not so creative.
After talking with Yoko Ono all night their first time together, he made love to her as the dawn rose, and then they recorded an album celebrating their union. Called Two Virgins, it featured their naked bodies on the cover and consisted of electronic noises and caterwauling screeches. The album was undoubtedly meaningful to them—but others were not amused. The record sold only to diehard fans, and the cover photo was blanked out by what looked like a brown paper bag, except for the two heads of the lovers.
This was novelty, but it didn’t have much use. (It may have some use now; the original covers without the brown bags are now worth a small fortune.) In this case Lennon forgot Stages 3, Incubation, and 5, Verification.
The Paradox of Creativity
So creativity is a paradox. It is both person and product, inspiration and perspiration, will and receptivity. It must also be novel yet acceptable. Jacques Barzun comments on the paradox often facing creators: “Most often their work has been hampered and ignored by the very society that now keeps boosting innovation. This paradox takes the form of saying, in words or by actions, ‘We want what is new and wonderful, not the strange and repellent thing you offer.’”63 Something must be new—but not too new. If it is, the audience walks out of the performance or the critic savages the poem or art exhibit. If you could call up some great creative artists of the past, you could ask them how their iconoclastic new work was received at first. Ask Nijinski about the simulated masturbation in his ballet Afternoon of a Faun; ask Stravinsky about his revolutionary chords in Firebird. Ask Melville how Moby Dick was first received; Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats, how Romantic poetry was first received; the Impressionists, how their art was received. Ask Galileo how the church liked his refutation of Ptolemy. Ask John Lennon about the strong language in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”: “The way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me!”
Sternberg notes that creative people “often feel attacked for their ideas”—for good reason, “since their crowd-defying ideas are incompatible with conventional ways of thinking and vested interests.” What they don’t understand is that by presenting an idea in opposition, they themselves are generating the attack! “An antithesis is, by its nature, oppositional.”64 Hence the need for such creators to have courage and stand by their independent judgment, which may be vindicated after their death. Vera John-Steiner, perhaps quoting Rollo May, speaks of “‘the courage to create’”:65 to persist despite lack of support or inspiration.
In the next chapter I will present an idea that may seem oppositional. However, I believe that rather than an antithesis, it is a synthesis: a theory that can coexist with traditional views of creativity.
The letters that are bolded and underlined have been crossed out:
B S A I N X L E A T N T E A R S.
Yes, if you cross out “SIX LETTERS,” you get “BANANA”! (Ugh!)
Exercises
1.Explain the ways in which the opening “Interlude” relates to the material in this chapter.
2.Read over the five-step process of creativity (pp. 2-3). How have you experienced it yourself, either while working on class assignments or creating for fun? Are the stages different for you? For instance, do you sometimes return to an earlier stage such as incubation when you have already had some “eureka moment”?
3.In your experience, when has extrinsic motivation (such as working for a grade) interfered with intrinsic motivation (creating for the sheer pleasure)? Is it different in different courses? Is it different in school than in other contexts? How would you advise teachers to draw on intrinsic motivation while still being required to provide a grade?
4.Read over the discussion of the “creative personality” (pp. 9-10). How would you apply these characteristics to yourself and/or someone else you know or know about?
5.How does the “Wind Theory” of creativity apply to you? How does the “Sweat Theory” apply? Explain examples.
6.Have you ever felt vulnerable to attack while expressing your creativity? If so, describe an example or two.
7.List some of the puzzling or unclear ideas in Chapter 1. Ask questions about them.
8.Explain what you think is most important in Chapter 1.
9.React to some of the ideas in Chapter 1. Debate, support, analyze, and/or reflect.
10. Give evidence from your own life or background experience about the ideas in Chapter 1. (Don’t repeat what you have written in another exercise.)
11. Watch the film Hearts of Darkness, and analyze Francis Ford Coppola’s creative process as he made Apocalypse Now. How did he use the stages of creativity? How did he exemplify the creative personality?
19See, for example, Rosanoff and Campbell.
20I have seen the number mentioned as both ten thousand and forty-three thousand.
21See, for example, Simonton, “Creativity as a Constrained Stochastic Process,” 91-92; Weisberg.
22Randall Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World (New York: Crown, 2007), 66.
23Isaacson, Einstein, 39.
24Henri Poincaré, “Mathematic Creation,” in The Creative Process: Reflections on the Invention in the Arts and Sciences, ed. Brewster Ghiselin (New York: Mentor Books, New American Library, 1952), 38. The three facets, based on his triarchic theory of intelligence, are “its relation to the internal world of the individual, its relation to experience, and its relation to the external world of the individual.” (p. 132)
25Poincaré, “Mathematical Creation,” 38.
26Nathaniel C. Comfort, The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 68.
27Ibid., 67.
28Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 28.
29On the importance of the validation phase to engineers, see Petroski.