Creative Vision
Sometimes this letter writes itself. Last year, I read Hasan Altaf’s amazing interview with Arundhati Roy. I have been wanting to share it with you but hadn’t been able to find a way to do so. Then Bloomberg News’ Ivory Coast correspondent, Leanne de Bassompierre, recommended that I read Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees. I knew from the first paragraph that I would bring it here and that you’d love it.
Roy and Shafak met in my subconscious and seemed to agree that they belonged in this letter together. Their agreement was clinched when I came across an insight shared by psychologists J.W. Getzel and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in their book Creative Vision (cited in Creativity in Business). Suddenly, this letter declared itself to be written. Of course, at this point, it is still not written so, in the hours (for me) and minutes (for you) to come, we will see how reasonable this letter’s confidence is.
/ Strategy
Getzel and Csikszentmihalyi worked with students at the Chicago Art Institute. They wanted to understand the conditions under which the students would produce works that would be deemed to be creative.
The study went like this. They invited students into a studio with two tables. The one held 30 or 40 objects. The other was empty. They told the students to take whatever objects they wanted, place them on the empty table in whatever configuration they chose, and paint them.
They filmed the process, interviewed the students afterwards, and had the paintings independently assessed for creativity. They wanted to know what impact the students’ processes had on the judged levels of creativity.
The least creative paintings resulted when a student gathered the objects, placed them carefully on the next table to create their ideal picture, and then produced the painting. Perhaps best described as ‘plan then execute.’
The most creative paintings were changed seventeen times or more during the process. They reflect “If you ask the student if he’s through, he’s never through, and he’ll say ‘Yeah, well, it’s better than it was before, but I’m not sure that I’m finished.’ There’s a hell of a lot of shifting, changing, erasing, painting over, modifying, approaching some degree of satisfaction…this does not mean it’s random, or they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. It’s got to be, I think, that they are carrying around some kind of standards, but they can’t really verbalise them or even visualize them clearly enough to say what things ought to be.”
Isn’t that just like a life well-lived? If we are open to ongoing learning and modification, we can create a more beautiful life. We need to be alive to the possibility of ongoing correction, shifting, changing, and, even if we can’t find the words for it, to remain connected to ourselves, to that elusive inner spirit that guides us.
Psychologist, Harold Leavitt, describes this as being ‘enactive’. You work on a specific problem until you find the right solution – a type of personal dialogue between your inner and outer selves. So often, we’re simply acting. This research tells us – as do thousands of years of human wisdom – that being connected to our internal selves is a source of distinctive power.
/ Self
Altaf’s interview with Roy is published in The Paris Review. The Review’s interviews are themselves masterpieces. They’re often conducted over days. The writing reflects an intimacy between the interviewer and their subject, a deep desire to connect, to know, and to understand. The archive goes back to the 1950s. Each one is a joy to read.
The interview starts at speed. They move almost immediately to Roy’s frustration that the world is moving towards a place where there ‘is an increasing danger of novels becoming too streamlined, domesticated.’ She describes them as increasingly “beautifully, confected product(s). There are no rough edges.”
Her view is that it is the novelist’s duty is to reflect the complexity of life. She says “A novelist can’t keep discrete worlds. Your business is to smash them together. The academic world, the journalistic world, the NGO world, they like to keep things discrete – this is a climate change dossier, in this room we deal with Hindu nationalism, that this the war and peace industry admin bloc, this is international finance…Sometimes, when I’m in a cruel mood, I think it’s a bit like a taxonomy of funding applications. Be it to really understand these things, to radically understand them, you have to look at the interplay.”
In a sense, she echoes Leavitt’s injunction to be enactive, to examine and foster the interplay between our internal and external selves. Of course, she is also doing more. She is pointing us to how the world is deeply interconnected and our efforts to put them into discrete boxes are far more about simplicity and control than it is about understanding to generate change.
Roy described how for her, language “arrives organically, to tell the story to be told. It comes to me like an audio track, as music almost. When I write, I don’t write a lot and then redraft and throw things away. It’s more like I hear it. And then there’s an enhancement, but there isn’t a great amount of redrafting.” Like the more creative students, she’s listening to an inner voice. Although, unlike many other authors, her first draft arrives more complete. Pulitzer Prize winner John McPhee says it takes him four drafts. We all have our own processes. Get to know what process works best for you. Protect and follow it.
She says that in writing her first novel, The God of Small Things, she spent two years writing around a particular scene. She couldn’t find her way through it and suddenly a structure appeared to her. She grabbed an envelope and, on its back, drew a graphic of how the story would unfold. She was able to move forward and, as you know her novel won The Booker Prize in 1997. She reflects that, at that moment, it was her training as an architect that enabled that unblocking – she could see the structure that was needed.
So often as we move forward in life, we feel compelled to leave the past behind, yet there is power in the integration, the old knowledge that is re-invigorated in new contexts.
And the breakthrough took two years! But she persisted.
/ Soul
The Island of Missing Trees is my favourite read so far this year. Leanne had me intrigued when she told me that there were chapters written from the perspective of a fig tree. I’m not going to tell you about the book, there are far better reviewers than me out there. I’m just going to share some bits that resonated with me.
As an England winter storm approaches, a hawthorn tree asks the fig how it is doing. The fig reflects on that kind moment of connection, “no matter what kind of trouble it may be going through, a tree always knows that it’s linked to endless life forms – from honey fungus, the largest living thing, down to the smallest bacteria and archaea – and that its existence is not an isolated happenstance but intrinsic to a wider community. Even trees of different species show solidarity with one another regardless of their differences, which is more than you can say for so many humans.”
In another moment, the fig thinks about the soil its roots wind through “As you tunnel deep down, you might be surprised to see the soil take on unexpected shades. Rusty red, soft peach, war mustard, lime green, rich turquoise…Humans teach their children to paint the earth in one colour alone. They imagine the sky in blue, the grass in green, the sun in yellow and the earth entirely in brown. If they only knew they have rainbows under their feet.”
And so Shafak echoes Roy, reminding us that the world is much richer, more connected than our rushed representations depict. In their ‘shifting, changing, erasing’, the students were looking for that richer truth.
As one of the characters walked through the trees, “thousands of eyes peered from the leaves, eyes made up of tiny light detectors, discerning different wavelengths, clashing realities, reminding Kostas that the world humans saw was only one of many available.” We forget this. That the world we see as real is only one of many different realities. This is not mysticism, it just is. Pause in the enormity of that truth. Imagine the possibilities that exist. You see one world. The eagle sees another. The butterfly another. All the same, all different, all real. How are you looking at your world? What happens if you shift your vantage point?
The fig tree tells us that “in life…we have to weave our stories out of threads as fine as the gossamer veins that run through a butterfly’s wings.” What story do you want to weave for your life?
This letter is now written. I hope it reads well. I do think it has said something valuable. I won’t adjust it. It feels like it must be left as is, to speak with you. My sense is that it has given no conclusions, but perhaps has provided possibilities. I hope that you feel them.
With much love
Karl
PS: The article that I wrote for Wanted Magazine, Choosing to Live, is now online. You can read it here. You can subscribe to this letter here.