POETICKS

Somewhere in Creating Minds Howard Gardner expresses a hope that his book will be useful for promoting debate on the subject of cultural creativity. I don’t know how successful it’s been at doing that among real psychologists, but it has definitely knocked me into my argumentative zone.

Before getting into my differences with Gardner, though, I should introduce a term of mine that will pop up here and there throughout my essay: “knowlecule.” For the purposes of this essay, a knowlecule may be thought of as the representation (or recording) in the brain of a “molecule” of knowledge (e.g., a single word in a poem, or a single leaf on a tree–or the whole tree). I consider creativity to be nothing more than the formation of links between knowlecules that have never before been connected in a given individual’s mind. (This is all close to the beliefs of Arthur Koestler.)

That out of the way, I can go to Gardner. I found some aspects of his discussion interesting. One was what he said about the chronology of creativity. He speculates that in most cases, a culturateur (another of my terms, by which I mean “agent of significant cultural change through works of art, science or some other similarly major cultural activity) takes ten years or so to master the knowledge needed to pursue his vocation, then ten years later achieves a radical breakthrough in it–which he often follows in another ten years with a comprehensive masterwork. In short, Gardner suspects that creativity follows some kind of ten-year cycle.

What I like about this hypothesis of Gardner’s is that it makes sense that our species would have evolved in such a manner that a person would reach physical and sexual maturity at about the same time as he would master (a) the general knowledge required to participate as an adult in his community and (b) the specific knowledge required to fill a particular vocational niche in his community.

My own creative careers in theoretical psychology, playwriting, the novel, poetry, literary criticism and a few lesser areas are outside Gardner’s scheme, since my contributions have not yet become widely valued. But either I will someday be recognized as a culturateur or I am an “abberateur” (i.e., an agent of abberation). If I’m a not-yet-recognized culturateur, my creative history ought to fit Gardner’s scheme; if not, it is still an interesting question whether or not his scheme works for ineffective as well as for effective creativity. In any case, I’m something of an expert at trying to be creative, so will use my own experiences to discuss Gardner’s ideas.

At the age of 26 I seem to have come up out of nowhere with a theory of psychology that was highly ambitious and wide-ranging (it covered sensory perception, creativity, pain & pleasure, aesthetic taste, dreams, character-types, psychological differences between the genders, emotion, comedy, and a good deal else). I had no certified background in psychology. I’d read a few books on psychology, and one on aesthetic taste that influenced my thinking, and had since adolescence often thought about categories of people, especially after reading The Lonely Crowd, and a book about Sheldon’s personality-types. I’d also thought about how the mind might work. But I don’t consider myself then to have entered the field of psychology in any reasonable sense.

My theory was very sketchy in places, revealing my limited background in the field. I’m convinced, however, that it was also a radical breakthrough. Certainly it was unlike any other theory of psychology current then or now–that I know of.  Be that as it may, I worked out my first comprehensive version of it less than five years after first putting it together. Approximately ten years later, I made my first large-scale addition to the theory, which was sort of a minor breakthrough as it included my discovery (or invention of the concept) of a kind of awareness not hitherto considered by other psychologists (as a separate “intelligence”): sagaceptuality, or narrative-awareness. (This, to be very brief, has to do with a person’s awareness of himself as the hero of a saga and is the basis of goal-directedness, deriving from the hunting-instinct that I believe even primitive organisms have; it also derives from the predator-avoidance instinct we all also seem to have–in which case one’s sagaceptual goal is escape from an evil rather than acquisition of a good.) I was (in my opinion) fairly culturateurical in other ways, too. In fact, I believe I was as creative in this phase as I had been to begin with, but since I was working on a structure already under way instead of working from scratch, it might not have seemed so.

By the time I wrote my first plays at 18, I probably could be said to have spent ten or more years in the field of literature, as almost anyone would have in our culture, since everyone is exposed as schoolchildren to literature from elementary school on. And I had been a stage performer (as a comic magician) from the age of eleven or so. My serious interest in reading plays began when I was 16. So my first plays somewhat obeyed the ten-year scheme: that is, I started writing them about ten years after entering the field of drama. My outburst of play- writing in my thirties began 12 years or so later, and it was then, if ever, I wrote my breakthrough plays (and consider them-breakthrough plays–only for me).

I don’t believe I had a radical breakthrough as a poet until I was in my forties, some twenty years after I had become at least a journeyman in the field. As for my career in literary criticism, it began informally in high school or before. I would say it became serious with the reviews and critiques I began writing for college courses in my mid-thirties. About ten years later I experienced a sort of breakthrough with a series of essays and letters on the taxonomy of experimental poetry. These resulted three or four years later in a book that I consider a more consequential but still minor breakthrough in literary criticism.

I wrote two abandoned novels and one horrible finished one between the ages of 19 and 29, then wrote not even a short story until just three years ago I wrote a 200,000-word science fiction novel I’m now awaiting a rejection slip from a publisher for. The chronology is weird there, unless one counts my novels and plays as all parts of my prose narrative career, which would make sense. The novel might then be the comprehensive prose narrative supposed to follow breakthrough efforts, which would be the plays I wrote 25 years previously. I doubt the chronological scheme works for those active in more than one sphere.

In seems to me, in conclusion, that only by straining can any of my careers be fit into Gardner’s ten-year scheme. Few, I’m sure, would disagree that it needs much further exploration. I think a main point to determine is if most cultural fields seem to take a person about ten years fully to assimilate–or some other set length of time. If so, I hypothesize that the culturateur, due to his innate cerebral wiring, becomes bored with his career field almost as soon as he masters it (i.e., finds it too predictable), and must destroy it (at least partially), then rebuild it, the process taking perhaps ten years. Let me say in passing that it is this need to turn his field upside-down that makes him seem “asynchronous,” not–as Gardner has it–his need to be asynchronous that makes him turn his field upside-down.

I differ much more with Gardner’s belief in the significant connection of creativity to, well, child-mindedness than I do with his hypothesized chronology of creativity. I dispute not the connection but that it’s anything special. All adult human beings are part-children. Consider, for instance, the popularity of both participant and spectator sports. Consider all the fun pastimes that people pursue. Consider also how many adult things children do–like work six hours a day. (What else is a school but a factory that children work in six hours or so a day?) Gardner also makes the standard assumption that children are naturally creative. I say they’re only micreative Or only creative enough to adjust to normal changes in their circumstances), and that their charming mistakes are charming only to someone who rarely sees them. Most kids, like most adults, conform, and their mistakes are similar to the mistakes of their peers (which the beaming parent won’t see). Most kids are not particularly adventurous but just follow the lead of the creative few amongst them.

I would suggest that we need better definitions of adultness and childness before we can explore the possibility that creative people are more childlike than non-creative people. As for others of Gardner’s ideas, I don’t know what to make of “the Faustian Bargain” he speaks of. It seems to me that non-creative superstitious people probably Faustianly bargain with God or the Devil for vocational success as frequently as creative people. I, myself, never have. (Oops, maybe that’s my problem!) I don’t remember any of the many culturateurs I’ve read about having made such a bargain.

What Gardner says about support at the time of a culturateur’s breakthrough makes sense but seems trivial: everyone needs, and usually has, support–throughout life. I do tend to think that highly creative people automatically gravitate to each other, and provide each other with important vocational support. But I don’t see that that has much to do with creativity, only with happiness. Friends are useful, but the only sine qua non for a cultural breakthrough is a sufficiently effective brain. (Opportunity is also irrelevant: a sufficiently effective brain will make opportunities for itself, find ways to thwart enemies and the establishment, and refuse to turn itself off–indeed, be unable to turn itself off–and forsake a creative vocation for conventional, paying work.)

That there must also be a vocational field in need of creation or re-arrangement is possible; yet I tend to think that the culturateur will automatically, though not necessarily without trouble, find a field suitable to his gifts. I also doubt that any field could ever be closed to further significant breakthroughs. Nor do I believe any person is likely to be born with an array of intelligences he can’t make a cultural breakthrough somewhere with–that is, I think Einstein would have been a genius in physics regardless of when he’d been born–with the proviso that he would have to have been born in a place where his gifts would be useful since it doesn’t make sense a given genetic gift would evolve in a location it was not needed in.).

I go along with Gardner on a culturateur’s need to find a vocation suited to his particular array of intelligences. (Gardner, I should point out, is a leading proponent of the belief that people have several intelligences, something I believe, as well, although I posit a different set of intelligences than he does.) That is, I doubt that a person’s general intelligence will allow him to perform equally well or poorly, regardless of the field he chooses. On the other hand, I believe that each of us does have a general intelligence, and that this general intelligence has much to do with one’s success in the field of one’s choice. Gardner does not believe in a general intelligence.

Gardner and I also disagree about Graham Wallas’s four-stage scheme of creativity, which I remember as (1) recognition of problem; (2) incubation; (3) arrival of solution; (4) testing of solution–which, if the solution breaks down, will lead back to (1) and a repetition of the process. This has always made sense to me and describes my own creative experiences perfectly. Gardner, however, believes that Wallas’s first step incorrectly assumes the existence of a problem to be solved, which would be valid in the sciences, for him, but not in the arts. He’s wrong. In poetry, for example, the problem will usually be to express a certain idea or image or feeling in a vital way, or to find an idea, image or feeling that a technique one already has can be used to express (in a vital way).

So, to be poetically creative about a tree, say, a poet will recognize his need to say what he wants to about it–and be unable immediately to (since only known and therefore uncreative solutions to problems are immediately available). Consequently, he will store the problem (and his preliminary encounters with it). I would consider step (1) in the scheme, by the way, to really be (1a) encountering a problem, and (1b) engaging it unsuccessfully.

At length, step (2), incubation, will follow–with the combination of knowlecules that represents the problem being subjected, in effect, to radiation–or haphazard nips of passing knowlecules, while at the same time also becoming de-contextualized and able to make new connections. Both of these processes, I might add, are basically simple but would require too much background in my theory to allow me to go into greater detail about them here).

Eventually, when the combination of knowlecules has links to new knowlecules and/or has lost links to no longer (or perhaps never) useful knowlecules, and something extraneous causes the poet to think of his poem (e.g., he sees a tree like the one he wanted to write the poem about), he remembers the problem, and it enters his mind, solved, thus taking care of step (3). Then, in step (4), the poet thinks about his solution, works it against models of what-a-good-poem-should-be and sees–probably without thinking verbally about it (what the mystics call “unconsciously”)–whether it works or not. If so, he has a poem, or a line toward a poem, or whatever. If not, step (4) becomes step (1) and the procedure is repeated.

The same process will occur in the dance. There, a Martha Graham might be practicing a dance and find that she’s become bored with some move because it’s become too predictable. In other words, she’s found a problem to solve. If she can’t quickly solve it with simple creativity (micreativity of the kind anybody might have), she’ll have to shelve it for incubation. At another time she might think of a plot she wants to provide a dance for. Some moves will come, some won’t–which will give her problems to solve, each like all problems. Thus the dance that results will be the sum of small problems solved, not one large solved problem–although it will be that, too, in a sense.

While on the subject of Wallas’s scheme, I should point out that George Swede claims in his Creativity, A New Psychology, that it has failed to be verified by controlled studies. The one empirical study Swede describes found that people not interrupted while trying to solve problems did as well as people subjected to interruptions, which seems to refute the necessity of Wallas’s incubation step. I believe, however, that the study had to do only with micreativity–with finding already-known but not readily available solutions and applying them in minor ways to only slightly new material, and so had nothing to do with culturateurical creativity.

In the field of poetry such micreativeness often produces fine poems, even major poems, but that only shows that creativity isn’t necessary for the production of a masterpiece in the arts or sciences–at the time of the masterpiece’s production. What I mean is that a person might create a masterpiece based on previous highly original techniques as opposed to newly original techniques. I might write five very original but flawed poems, for instance, then write a totally unoriginal but unflawed one that used all the innovations I’d come up with in the previous five poems. The result might be a masterpiece but it would not be highly original.

Another possibility is that a poet might compose a major poem that is highly original without seeming to pause for a period of incubation when what actually happens is that the poem gets its original portion from material previously incubated. That is, without realizing it, a poet trying to compose a poem in one sitting might spontaneously insert into it a previously incubating and now solved problem he had forgotten about. An example based on personal experience: I once walked around with the problem of having the idea of using the number one as a mathematical exponent in a poem but not having any appropriate words to go with it. I gave up. Much later I was working on a poem about Emerson, and suddenly saw a way to use the one as an exponent in it. I did remember my previously storing the idea of the one as exponent in a poem, but if I hadn’t, I and any observer of how I went about making my poem would have concluded that I’d been creatively successful without pausing for incubation.

It is also possible that a kind of very short-term incubation might sometimes take place: for example, someone might try to put an image into a poem that’s under way and fail. Only moments later, though, after only one or two other attempts to make a line work, the poet might see how to use the image–because some form of very brief incubation had occurred. In short, I feel certain that incubation is necessary for true creativity.

Since I brought George Swede into this essay, I should acknowledge that his book has very favorably influenced my thoughts on levels of creativity (most of which I hope to write about later). but that I don’t consider his distinction between culturateurs who collaborate and culturateurs who don’t useful. Each vocational field’s culturateurs will differ in many ways from every other vocational field’s, and one of the ways they differ will be in how much they interact with others. I think that no culturateur can be considered major if all his best works are collaborations–collaborations, that is, whose parts are inseparable. (Stravinsky collaborated with choreographers but his ballet music could be performed by itself. Kaufman and Hart, on the other hand, were full-scale collaborators, and minor. I have a few ideas why this should be so but they’re in the incubation stage at the moment.)

Whew, I have so much more to say about creativity, but I’ve run out of gas for the moment.

Note: both Swede’s and Gardner’s books are available through Amazon (amazon.com).