December 1st, 2008

Hover over your pain points in defence of those bruises that never heal. They never heal because you hover over them. Protect yourself at your peril; it's not a paradox, it's the rule of life. Life is pain, and if you protect yourself from the chance of experiencing it, you ensure the permanence of your vulnerability.
- Rob Mackie

... on the other hand ...

"Doctor doctor," I said, "it hurts when I go like that. 'Then don't go like that,' he said."
- Groucho Marx

* * *

So, the other night while writing a new song on piano (I've been writing a lot of pieces on piano lately), I got to thinking about the nature of creativity. Actually, what got me thinking was how unnatural creativity really is.

Think about it: If you have enough to eat and are warm enough, and relatively happy enough ... what would possibly motivate you to hunt better or ... er ... build shelters better or entertain yourself more? Well, nothing, actually.

So the anthropology goes, primal man employed creativity to solve his need for food or comfort (well, creativity was applied to existing crappy conditions to somehow improve one's survival probability). Threatened by a tiger? Bonk it with your newly-invented stick (a la 2001: A Space Odyssey) or are you thirsty all the time? Find a way to capture and preserve rain water. Need food over the lean Winter months? Farm the land and store the surplus. (Or steal your neighbour's—yes, crime can be creative.)

So by that argument, it is perfectly natural to have creativity. It's a survival skill, don't you know. And if you have all you can eat, and are just as warm and fuzzy comfortable as you could possibly want, you can use that extra leftover creativity to make some really nice cave paintings, mosaics, or post-Industrial Speed-Metal Thrash House Gangsta MP3s for sale from your website.

Except it doesn't seem to work that way (at least on the surface). There are so many warmly-dressed fat people in North America, so you'd think we spend all our time writing, painting, authoring, composing, and sculpting, wouldn't you? But we don't. We are an amazingly uncreative people, and though I (obviously) paint myself as an exception, I hardly qualify as a creative powerhouse. I do write, and I do compose, I have this blog which has lots of creative ideas (though it is factual and expository) ... and yet I don't rate amongst the world's great creators.

My point is this: If creativity is a finite and quantifiable commodity that we humans carry with us as a survival skill, then something should be seriously wrong with us if we are comfortable but not creating. (By the way, making babies is not what I would call creativity in this particular definition ... the pickup lines employed to get her into bed might be an exception to that.) So here's what I think happens instead:

Like so much else in the human mind and body, creativity is a skill or an ability that we learn over time and develop much like we develop muscles. If we are in a situation where we have to do a lot of heavy lifting, we grow strong from all that lifting. If we are in a situation where we need to be creative to survive, our creative skills grow and flourish. Move it or lose it, basically. And if we let it atrophy, we can't just turn it back on like a faucet. Instead, we have to re-develop our creative abilities over time.

This, I think, is why affluent and comfortable people in society tend to become less and less creative. We stop exercising our creative living survival skills, and thus lose the ability to be creative in any way. But if we are living hand-to-mouth and have to employ clever and innovative techniques to keep the food trickling in ... or if we have to rely on the brains we are given to come up with newer and more tricky solutions to odd scenarios, then that part of our brain develops and sharpens. We become problem solvers instead of ... lazy semi-interested reactionaries.

If this is the case, or at least if this has some bearing on how we create (it can't be 100% true 100% of the time, otherwise, nobody who has eaten a full meal more than once in a row would ever set brush to canvas or paint to paper), then it somewhat supports the adage that artists must suffer for their art. Or, more to the point, artists must have some worldly experience at overcoming obstacles in order to really truly be creative.

Of course, once they are in a creative state of mind, whether or not they have any talent is another issue altogether ...

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