FIRE
Jackson Pollock, Number One, 1948
In Rollo May’s "Courage to Create", he makes the argument that before there can be an act of creation, there must be an act of destruction. He was mostly referring to the established structures of ideas that must be overthrown when innovating new concepts in science or art. But what if the process of creating is more intrinsically connected to destruction? Concepts and ideas aside, what if they are primordially connected on a base level inseparable from the onset of the action?
I recall watching a TV documentary of a young boy who had a cleft, not in his palette, but in his entire face. His far too far apart eyes were separated by a caved in nose and his forehead had too wide a span from temple to temple. The doctors incised his skin across his head in an arc from ear to ear. They then pealed his fleshy face down below his mouth and removed a section from the too wide brow bone in its center. With the center forehead space gone, they pushed the temples closer together. Taking the extra brow bone material to the table, they began to whack at it with a chisel, chipping away a shape suitable for the boy's new nose bridge.
What was disturbing to me about this procedure was not the reminder of my mortality, the moroseness of the operation, nor the vulnerability of pliable flesh against cold steel. My unease derived from my empathy with the doctors. I knew that energy. They weren't handling that bone with kit gloves; they were banging and beating it. Any person unfamiliar with creativity would have been so concerned with the preciousness of the material that they would have been paralyzed to transform it. Frozen, they would ask, "Where am I going to get more of this bone that I'm making into a nose if I accidentally destroy it?" But, there's an urgency here. Something has already been destroyed and recreating it successfully is paramount.
I hear what you are saying here. I have felt this as a writer and a historian. If you consider a piece of prose as the "material," it can be extremely hard to take something you have written, break it down, and transform it into something more meaningful. A writer's fear of losing what he or she has written can often paralyze a writer into complacency, halting the creative process in frustration and preventing creativity from taking hold and making the prose better. I have seen this as both an editor of other people's work, and as a writer myself. It is sometimes difficult to recognize the faults of a completed work and then "destroy" it to make it better. The result is an endless series of drafts as opposed to a completed product that resonates with both the writer and the reader.
ReplyDeleteHI Megan, I cam across your work because I am grappling with a painting of a toy...A wonderful old fashioned moving toy of a a man being chased by a crocodile. Your thoughts on painting toys have been helpful. Michelle, Durban South Africa
ReplyDelete