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then realized that this “unfinished” quality would always remain, and that it is a part of the creative process itself.
to influence our evolution through our own awareness.
you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.
But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.
self-reliant and could endure the inevitable loneliness in homesteading with the nearest neighbor twenty miles away.
When I was a child in a small Midwest town, boys were expected to fistfight. But our mothers represented a different viewpoint, so the boys often got licked at school and then whipped for fighting when they came home. This is scarcely an effective way to build character. As a psychoanalyst, I hear time and again of men who had been sensitive as boys and who could not learn to pound others into submission; consequently, they go through life with the conviction that they are cowards.
If we let ourselves experience the evil, we will be forced to do something about it.
For curious reasons we are shy about sharing the things that matter most. Hence people short-circuit the more “dangerous” building of a relationship by leaping immediately into bed. After all, the body is an object and can be treated mechanically.
Otto Rank.
Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.
Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.
But in our appreciation of the created work—let us say a Mozart quintet—we also are performing a creative act.
By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death.
This is why authentic creativity takes so much courage: an active battle with the gods is occurring.
One is that genius and psychosis are so close to each other. Another is that creativity carries such an inexplicable guilt feeling. A third is that so many artists and poets commit suicide, and often at the very height of their achievement.
All artists have at some time had the experience at the end of the day of feeling tired, spent, and so certain they can never express their vision that they vow to forget it and start all over again on something else the next morning.
Artists are generally soft-spoken persons who are concerned with their inner visions and images. But that is precisely what makes them feared by any coercive society. For they are the bearers of the human being’s age-old capacity to be insurgent. They love to emerse themselves in chaos in order to put it into form, just as God created form out of chaos in Genesis. Forever unsatisfied with the mundane, the apathetic, the conventional, they always push on to newer worlds. Thus are they the creators of the “uncreated conscience of the race.”
We all know that each generation, whether of leaves or grass or human beings or any living things, must die in order for a new generation be born.
true artists—namely, those who give birth to some new reality. These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness.
Nowhere
has the meaning of creativity been more disastrously lost than in the idea that it is something you do only on week ends!
A healthy child’s play, for example, also has the essential features of encounter, and we know it is one of the important prototypes of adult creativity. The essential point is not the presence or absence of voluntary effort, but the degree of absorption, the degree of intensity (which we shall deal with in detail later); there must be a specific quality of engagement.
Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter.
A talented professional, this man had rich and varied creative potentialities, but he always stopped just short of actualizing them. He would suddenly get the idea for an excellent story, would work it out in his mind to a full outline which could have then been written up without much further ado, and would relish and enjoy the ecstasy of the experience. Then he would stop there, writing down nothing at all. It was as though the experience of seeing himself as one who was able to write, as being just about to write, had within it what he was really seeking and brought its own reward. Hence he
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Alcohol is a depressant, and possibly necessary in an industrial civilization; but when one needs it regularly to feel free of inhibitions, he or she is misnaming the problem.
egregious
It is not a mere expansion of awareness; it is rather a kind of battle.
We have the joy of participating in what the physicists and other natural scientists call an experience of “elegance.”
This is one aspect of what is called ecstasy—the uniting of unconscious experience with consciousness, a union that is not in abstracto, but a dynamic, immediate fusion.
Gestalt
this incomplete Gestalt,
It often occurs to me that people living in our modern, hectic civilization, amid the constant din of radio and TV, subjecting themselves to every kind of stimulation whether of the passive sort of TV or the more active sort of conversation, work, and activity, that people with such constant preoccupations find it exceedingly difficult to let insights from unconscious depths break through.
Of course, when an individual is afraid of the irrational—that is, of the unconscious dimensions of experience—he tries to keep busiest, tries to keep most “noise” going on about him.
Gestalt.
exegesis
nimbleness,
A remarkable example of the creative encounter is given in the small book written by James Lord in recounting his experience of posing for Alberto Giacometti. Having been friends for some time, these two men could be entirely open with each other. Lord often made notes directly
after the posing session of what Giacometti had said and done, and out of them he has put together this valuable monograph about the experience of encounter that occurs in creativity. He reveals, first, the great degree of anxiety and agony that the encounter generated in Giacometti. When Lord would arrive at the studio for his sitting, Giacometti would often disconsolately occupy himself half an hour or more doing odds and ends with his sculpture, literally afraid to start on the painting. When he did bring himself to get into the painting, the anxiety became overt. At one point, writes Lord,
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he often feels that the particular sculpture or painting on which he happens to be working at the moment is that one which will for the very first time express what he subjectively experiences in response to an objective reality.6
One distinguishing characteristic of the encounter is the degree of intensity, or what I would call passion.
Hofmann went on to say, interestingly enough, that his men students get married early for reasons of security and become dependent on their wives, and that often it is only through their wives that he, as their teacher, can draw out their talent.
somnambulistic
haphazardly,
concomitant
succinct
perchance
I propose that the statement, “human possibilities are unlimited” is de-energizing. If you take it at face value, there is no real problem anymore. You can only stand up and sing hallelujah and then go home.
it is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing him out into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, “The sky’s the limit.”
Consciousness is born in the struggle against a limit, called there a prohibition.
The limits are as necessary as those provided by the banks of a river, without which the water would be dispersed on the earth and there would be no river—
