August 18th, 2006
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. -Pearl S. Buck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1892-1973)
And the only thing I would add is that those plodding grazing farm-animals of people who don't create anything culturally substantive, don't have exceptional thoughts, or don't read—in fact, those zombies who effectively cease to exist if nobody is around to coddle them—just don't get it and end up muttering "Chill out" and "Take a valium" and "Get over it!" to the truly creative people of the world.
I suppose we should all be grateful to the farm animals: We need them to pay taxes, support infrastructure on their backs, put their asses into chairs that need to be kept warm. But we should never forget that they would have been sabre-toothed-tiger dinner instead of evolving if it weren't for the real creative and exceptional movers-and-shakers.
Let's use concrete (the building material) as an analogy: Some great creative mind had to wonder if such a thing as concrete could exist, then some keen intellectual mind had to take the theory and make concrete out of it. Finally, the monkeys came along, were told how to pour it, were told how to care for it until it hardened into something useful. The irony is that the breeding-stock-primates think they rule the jungle ... not even realising that the jungle is just a creation to keep them busy. They've got the notion that since they are semi-skilled enough to know how to pour concrete they must be experts about it and everything tangential to it.
But, in truth, they haven't got the expansive mindscape to learn anything creative or exceptional, and haven't got the courage to admit that whole areas of human knowledge (entire floors of libraries) are closed to them ... and probably always will be. Back to the analogy: So they pour concrete all day and mutter that if they were designing concrete, they'd do it some other way. And though they'd never admit it, they'd make disasters.
Like it or not, there really is a Great Chain of Being, and the farm animal people of the world are at the bottom of the pile. They're there because it's safer for all of us that way. Things get ugly when the donkeys, pigs, cows, and ... um ... dromedaries perform acts of lèse majesté and think they can be creative and thoughtful too. All they create are piles of dung. And there's their knowledge of their inadequateness ... stupid and plodding though they may be, they are vaguely aware of their intellectual and dynamistic inferiority.
So they harp and criticise. They have to if they don't want to admit to themselves that they were bred to be Alpha Semi-Morons. They think (maybe they just self-delusionally hope) that sniping and pointless criticism elevates them to the status of Someone History Should Take Note of ... when all it does is denigrate what little character the Truly Gifted and Talented people work so damned hard to impart in this world.
Yes, little monkeys, we need you to scrub our intellectual toilets, but keep your soiled little hands off of our books: You can't read them anyway, and you're just going to make a stinking mess if you try.
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