My sole motivation is to facilitate a process in which people who deign to do so can take up a role in the process of bringing to the human endeavor more vitality, connectedness and freshness. The work envisions an opening up of our psyches to appreciate greater varieties of generative actions. I know that people are capable of epochal change: it happened in the seventeenth century, in the period called the Enlightenment, when a critical mass of great minds extricated enough people from the night of Feudal religious dogma so as to create new, secular ways of living for all. My question is how can we do this again?
The core methodology is to lay out in enough detail to be useful, the distinguishing drivers of generative creativity. We all possess certain these drivers in varying amounts. But to make the kind of impact on others lives as do the breakout creatives, it is necessary for these drivers to dominate a personality. The dirves take over the lives of the people who possess them, turn them from people who live their lives to people whose lives are being lived by the power of a vision, commitment to a new way of living, and the unshakable will to enact that way.
We have identified four channels into which generative energies have coalesced during the course of the human endeavor:mystic, artist, prophet and leader.
When these people and their exceptional energies encounter the settled world their chaotic and overflowing energies become “grooved” or “channeled” into figurations, traditions and disciplines. The energies each of the figures experiences start out as being chaotic, to the person involved, these energies feel unnerving and unsettling. As children, they may have had trouble in school, or they may have been so bright as to eclipse their peers in imagination and intelligence. Some may have been so disturbed that they dropped out of institutional life to wander as iconoclastic nomads. Still, as they come to maturity, they picked up on stories of famous people who vaguely sound like them, or get they attracted to like-minded friends or they see people doing things that are intriguing enough to imitate. So there is an "attractive" and gravitational effect, coalescing theses talents into channels. Schools, traditions, genealogies, disciplines cluster around these channels and give them definitiion. These souls, once overwhelmed with their excess of energy, by affiliating with and within these channels, now have the means, mirrors and mentors available who can help them to make sense of their lives.
MYSTIC
The mystic is focused on the whole psyche in its most active and generative expressions. The mystic strives to keep the experience, all of it, open. The great mystics that we know of have take additional steps to put this fact of experiencing into words, or music or some other conventional form. Mystics are the ones among us who embody the pure faith-for what can come forth in our living (not faith in the fantastic or some vain institution).
It is crucial to note that the mystic may be, as Nietzsche declared, “dynamite,” one who, like Jesus, “comes with a sword,” but it is to AFFIRM, to embody faith-for that the mystic lives. The mystic’s energies are totally committed to bringi into an engagement with the existing world new and fresh energies. It is true, that to do so, amid the hardened and dense fixtures of mind and society, holes have to be bored, edifices demolished. But it is not rubble that is left. In the spaces thus opened, in the open market of unleashed energies, the mystic stands in order to have them convey a sense of vitality and freshness. And thus, the whole movement of the breakout creative, though having its destructive moment, is affirming of a bringing into the real what has yet to be fully sensed.
All mystics dwell in the mystery; thus the derivation of their name. They wander. They are not settled, even when sitting; they do not abide, even in a home or in friendly company. Mystics literally live out of another world, of their own creation. This is the mystic world we call a “field of enthusiasm.” They create this world, project it, because their own psychic energies are so overpowering, their psychic filters and ordering processes are so rich, that the world of myriad things never gets clear for them. So they create a world that can be clear: using the capacity to dream, to symbolize, conceptualize and express, they forge a first world, out there, which they inhabit,. Then they interpret the terrestrial, mundane, teeming and frothing sensory world according to it.
But, lest we think that mystics are “space cadets,” I want to be clear: the breakout creative mystics are ferociously disciplined about their fields of enthusiasm. The mystic’s “field of enthusiasm,” a field of great constellating power that is more real to the mystic than any law or institution or habit that might have once bound them. They exert tremendous energy, discipline, and force of character and demands of expression to making this field of enthusiasm act as a force with, by, for and against that mundane world. Not only are they open, but withstand the tremendous forces of generative power that impinge on their unprotected psyches. Not only do they deny the veracity and totalizing envelopment of habit, but summon the tremendous energies necessary to remain alive in that enervated state. Not only do they deny, but they summon the will to rise from the ashes of their own annihilated beings to affirm what can only be vaguely sensed and impalpably realized. This is the essence of their faith-for.
THE ARTIST.
The artist figure centers on sensibility, that is, experience that is most directly tied to a physical manifestation of what we call our “senses” or a combination them. All artists, as do all the other figures, partake of the classical mystic figuration, thus we named artists (Holderlin, Celan, Pollack, Stravinsky) when speaking about mystic expression. Artists are first about the concrete liveliness of experiencing through sensibility, and then about expression or result. An artist may or may not have any need to produce a “work of art,” and certainly the qualification of “beauty” is not at stake for contemporary artist figures. Their attention is directed toward “the critique of material” (Heller), seeing in all that lies about around us a new way to be touched and so to touch what occurs and thus bring forth a breaking out of whatever is old and tired and well-used into a new way for the psyche to constellate and enact its energies.
Always at stake is activating perception. The great excess of this sense, (Rilke, feeling the world, and it overflows) resulting in an encounter with some sensible material or language or sound, redounds to our benefit. The artist engages in a technique because a quirk of nature or nurture has lent to this person a proclivity and affinity toward this medium. The artist feels a hunger to inhabit this sensibility, and often it is a productive habitation. When not active and engaged, this sense of the artist acts as though it were in deficit. An imbalance is created and in the great absence, the muse is awaited. Thus there is a chasm between the artist as person and the artiist in action. It is into the theater of the latter that the artist longs to be, and in this theater, inhabiting this role, that the artist comes alive. All the interviews in the world and depictions of his or her daily life will reveal nothing whatsoever of the arteous that lives in this individual.
The artist “calculates.” The artist calculates the way a gunner does, measuring space, speed, trajectory so as to hit the target. The target is exactly that slanting into experience which yields the greatest compression (and then exposition and explication) of what is occurring at that, and any, moment. The poet aims for the metaphor; the novelist, the character in a situation, the painter, the scene and its light. They combine this sighting with the precise timing of pulling the trigger: the application of their technique. And then they time the pace of release of the projectiles (their actions, animating the technique), such that through just the right spacing and juxtaposing of elements (colors, words, key strokes and tones), the completely fresh world is presented. And the expectation is that the viewer/reader/listener, whose experience is meant to open onto the worlds so evoked, will then be a witness to what has occurred. And, since it can be done, it can be repeated; and so it might take its place in the ongoing world, transforming that world.
People commonly recognize the artist by the production of interesting and engaging works. Actually the artist figures proliferate far beyond the realm of books, theaters, concert halls and museums. The artist figure is one for whom experience itself is never settled. In fact, a producer of artifacts may be anything but an artist figure. Artists produce things that emanate from personal energy, that break our experiencing out of habituated molds.
This figure senses time slipping; he or she burns with urgency to strike. And they also labor, for as long as the calculation is salient, to bring the experience into its full and complete mode – undeniable and life breaking in itself.
THE PROPHET.
The prophet’s realm is that of relation. Following the mystic, who cuts and rejoins the discrete and many dimensions that constitute a “world,” in a decidedly spontaneous and surprising way, prophets feel the pulls and the strains, the tensions and the slackening of the sinew or gossamer by which all entities – living and not – are tied together. They have a strong sense of oneness, but they rejoice in the plurality, multiplicity, and fractal infinity of cosmic plentitude, its cornucopia. They deeply feel the pathos of the riven human condition, and stand in the world for its redemption and healing,
The prophet comes into being along with the power of the word. The artist arose with the symbol: the duration of an image that creates an arch of time over a constellation of what occurs – something small, tangible, real, that nullifies time’s passing for a while. The prophet arises with the word: that way communicating in, by and for a situation a temporal passing that is completely reliant on human actions. The prophet is the first appearance of humanity as a standard, a determinant of what can occur.
The prophet thus instigates “should,” the category of complete anticipation. The prophet opens up the realm in which we have to face each other, and so, in that communication, constantly choose the course. The prophet navigates. Nietzsche’s metaphors of the helmsman on the sea are prophetic: it is the feeling we all have in that moment in the conversation where we either take responsibility or back away. The prophet precipitates these situations. Lives for them, and does not accept the situation as a given, but floats on it, as if on a sea. The world is an oceanic flood of expectation-setting words: categories, commands, constraints and promises.
The breakout creative prophet demands that the ocean be set free again and the waters to it and from it flow; and this sea is the human community, given in language, felt in relation; demolished in whatever diminishes, detaches and isolates that flow. The price for this not occurring to the prophet is sickness, to be sure; and, in madness and murder, maybe death.
THE LEADER.
The leader coalesces around the idea of organization and therefore production. I hesitate to use those words. They are sterile and seemingly mechanistic. Indeed, alone among our figures, the leader is associated with the mundane and prosaic. The realms they occupy are thought to be in heading businesses, political organizations or various kinds of movements. All of these organizations we either need as a means of survival, or choose among as outlets for our passions of the day. While the other figures are easily avoided, not so the leader. They are thought to be our bosses, our governmental representatives, and we have to do with them every day of our lives. Hardly are the majority of this group thought of as creative. Words like “powerful,” or “charismatic,” or “corrupt” and “inept,” applied to them. Rarely, if ever, have I heard of leaders described as being “creative.”
The leader is confused with names that are more pernicious: tyrant, dictator, demagogue; or more benignly, with terms such as administrator, executive or bureaucrat. These are terms that signify a leader’s supposed power over us, and to the usually bad use of that power. Any idea of them being creative gets lost in the feelings of outrage and betrayal these leaders generate in us, whose lives they exploit or abuse.
But the leader we speak of is decidedly a creative figure, completely worthy of the appellation as are the others in our group. The people we have in mind, in direct and overt ways, apply the psychical abilities to coalesce the great undifferentiated energies so loved and called upon by the mystic, and brings them into forms that themselves are productive of more restricted, but more apparently, endlessly varied forms. They take the images of the artist and the comprehensions of pathos our relations are evoking in us and are inspiring in us, and coalesce them into collaborative endeavors that yield organizations, services and products for us all, that had only once been dreamed of in the creative realm. The leader is the true alchemist. Especially the contemporary leader of budding and “innovative” technical or social organizations that bring diverse and otherwise occupied energies into an effort that brings about new products, services and forms of relating to one another.
While the other figures are relatively alone in their creative lives, the leader, when venturing his or her creative energies, thinks first of organizing many people in the effort.
The leader lives in "real" time, within the strictures of what exists, and struggles to stretch the instantaneous time of a vision into the secular, material work of production with real things and relations. Thus the leader lives in a tension of continual sacrifice. The body of the leader is sacrificed to the eternal incorporeality of the vision; the time of the leader’s real life is sacrificed to the long durations of society and institution and the conversion of forms of matter. The psyche of the leader is sacrificed to the greater needs of the followers and followers to be, no less the opponents of the endeavor.
Not every CEO is a creative leader, few in fact are. But, there, laboring to create vibrant organizations that buck the tide, they are. Some break through to fame, like Steve Jobs (who was resurrected after having been sacrificed); but most labor anonymously, and are usually under fire from their stockholders and board members who have far less compelling motives. Many of these leaders just bring people together to think and converse; some bring people together to make a community a home for the unwelcomed. And we do not know the names of these people.
These, the mystic, the artist, prophet and leader are the ones who we study here as "breakout creatives." If we recognize them, and, whatever our creative proclivities might be, hear them, experience their sensibility, open to their experiments, and follow them, we might well bring ourselves to the brink of our own vitality and thus feel the surging of our own expression of the generative.
