On caressing the creative energy

In the introduction to his phenomenal novel, Native Son, Richard Wright makes a fundamental revelation about the creative process.

He says that he wrote the novel in just about three months but he could not figure out the first and last scenes of the novel. He managed to place the ending scene, but the beginning scene “ate up his head” for a long time, as my people say. In his desperation, he went for a tipple, one too many, and the revelation came.

The scene unfolded in his sub-conscious mind and floated to his conscious mind.

The late Francis Imbuga went through similar tribulations in finding a title for his novel, Miracle of Remera. He wrote the whole novel under the working title of The Naked Truth, but he was not happy with this title.

After reading his manuscript several times, I suggested a number of titles which he rejected. It was after a number of “swallows” of his favourite beverage in a grimy tavern in Remera Chimirongo (a suburb of Rwanda’s capital city, Kigali) that the idea of renaming of his novel was revealed to him.

Different writers have different ways of opening up windows to their subconscious mind. While some pray, others meditate, drink, wash clothes, cook, take a walk, listen to music, play with children, sit alone, swim and workout or simply sleep.

You have to discover how to connect with your underlying creative resources. It is unfortunate that our society makes it very difficult to get in touch with these resources.

We are trained in various ways to suppress our primary creative processes.  I have been informed by psychologists that we are, in most cases, ruled by our secondary processes.

The secondary processes are those that are rational, logical, sensible and realistic.

Those ruled by secondary processes give up their imagination, their poetry, their ability to play, to fantasise, to laugh and to be spontaneous.

They regress all of what Maslow calls their “healthy childlikeness.”

The maturity myth, unfortunately, fosters the idea that to give up our childlikeness is to be mature.

When we buy into this idea; we inevitably give up our creativity, we discard the primary processes that call upon the primitive, the archaic and the non-rational aspects of our unconscious and preconscious.

QUALITIES ESSENTIAL TO CREATIVITY

These are the qualities and resources that are essential to creativity.

These qualities give us the ability, as Maslow points out, to regress voluntarily, to be pure in a childlike sense, to bring into play our dreams, memories and fantasies, to make non-rational connections and metaphorical bridges between the familiar and strange.

With this, we operate independent of controls, taboos, inhibitions, delays, planning and calculations of possibility or impossibility.

These, are the symbolic processes which are the sources of our spontaneous insights of innovation in life.

Writers have to learn to court and caress these instinctive creative aspects of ourselves.  The successful writer, I think, pokes around, experimenting and trying things.

Allow me to quote Silvano Areti. He has written extensively on creativity. He says that the creative person does not discard, repress or suppress thoughts, which appear irrational, inconsequential, or unrelated. He keeps them in the repertory of his consciousness.

By so doing he becomes aware of “hidden structures of the good, the beautiful and the true.” He is receptive to what may appear. He wants to make visible the invisible and audible the inaudible. Creativity is thus not something mysterious, unfathomable, a muse to be captured as some people think, but we can encourage creativity.

Areti underlines conditions which we should take advantage of to encourage creativity. He notes that aloneness; that is being with one self away from clichés and conversations of society is important.  Equally significant is inactivity.

This is not excessive loafing, but merely a cessation of overt behavioural activity as a way of making the process of focusing and centering more fruitful.

To him excessive moments of routine activities stifle mental activity.

Areti talks about remembrance and inner replaying of our past traumatic conflicts. To him, contrary to standard belief, neurotic conflict is not a prerequisite for creativity. Whatever creative impulse exists does so in spite of neurotic conflict. When we resolve a neurotic conflict, learn to deal with it and unblock ourselves, the creative flow can be much greater.

However, once such conflicts are resolved and are part of the past, they can be invoked with a sense of distance yet familiar.

“Present conflicts block us, but past ones that we have dealt with can serve as a source of creativity when we play them through for ourselves in memory.”

Gullibility is another condition that Areti talks about as essential to creativity.

This is the willingness to suspend disbelief and accept certain underlying patterns until they are proved wrong by our secondary processes.