GENESIS
When I think of origins, I recall my grandfather, a fundamentalist minister. He did not see the Genesis story as myth, but as literal truth. Though as a youngster I dared not argue with him, I often thought about his opposition to the theory of evolution and his insistence that the Biblical account was factual.
“In the beginning God . . .,” he described the Old Testament writer’s story of the creation. (1) This origin myth begins with a creator. For the Genesis poets and my grandfather this was the central truth: Everything proceeded from the word of God. St. John put it another way, “In the beginning was the Word.” (2) The creation was cosmic wordplay. God inserts His “l” into the “word” and forms a “world.” Everything was a separate act of the power of God. My grandfather did not see the Genesis story as a metaphor about creativity at the conceptual level. He didn’t have much of a sense of humor either.
God, the creator, creates a universe according to His will. Creation in this view becomes a matter of will power. He decides a new world should come into being. It requires conscious intent and effort. This myth also suggests that creation requires a creator. Other origin myths don’t. In this conception a creator has an idea that he carries out. This creation begins with a creator with an idea he wants to develop.
Let’s play around with some thoughts advanced in this early story. It suggests some paradoxical ideas about the nature of the creative process and its beginnings, that is, the earliest recognizable stages in the development of any new idea. Creativity at the conceptual level refers to the formation and development of new thoughts, concepts or images such as those found in poetry, paintings, scientific theories, mathematical formulas, inventions, technologies, production methods, even advertising schemes. Metaphor from the French meta: “beyond” and pherein: “to bring” suggests taking some ideas beyond their usual sense to some new meaning. “Carrying beyond” is basic to conceptual creativity: Creators get carried away with their new ideas.
Myths are stories man develops to explain his experiences to himself. The popular idea of a myth is that it is a false explanation; on the contrary, myths are metaphors containing hidden truths. They are written in symbolic, rather than literal language. They may be true on several different levels like a poem. As explanations they are as comprehensive as they can be when they are conceived. Though their origins are often forgotten, the psychological truths remain.
Myths are continuously being created, even in our scientific age. Theories, for example, are stories that have more or less usefulness in explaining phenomena. They are often good for a season. Psychologists, for example, once thought we had full conscious control over our destinies. Freud then challenged that idea with the mythology of the Unconscious. As our experience changes, we invent a new mythology or resurrect and improve upon old ones.
Certain myths, namely cosmogonic or origin myths, tell of the beginnings of the cosmos. By analogy they also suggest certain psychological truths about conceptual creativity.
LINEAR VS. WHOLISTIC PROCESSES
St. John says the word started it all. Even current understandings of creative evolution recognize that verbal communication caused great change from a purely biological world. Language supported evolution beyond pure genetic transformation. Now there could be cultural changes as information passed from generation to generation, first by word of mouth, then in written form. Human cultures could go beyond animals.
But with every advance something tends to get lost. Because language usually is expressed in a linear way, it often distorts the reality it attempts to describe. Forcing an organic, interactive process such as creativity into a linear system is like flattening a cube into a square and still calling it a “cube.” A dimension of reality gets lost–its wholistic and interactional nature. (cf. web sites)
SEQUENCES IN CREATION AND PRESENTATION OFTEN DIFFER
Let us return to the Genesis story. A few interesting paradoxes might shed some light on creative beginning.
God creates a world to reveal Himself to. He creates the earth, then light, then grass, then the sun. The sequence is confusing, if taken literally and linearly. If the sun was formed on the fourth day of the creation, what provided light on the second? If grass was formed on the third day, how did it receive photosynthetic energy to grow? (The sun was not created until the fourth day.) Yet most creative beginnings are as non-rational and nonlinear.
The sequential confusion in the myth suggests a paradoxical truth, namely, most creations do not occur in the order finally presented. The melody stirring the composer to write may turn up in the third movement. Some parts of the creative act are not even presented. “When I tackle the white canvas,” says George Braque, “I never know how it will turn out. This is the risk you must take. I never visualize a picture in my mind before starting to paint. On the contrary, I believe a picture is finished only after one has completely effaced the idea that was there at the start.”(3)
Howard Gruber says, “The growth of a creative thought process is complex, often slower than commonly recognized, many-streamed, and endlessly intriguing . . . From the thinker’s own point of view, there are doubts, retreats, detours, and impasses; there are also impulsive moments of decision, leaps into the dark from points of no return.”(4) Scientific work is rarely done in the published order.
Rarely do workers define their terms before they begin. They are, on the contrary, the consequence of understanding the problem, not the cause. Researchers change materials and procedures often as results alter original hypotheses. Feedback from experiments determines subsequent directions. Researchers complete their review of the literature after concluding the experiments. Sigmund Freud, for example, put off his extensive review to his most famous work, The Interpretation of Dreams, to the very end. It was the last thing he wrote before sending it to the publisher. (5) Most creative people do not know ahead of time what will finally be relevant. Research is groping forward. Experiments do follow one another in time, but rigidly following a fixed order of procedure blocks the discovery process. True discovery always surprises.
THE CONCEPTUAL NETWORK
Not only is creativity nonlinear, we begin all over. Our starting point may be the ending point; the middle may go to the beginning. The scientific method of hypothesis forming, data collecting, and testing is a general outline, not a rigid way to empirical truth. Backing and filling is the nature of the creative process. Just because we write results in a linear fashion does not mean we find them that way. The method is a circumflex going forward, backward, inside, outside tangle of progressions and regressions. The process of thought is full of trials and errors, starts and restarts, blind alleys and occasional open byways. There is no one way to creative progress. There is no one way to begin.
Creators work in a similar fashion to their brain. Although some neuronal connections are serial (one after the other), most are parallel and cross-linked. Stages in the process can be recognized, but creators often use them simultaneously and/or out of sequence.
Scientists, in the end, write their results in terms of logic and reason, but they integrate information from many sources and different points of view along the way. From the framework of an individual experiment each part has to connect with the next in a logical sequence at the explanatory stage. Each line of thought also has to tie together with the strands of logic from other frameworks. Researchers, however, are not mathematicians linking deductions to prove a theorem, repeating experiments several times to “prove” their hypotheses. They go beyond single lines of reasoning. Ultimately they do not think linearly.
Because many overvalue the linear approach, there often is an overvaluation of particular ideas called “insights.” It is not the concept, by itself, which has value: If you tie many strands of thought into knots (insights) forming a net, it is not the final knot that provides the “aha” to your theory that matters. You could have tied it together in a different order and another one could have been the final “insightful” one that pulled everything together. Instead, the whole process is necessary and all parts must fit together.
Creators tie several strands of evidence together into a trap to gather more fish than one could with a single hook and line. Gruber says that the general architecture of scientific thinking is like “a network of enterprises . . . which are mutually supportive, yet in some ways they have an existence independent of each other, very much as the strands of a net. And since it is a living network, new relationships are constantly appearing . . . The total process of constructing a novel point of view is so complex that it is impossible to identify the solution of some one problem as a step more crucial than any other.”(6)
Jacob Bronowski, the philosopher, says about scientific evidence, “A concept is formed, a law is proposed, not because the repetition of an experiment makes it inevitable, but because a crisscross of evidence from many different kinds of experiments supports this hypothesis (and confounds others) as a plausible way of linking them all together.”(7) What convinces us is that the system as a whole works, not that the same thing is repeated in a linear fashion.
The painter’s creative vision, like a scientific theory, holds together because of its wholistic approach. Artists also work in a nonlinear fashion. Although stages can be identified over time, artists also begin and work all over. They make many simple sketches to determine possible positions of the major masses in the picture. They initially avoid getting absorbed in details. They focus on the relationships between the shapes rather than on the beauty of the mark they are making. To become emotionally involved with partial aspects would cause them to lose proportion in the whole design.
Thus, for a work to hold together, we begin all over. We examine the problem from as many viewpoints as we can, integrating as we go along. The conceptual creator, like God in the Genesis myth, begins and works all over, that is, many starts in many places. All converge on the final goal. Conceptual creators develop ideas wholistically. New ideas are netted not hooked.
DOUBLE PARADOX
The Genesis myth suggests a creative double paradox: Poetic truth is sometimes truer than life, and stories about life sometimes have to be false to be true.
Let’s take the latter first: In writing a story, at least, the facts sometimes suffer. They are sometimes less important than the presentation as a whole. In art, unlike science, empirical veracity is the least important part of the presentation. Jean Freeman says that a plausible story is more important than the way it actually happened. She says, “A serious writer soon discovers that part of his job is to impose order on life, which is so often full of coincidence, chance, and irrelevance. He must make coincidence seem fordained, turn chance into cause and effect, and rule out irrelevancies altogether.”(8) Stories, the product of imagination, have to be sequential and reasonable, the writing of them is often neither. It is paradoxical, but true.
On the other hand, the Old Testament writers did not follow Freeman’s advice. Their sense of causality was entirely out of whack. How can we understand this? While these writers described sequences as though they were giving a factual account, they really were depicting subjective experiences: the poetic experience of a God creating “all over.” Rather than concern themselves as a novelist like Jean Freeman with plausibility, they expressed a particular understanding: For them the psychological and religious truth was that God created their world. He could do it anyway He wanted. The Creation was a division, expression and revelation of Himself to Himself and to man whom he created in His image.
The Genesis writers were poets. They described essences. They showed God creating. It was kind of messed up back then. Most start-ups are that way. Alfonso X said, “If I had been present at the creation of the world I would have proposed some improvements.”(9) But hindsight is usually better than foresight.
A creator wills what he wants and sometimes it gets messed up. A factual presentation is one thing, a poetic presentation another. Sometimes art is “more truthful” than reality. Just as Rimskii-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee” characterizes the feeling of bees in flight better than a recording at a hive, so the Genesis version conveys the essence of one idea of creating, that is, a creator bringing into being an idea according to his will. He does it as he wants to.
A TEST OF WILLS
After turning chaos into a world, God feels lonely so He becomes further inspired and breathes life into man. (The word “inspiration” comes from the French “in + spirare”: to breathe into.) After creating Adam, He takes one of Adam’s ribs close to his heart and shapes Eve. Her shape later creates chaos for Adam.
The story is familiar. God instructs them not to eat of the apples of the tree of knowledge for then they would lose innocence and have to leave the garden. But Eve meets a serpent who cons her into eating the restricted fruit. She, however, bids Adam to try it first. After both eat, they discover their nakedness and cover up. Eating from the tree of knowledge leads to their “fall” upwards into consciousness of themselves. They then must grow up to struggle in a world outside the garden of infancy.
When we create something, we must give it freedom to grow. It needs to have a life of its own. Sometimes it goes against our conscious intentions, though at times it displays our unconscious desires. Do you really think God wanted man to remain a psychological infant? Would you do that to your child? No, God recognized Man’s need to grow up–even if it is hard on both parent and child.
I was told that Adam said to Eve on their departure, “We’re living in an age of transition.” When we create, we must face change. Moreover, as times change, we must change with them. Do it with a sense of humor.
Creativity results in transitions, but with them there can be psychological growth. The irreverence in the above paragraph suggests that mocking the father (and the grandfather) is important to the separation process in any creative adventure.
Human consciousness requires the ability to say “No.” The rebellion in this part of the myth suggests that man, to move from where he is, must say “No” to his father and others that represent the status quo. It also suggests that those who would attempt new beginnings may risk serious loss as well as potential gain, and that those who represent the past may not be completely happy that others want to move on.
Chaim Potuk says in his book In the Beginning, “All beginnings are hard.”(10) They are not only hard; they are often unclear, arbitrary and uncertain. The conceptual creator faces many hard beginnings. To be innovative is to struggle with beginnings.
SUMMARY
- Myths are metaphors containing psychological truths. They are written in symbolic, rather than literal language. We are still creating myths to give meaning to our world.
- Cosmogonic or origin myths suggest multiple kinds of beginnings.
- There is no set starting procedure. Creativity is no linear process, but an organic wholistic process. One begins “all over.”
- Different perspectives must converge together in an integrated fashion thus some viewpoints have to be altered to fit the theme as a whole.
- Rebellion is often part of the innovative process.
- Creative beginnings are hard, unclear, arbitrary and uncertain.
REFERENCES
- “Genesis” The Holy Bible
- “St. John” ibid.
- Braque, George. in Sedgwick, John P. Jr. Discovering Modern Art, New York: Random House, 1966.
- Gruber, Howard E. Darwin on Man. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974.
- Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
- Gruber, ibid.
- Bronowski, Jacob. The Identity of Man. Garden City, New York: Doubleday/Natural History Press, 1971.
- Freedman, Jean Todd, “Writing the Commercial Short Story” in Engle, Paul ed. On Creative Writing. N.Y.: E.P. Dutton & Co., N.Y. 1964.
- Alfonso X. Alfonso the Wise (1226-1284) quoted in The Great Quotations compiled by George Seldes. New York: Pocket Books, 1967.
- Potuk, Chaim, In The Beginning. New York: Knopf, 1975
* This essay is the first chapter of a book called Evolutionary Creativity which is available in paperback at http://www.lulu.com/johngyoungmd