A Creativity House, and Rollerblading

Here's an interesting press in the UK that specializes in books on creativity: Ablex Publishing.

Some sample titles: The Person behind the Mask: Guide to Performing Arts Psychology and Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation.

I find the idea of creativity and emergence in conversation appealing in itself. Although I can't say that I like the idea of self-conscious conversation.

I think it's also true of writing and, no doubt, any art that both free inventiveness and lack of self-consciousness are needed.

I learned this in a visceral way once while rollerblading. Every time I had a thought about how well or badly I was doing, or how I looked, then I stumbled. Otherwise, smooth sailing.

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"Negative" Emotions

An old print ad for Ban deodorant has caused me to ponder.

It suggests, with an amusing picture for each, some items we might like to get rid of:

Ban Insecurity
Ban Stereotypes
Ban Angst
Ban Self-Doubt
etc.

For some of these, mental health professionals (and Buddhists) might suggest that we let them be and simply watch them float in and away.

I've found that thoughts/emotions I try to get rid of tend to stick and grow. At the same time, sometimes I can stop a thought when it first rises: just "don't go there." This is a matter of some import to me, since I have a form of OCD that's more "pure obsessive," as it's called.

What do you think? What has your experience been?


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The Passive Part of Creativity

A lovely essay I came across in an old thrift-shop New Yorker (June 16, 1977) extols the pleasure and power of pausing and letting something happen, of yielding to the natural rhythms of processes.

Letting bread rise is the obvious example. Or pregnancy.

Letting an idea cook also has much to be said for it. Or letting a draft sit until it's possible to see it fresh. (I have so far found the latter physically impossible.)

What was most interesting about this piece by Noelle Oxenhandler is how sensuous and whimsical she made the experience of what could be called waiting.

Sensuous: the simple matter of letting a newly-washed floor dry..."to lie on my back in the grass watching the clouds, my wet mop beside me, while inside the house th ewater shapes dried on clean, lemony wood floors."

Whimsical, following the odd impulse: A young blind man was gathering strength for action in the French Resistance movement against the Nazis. In spite of his sense of urgency, he felt he should first take dancing lessons. "What courage," she writes, "to dance on the brink of war, on the threshold of Buchenwald. To give oneself the time to evoke or to exorcise whatever inner forces were needed or stood in the way of action. And how difficult--except with hindsight--to see this as courage."


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