DesertSky11@mac.com
My goal is to explore the creative process in a new way: to see the kinds of lives that people live in order to bring the new and fresh, the iconoclastic and and subversive, the unexpected and unwelcomed in to the world.
When an ecology is healthy its elements create.
A healthy, living environment, is thus generative of change: Its vitality is measured by how much it is able to generate in terms of activity in the environment, reproduction of its (modified and adapted) species, the nutrients and material it makes available to other living things, etc. This contribution of each element in a healthy ecology is what we call “creativity.”
Creativity is thus the touchstone of health: where there is health, creativity is not only possible but it is necessary. If a creature is caged within a limited and tightly controlled environment, it does not thrive. In this way, we know that the ability to act creatively is necessary for vitality of every living thing. And, along with this, we realize that only healthy, generative environments enable and support the creativity of each of its members.
In the human arena, we have a problem. Our societies are so complex and definitive, we can hardly see what else there is. Our technologies are so omnipotent that they are limiting the vitality of everything around us. Our science is so effective that we are able to manipulate many of the forces around us to our own prescribed purposes. Our human world has become an impediment to nature’s ability to be healthy and generative, and our institutions and technologies are so pervasive that they have become an impediment to our own creativity.
We have, in other words, overwhelmed our own ability to engage generatively, creatively, and vibrantly in our world. Our creative energies are channelled into the technical-commercial realm through which we make our livings and enjoy the fruits of what is made available to us through the consumer driven market system. And, there is so much variety and choice packed into that system, only our incomes seem to pose a barrier to our satisfaction.
But the lack of generative vitality in that system is all too apparent. Let’s dispense with the litany. If you are reading this, you know what I mean. The intent of this space is to speak of the creative, to provide what we believe is a distinctive window on that essential living dimension. And we do this so that people, like ourselves, who know only too well how our current way of living saps our vitality, can choose the living, choose what can change us, in our own lives.
What is distinctive in our approach:
We see the human creative endeavor, in its modern Western form, as marked out by four types of creative “figures,” or people who have chosen to live in certain ways that have common characteristics. They have clustered around certain life ways, or “ethics” that we can name, study and learn from. And by using these “figures” as guides we can come to see how certain choices in our lives support our creative inclinations, while others don’t.
The four figures are:
Mystic. One who embodies faith-for raw and without intermediary the kinds of energies and forces at play in the world that both unleash creative life, and those that constrain, dilute and/or diminish them.
Artist: One who grasps these creative energies, and labors to enable themselves and others to individually experience them in their full efficacy as the force for generative vitality.
Prophet: One who feels these energies at work in how we relate to each other and to the larger world -- of our ecology, society, and even to the cosmos.
Leader: One who uses organization of many different forces, relations, people and materials in order to put the new and the vital in play as actual things, and contexts for concrete, daily activity.
See the Blog Post "The Breakout Creative Figures" for more on these figures.
In Western culture, these are the forms around which human creative energies have clustered during the course of our history. To the extent that these people who have exemplified these figures create new ways of living that defy the assumptions, norms, rules and habits of their times marks the extent to which these people create “events” that break out, and break us out of life-draining confinement.
This work is dedicated to helping people to fully embrace the life that such figures have to lead in order to fully realize their creative mission. It is not a “self-improvement” tract we offer. We study these figures from a perspective that marks out that margin in which “break out” actually occurs. We are looking at our own times in order to see what that margin of the “adjacent possible” consists of, and what kind of creative energy, in one or a combination of several of these figures, will be needed in order to act generatively and creatively in the most global and intensively personal sense
I am now engaged in a deep study of this creative process. These pages represent works in progress, as I think through subjects, I will test them here. My main concentration is in producing a series of books that study each of the figures. I will look at each with an eye to how one lives the life of such a figure here and now. In so doing we will consider what such a figures consists of; we will trace the genealogy of this figure to see the genetic material evolving over the course of the Western adventure; and we will consider what the most contemporary avatars of each figure in order to construct a reliable mirror for our own self-appraisal.
