Alan Kirker

Creativity

September 30th, 2020 by

An artist might view creativity as the satisfying of an urge to make something of beauty, something others may also find appealing or that will somehow resonate. What is its source and what enables its manifestation? Filmmaker David Lynch uses the analogy of fishing when approaching a creative endeavour through a Jungian plumbing of the collective unconscious. According to Lynch, an appropriate setting is helpful and can take a form such as meditation. This quieting one’s mind and a lowering of the line or net is followed by a corresponding patient waiting until the fish, or idea, bites. Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna states such riparian metaphors describe the creative forces flowing within nature and the imagination “which run like an endless river through all of us and are driven by the hydraulic momentum of the cataracts of chaos… These things are icons for the world that wants to be” (2001, p.49).

Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and somehow valuable is formed” (Wikipedia, retrieved September 2020). Beyond this, many definitions of creativity exist that span popular understanding. In one example from an analytical perspective, it is

“a process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies, and so on; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions, making guesses, or formulating hypotheses about the deficiencies: testing and retesting these hypotheses and possibly modifying and retesting them; and finally communicating the results”, while “it is usually distinguished from innovation in particular, where the stress is on implementation” (Wikipedia, retrieved September 2020).

Creative Destruction is the idea posited by Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter of a business cycle of mutation. A process of continual renewal which can see completely new yet highly relevant opportunities emerge from what had been up until that point often viewed as entrenched, immovable means of conducting business, or society. Do present circumstances offer the chance for creative destruction and rebirth more generally in our vastly complex civilization?


Abraham, R., McKenna, T., Sheldrake, R. (2001) Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness. Rochester, United States: Park Street Press

Chaos

September 29th, 2020 by

Chaos derives from the Ancient Greek khaos, which means “vast chasm, void”, whereas figurative uses of the term as in confusion or disorder appear from the seventeenth century on. The scientific and mathematical meaning which first manifest in the nineteen sixties known as Chaos Theory looks at

“dynamical systems whose apparently random states of disorder and irregularities are often governed by deterministic laws that are highly sensitive to initial conditions… and is an interdisciplinary theory stating that, within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization” (Wikipedia, retrieved September 2020).

A popular metaphor used to underscore this complexity is referred to as the butterfly effect where one flapping its wings can lead to the formation of a hurricane in a completely different part of the world. Does this level of connection speak to an underlying implicate or enfolded order beneath what is otherwise apparent chaos?

Chaos may be regarded as a transitional phase, the counterpoint of or antecedent to creativity. The ancient Nile River’s flood season was heralded by Argha-Noah, the waters of change, symbolized by an ark, a boat- or sail-like crescent moon. According to historian J. C. Cooper in An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols (1978), this symbol represented “the feminine principle, bearer of life, the womb, regeneration, the ship of destiny” (p. 14), as the floodplain would become enriched with the settling out of fresh, fertile sediments in advance of the growing season.

Mathematician Ralph Abraham implies that chaos on a more personal level can even be welcome, for the

“repression of chaos results in an inhibition of creativity and thus a resistance to imagination. The creative imagination, manifested most profoundly by people like Euler or Bach, should be functioning in everyone. People have a resistance to their own creative imagination” (2001, p. 40).


Abraham, R., McKenna, T., Sheldrake, R. (2001) Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness. Rochester, United States: Park Street Press

Cooper, J. C. (1978) An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols. London, United Kingdom: Thames & Hudson

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