The impossibility of creation.

Impossible Creation

Part I


We know we all create. Surviving the day to day requires us to. The desire to focus on this and

expand upon it, extemporising, perhaps letting the notion of it dominate and dictate our existence,

is possibly what distinguishes the "artist" from others, by which I mean to include writers and

musicians. The activity is analogous to following a religion and trying to uncover its

truths and mysteries. We assume it removes the "initiate" from the mundane, lifts them higher,

psychologically and spiritually from those who don't appear to focus so forensically on this activity.


The one who produces an artefact, words, music that resonates with us, highlighting emotions,

thoughts and feelings, leading us beyond them, challenging our notions of beauty, love, what is

significant, becomes our focus. We watch them closely, observe what they produce, why they did

so, their influences and reasons or thinking, and we absorb them into our being. We stand infront

of a Rothko and think " I am Rothko - he is me - I feel what he felt."  We become empathetic and

this would appear to be a positive thing. Or, we can stand back and marvel, as with some amazing

work by Michelangelo and imagine him some god or someone led by god. Above human in some

way.


However, absorbing another's being, or distancing ourselves from the genius we see

portrayed, that is, acknowledging that we could not ever produce work of such high calibre as

this or that artist, could absolve us from our own job of processing events etc of our own lives. It

is my belief that we need to unravel, unfold and extemporise on our individual experiences, ideas,

thoughts and feelings because, although I believe in the collective unconsciousness as

described by Carl Jung, I also think this should be added to and expanded by each individual.



My conclusion, therefore, in this time of great anxiety about the nature of creation in which painting

appears obsolete, the novel deceased, music just a regurgitation of sounds gone before, is that the

way forward for the arts, for the process of creativity, is not to obsess about the medium, the genre,

the intent or the nature of the process, the characters who have become celebrities, the work that is

deemed great but seems odd even unfathomable at all, but to encourage participation, to expect

everyone to have a creative life; to live creatively and to regard all the things produced, whether

deemed mediocre, or undeveloped even bad, as valid fragments of the creative fabric that we are

woven from. Threads. Or broken pot. Perhaps the totality of our creative efforts is a broken pot.



Part II

Each day is filled with acts of creation. Quietly marvellous things, like cooking and baking. Grace

Paley wrote a poem about making a pie instead of writing a poem because a pie felt more useful

and was always welcome. How many of us scribble, daub, build even, on the sly, leaving the ongoing

things to one side with guilt and attending to these indefinable activities and engagements as if they

were our illegitimate children or concubines who we feel we cannot acknowledge with the full weight

of our love or attend to with the care and time we would like to offer them. They're our selfish

indulgences, things we do when we feel we should be pouring our energies into our day to day duties,

more pressing and urgent and legitimate than this other, which will only, after all, be poured into that

deepest pool of forgotten things.

Not only that, as you glance around in the morning, your eye rests upon the beautiful dish and bowl

that you bought from a potter whilst on holiday, then the fine etching of a landscape given as a lovely

present and moves over to the poster of some artist's work like Munch which took your breath away

on a museum visit. Even the perfect teapot in your hand, though manufactured partly by machine was

designed so well, it's shape and proportions, it's materials, the colour, the glaze. You're lead to think

 about design and manufacturing, it's sophistication, the high levels of skill. You see your mobile

phone and marvel at it, at computers, remembering when they weren't ubiquitous and all of a sudden,

you are overwhelmed by it all. The world is humming, buzzing, vibrating with creative activity and

the evidence of it all and it all seems, of such dazzling calibre that anything you might make yourself

today will seem so meagre, so unformed and insignificant, that you wonder if you might just make

a nice cake. Stands for some time, contemplating the possibilities.