Creativity: Where it comes from and where it leads
In a recent post I admitted the challenge I face coming up with things to write about here in the blog. I don’t see myself as being particularly creative. That’s why this passage in Karl Ove Knaussgaard caught my attention:
What does it mean to create? What does it take? How does an artist open up a creative field for a work, how do they keep it open, and how do they enlarge it? What do they consider, what do they look for? How do they ground their work in their own lives and at the same time make it relevant to others too (In the Land of the Cyclops, p. 194)?
The passage is near the beginning of Knausgaard’s extended reflection on the creativity of Ingmar Bergman. He begins the essay with a discussion of Bergman’s workbook, in which the filmmaker developed his thoughts about all sorts of things. The reader can see in the workbook what Bergman was thinking about films as he was making them, and also about other projects that never came to fruition. This sort of writing and reflection, Knausgaard suggests, is one of the prerequisites for creative activity. One needs a space in which to write or think freely, without concerns about what others might think. In fact, if the space is to be fully free, I would say that it needs to be a space where the reflections aren’t immediately subjected to the critical eye of the person doing the reflecting.
Perhaps I think that last bit, though, because of my own experience keeping a journal. I’ve tried to journal regularly many different times during my life — in fact, on the shelf above me now is a spiral notebook recording my thoughts as an adolescent many (many!) years ago. There’s some cringe-worthy stuff there. (Is our dog our family pet, or are we our dog’s servants?) My teenage journaling efforts were but the first of many short-lived attempts. In fact, I think that it was only in the last decade or so that I was finally able to write in my journal both regularly and frequently for an extended period. I don’t think it’s any accident that it’s during this time that I’ve finally stopped noticing the critic looking over my shoulder. Leaving the internal critic behind was crucial.
Knausgaard’s second prerequisite to creativity is that one must “be alert to every inner impulse, regardless of how unimportant it might seem” (p. 195). I think he’s right about this as well, but I would broaden the point. I have in mind here Murakami’s advice to aspiring novelists, cited in the post linked above: if you want to write a novel, a first step is to read many, many novels, both good and bad. In addition, Murakami said, you should pay attention to what’s going on in the world around you. In short, those impulses Knausgaard is talking about need to be fed by experiences, both the experience of reading and of attending to the world. One needs both the input on which the impulses feed and the outputs that they might yield.
An aside: many years ago I studied biblical Hebrew rather intensively for a couple of years. I remember being fascinated by the biblical text and by the communities that produced it. I’m sorry to say that I remember very little of the language itself. One point about the opening words of the book of Genesis has stuck with me. I no longer remember the particulars — I think it’s related somehow to the vowel pointings — but there’s some sort of grammatical error in the surviving text of those opening words. As I remember, in order to translate the text into English one has to decide how to correct this problem. There are two options. Correcting it one way yields what I think is the most common translation: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth….” Correcting it the other way provides a different take: “When God began to create, the earth was without form and void….” The difference is significant: the first translation suggests that God created everything ex nihilo, out of nothing. The second suggests that there was something already there, providing material with which God could work. I don’t think much about God these days, but I’ve long thought that the second translation makes more sense. Any creative act — even a god’s creative act — begins with something.
But the “something” has to go somewhere, and this leads to Knausgaard’s third prerequisite for creativity. One must find a “trigger point,” a point that inspires a way forward into the other elements of what one is creating, a point “where one image gives rise to another image, one scene gives rise to another scene, one song gives rise to another song” (196). I think this third prerequisite indicates where the creative juices really start to flow. And it’s also where my writing on this blog surprises me the most. I’m often surprised by where I’m led as I write the post. (Where did that point about bible translation come from, anyway? I’ve not thought of that in years.)
I have to say, though, that I’m haunted by the last bit of that first quotation from Knausgaard’s essay. How can I write about my own experiences in these blog posts while “at the same time make it relevant to others too”? On second thought, though, it’s not so much Knausgaard’s sentence that haunts me. Instead, it’s that critic looking over my shoulder at what I’m writing.
