Meditations on Creativity, Artists, and Spirit
The following composition is a meditation on the challenge of the artist in the creative encounter, and more specifically when the creative person is fully immersed in the creative act insofar as it becomes possible for new and unknown things to emerge from the unconscious into consciousness. The questions at hand: what is involved in the creative act, and how is the artist to prevail in the face of the great paradox that wrests the creator from creation? Like life, the creative act is engaged in a perpetual conflict between “risk of annihilation,” or impermanence, and “salvation,” a return to greater heights, the (re)birth of something new. The birth of creation and the subsequent death of the event are two sides of the same coin. One solution for achieving the “spirit of the artist,” one who defies and prevails with passion and “divine grace,” is fostering the courage to cross beyond the limits of doubt and deconstruction, casting themselves into the creative encounter and affording the potential of one’s becoming to create “like God.”
The French painter Paul Cézanne said of the creative act that “painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.” Sensations refer not solely to effects and affects, but also to the sense of connection between them and the images and thoughts that percolate beneath them. In psychodynamic terms, the artist’s attention is in confluence with their own unconscious—that is to say, in the creative act there is a realization of what is “always there,” sudden awareness of the effervescent tension between possibility and limitation in one’s consciousness. In other words, when the artist realizes in a spectacular fashion the potential contents of their own becoming, that is, its limits and intensities within a common medium, the artistic deed flows with a wonderful and novel spontaneity that has, in the right mind, the power to conduct orchestras of sensation. The artist extends themselves into the unfamiliar territory of their medium, confronting the emergent conflict as it appears in their consciousness and transfiguring it, as the sculptor acts to catalyze their figure’s emergence from a stony ground. Creation presupposes limits, like the river which requires the harmonic tension of the river banks, without which there would be no river.
Conflict, a central facet of the creative process, also presupposes limits which in many ways proposes what we might call the act of “natural rebellion,” a myth quite adequately emphasized in the Hebrew story of Genesis. We have eaten and become “like God.” Approaching blasphemy, it may be accurate to say that the creative mind, like Yahweh, creates sense from nonsense, being from non-being, life from non-life. The Word is a rebellion against the silence of non-existence. Creativity is an act of seeking known and unknown limits and, having apparently eaten from the tree of good and evil, finding novel and useful ways to reimagine them. Struggle, conflict, and creation are inseparable from living in a world enraptured by difference, the limiting quality of becoming. Struggle is the realization of conscious limits and the playing out of their proposed conflict, resulting in an ongoing process of becoming, and, in the case of the artist, the artistic composition. The rebel is the image of hope that there is more than this.
Deleuze and Guattari say: “Composition, composition is the sole definition of art. Composition is aesthetic, and what is not composed is not a work of art” (What is Philosophy, p.191). The composed thought, or for the artist, poetry, is a composition. The artistic composition contains both the spontaneity of spirit as well as the characteristic beauty and mature quality that comes from the affirmation of conflict and the absorption of tension. In the aesthetic composition, the unconscious is made conscious through a realization of the medium as well as an intimate concern with the emergence of actual potential. Thus, the struggle of the poet is to create life from the silence of non-being; in the creative act she insists or orders meaning; and in this sense, her greatest battle is “less against chaos… than against the ‘cliché’ of opinion” (D&G, What is Philosophy, p.204).
The greatness of a poem or work of art is not that it captures or harnesses the thing portrayed or experienced, whether in image or thought, but on the contrary, that the project is unique and sets free an entirely new expression of what the artist has experienced. You must, put simply, efface yourself in the creative act, to the point where action and decision are a singular motion, opinion is cut through, and at the same time unleashed in the life of the work. The thought is effaced on the page, leaving behind only an image of thought, a perpetual point of reference. Our everyday thinking experience is in many ways analogous to that (un)harnessing of the creative spirit so mastered by the great artists, saints, philosophers, and scientists of time.
A change of scenery. In another place, a 14th-century alchemist sits at his desk, fixated on an image etched into the wood; he peers not into the yin or the yang, but the boundary between them, the curling river connecting the mind and the body. In his laboratory behind him, a process of heating cinnabar, a red, soft ore, in a furnace powered by the earth; light reflects off the mercury sweating from its surface. To the alchemist, mind and matter are alloyed together. Alchemical transmutation, as in the mythologized lead-to-gold, is not merely a material process—it is a process imbued with a precise awareness, like the artist at their canvas, inviting the surfacing of conflict and the presupposed limits of the medium to produce something new, to create what was not there before, and most importantly to discover the possibilities of what there is. (This does not seem too estranged from the desires of a modern young scientist. We can now turn lead into gold with a particle accelerator, and, while using different tools, the contemporary lab is just as much mind as it is anything else.)
Simply put, the concern is that to think differently is to make a difference. As Kant insisted, we not only know the world, but the world at the same time conforms with our ways of knowing. Deleuze and Guattari claim that “knowledge is neither a form nor a force but a function: ‘I function’” (What is Philosophy, p.215). If knowledge is a function of being, and if what is seen is not all there is, this is not all we know. If we consider the diabolical character of thought, again we see themes of revolution, the breaking of rules, and the crossing of lines forming new lines. Slavoj Žižek, an avid diabolical thinker in this sense, says of Hegel’s revolutionary philosophy, “If there is a Hegelian motto, it is something like: find a truth in how things go wrong!” (Hegel in a Wired Brain [2020], p.10). In Hegel’s dialectical model, synthesis is the effect of thesis and antithesis; the alchemical thought, then, is a perpetual turn toward antithesis, seeking to invoke what is “not there,” and in the process revealing something new in the matter.
And “so long as the material lasts,” say Deleuze and Guattari, “the sensation enjoys an eternity in those very moments.” The thought, its matter being ephemeral, remains affective; that is, the creative encounter is felt as the body “sings, dances, or plays,” with the material. They continue: “Sensation is not realized in the material without the material passing completely into the sensation, into the percept or affect. All the material becomes expressive. It is the affect that is metallic, crystalline, stony, and so on; and the sensation is not colored but, as Cézanne said, coloring… They ‘bring before us, in front of the fixed canvas,’ not the resemblance but the pure sensation ‘of a tortured flower, of a landscape slashed, pressed, and plowed,’ giving back ‘the water of the painting to nature’” (What is Philosophy, pp.166-167). Sensation is the artist’s sword, like a lover’s hand, a pen worth more than any mark or tracing.
If we seek the “utopian harmony” of the perfect dance or performance, we risk not only failure, but also the madness, loneliness, and suffering of the finite creator. If creation is “god-like” and courageous, it is not because we are seriously gods nor always full of courage. If that which lives in the present has eternal life, the creative self lives in the future. In the words of poet David Whyte, “Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply, and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those cares and those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world” (David Whyte, Consolations). The creator in pain, depression, or deep repression requires the courage to feel and experience, to embrace the sensations and thought created in the present and actual experience.
Like life, the creative act is engaged in the perpetual conflict between “risk of annihilation,” and “salvation.” The birth of creation and the subsequent death of the event are two sides of the same coin. We are caught in the currents of fate, considering Nietzsche’s position, and dso even in great agony we can take shelter in the often strange ecstasy of “casting oneself adrift,” abandoning your clinging onto identity and instead setting free those deepest concerns, to becoming other as Deleuze and Guattari might say. Carl Jung knew that there is no birth of consciousness without pain. Jung proposed that until one makes the unconscious conscious, “it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Nietzsche warns us that if we are to kill God, that is, to rebel and turn away from what there is in order to create as God has, in our (God) image, we must be willing to leave the familiar safety and security found in the shelter of His temple. The phenomenon is sometimes called the union of opposites, coincidentia oppositorum; in clear biblical symbolism, we killed Christ on the Cross and God returned with grace, loving forgiveness, and yet in His forgiveness remains the creative fervor and divine rage of one united, most benevolent, and conscious being. (It is in this sense that even the wicked seek the ultimate good, often in perverted, (self-)destructive ways.)
A life worth living is to find the harmony between rebellion and reconciliation, since “the artist is no longer God but the Hero who defies God” (D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, p.338). Self-consciousness, in theo-psychic terms, is a transposition of the eternally-becoming body and the individual, multiply-realized body of our being. Žižek says our “awareness of god is simultaneously the self-awareness of god himself. God is not an entity outside the process of reality which steers it from a safe distance; the process of reality is the process that takes place in god himself, it overlaps with the becoming of god himself” (Hegel in a Wired Brain, p.63). It is in this way that we might be both “of god” and “not of god” at different times in the creative act.
The Creation is the Fall, if we want to put it rather brutally, though we may join Hegel and others who consider it a fall upwards, rather than the traditional declension or expulsion from Paradise. We fall, or take flight, toward self-knowledge, and thus away from its antithesis, the eternal void, nothingness, or a pure difference. The god-like struggle of the creator is to defy the possible and create the impossible: this thought. This is the ideal picture. On the other side of the coin, if we take the more traditional, direct wisdom of the Bible, the Vedas, the Gita, or any other apocalyptic text, and read it under a dim light—a light so adjourned from the body of the Sun that we may shudder under anxious breath, desperate and clinging—if we take this idea that we are actually separated from the world, our thoughts, the total consciousness, or all the other “transcendent” gods and their saints, then we affirm not our becoming but rather a being that is already ceasing to be. In other words, to think with an “I” is to momentarily forget that “I” am not “I,” but am instead the unspeakable, imperceptible, and otherwise “unknowable thing” thinking “I.”
In our separateness from things, for instance, the creator from his creation, we freeze the essential thing of nature, a kind of frozen potential in the painting or invention, and the material becomes “‘petrified intelligence’ extended in space, whereas consciousness is liquified intelligence unfolding through time (history). Estranged from the idea, nature is only the corpse of the understanding” (Hegel in a Wired Brain, p.62). But of course, there is always more, and anything truly frozen is bound to change in time. Nature, fate, god, the unconscious, the creative spirit; all these remain present in the actual life of things. One might rejoice that “God does not remain petrified and dead, the very stones cry out and raise themselves to spirit [Geist]” (p.63).
The artist is the hero with the courage to face the death of the old and the birth of the new. We defy God in creating, but in our experience, we unite thought and material and thus with God, the unconscious, or whatever absolutely unknowable and omnipotent force one prefers—realize that even in old age and dark times, in the actualization of the present moment, or rather, as events become actual, we exist immanently at the zenith of our condition, which is to say, our ultimate creative freedom is now (perhaps only now), and this affords both the origin of our deepest anxieties and the ecstasies of this living moment. Intensity and tension are inherent to any good harmony. Disharmony abounds, Nietzsche’s phrase: “Choose the right enemy,” guides me. Find happiness in surpassing the limits of your discomfort. Hegel knew that to know a limit as a limit was to be beyond the limit. This is the key to an artist’s happiness or at the very least a life worth living. And “what is happiness,” says Albert Camus, “except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads.”
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# 171
to find my own way
I got expelled from Paradise
and found you waiting
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