Why create?

What a strange journey thinking takes us on. I began by asking myself how I could write, draw, compose, that is, create more than I do, or to put it the other way, how I could capture in communicable form, that is art, more of what I see and how I respond to the facets of this scintillating world, so intriguing, so impressive. I end by addressing the question of why we, including God-in-love, create at all.

On the way I've changed my mind about the meaning of old tools, generated and discarded new analogies, used my trust with triads to posit new categories, had insights while showering and bright ideas just before going to sleep, gotten lost regarding my intentions and targets, regularly reviewed my notebooks, and ended up with what seem to me interesting notions about the 'why' question as it applies to artists and others. 

Who am I to speak about any of these things, I wonder. Here goes, anyway.

What if we think the impulse for creating, for encountering creations, for encountering generally as proceeding from three self-reinforcing desires: to discover and describe the livingnesses of things (whatever, wherever, whenever) so as enjoy the resonance in our own livingness; to be intimate, that is closely acquainted, very familiar, with an other or others so as to be known as we know; and to be delighted by the very activity of creating.  Livingness, intimacy and delight: what makes these good candidates for answers to the 'why' question is their self-reinforcing, hence self-justifying operation. We create, indeed we encounter, because we like doing it, because part of the payoff of the outcome is enjoyed in the process. 

Livingness I've discussed elsewhere as the openness of things to what is and can be, describable in terms of potentiality, energy and power. Its presence (or absence) evoke response in ours. How often when we read a story or poem, or see a performance, or listen to a song, or see an image are we moved in our sense of where we are and what we are ready (or not) to receive or do. 

Intimacy, a word that leapt of the page of Egon Friedell's Cultural History at me, not a new word but one that seemed all of a sudden like a key, speaks about the space between the participants in an encounter, a space filling up with strands like hyphae penetrating, suffusing, reading each.  The artist looking at the model, the writer contemplating the world under creation, the songwriter trying to capture some poignant but evanescent original feeling get to know what it is they seek to present with a thoroughness and depth commensurate with their own need to be known, to be recognized, understood, welcomed. 

A resource for intimacy may be what I have called the 'freedom fields' or 'relevant perimeter' on other posts in this blog. I realize now that while the categories are meaningful, my understanding of their significance was not; they are not so much presentations of what is actual versus possible as what is obvious vs what can be inferred, what is definite vs what is indefinite:

    what something (or somebody) is vs what it can be, can have, can do; 

    what is evident about sth (or sb) vs what is hidden, invisible, suggested; 

    what is present of sth (or sb) vs what is absent, missing, empty; 

    what sth (or sb) is as an individual vs the form, the many, the whole; 

    what sth (or sb) is now vs the past, the persistent and the coming to pass; 

    what sth (or sb) is for itself (I or as if I) vs an other, you, myself.

In any case, these considerations show the way to deeper familiarity. 

There's direct pleasure in where we are finding ourselves, what we doing, what we having contact with in the course of our creatings. The simple activities of looking, of moving, of handling are often their own reward. Thinking about these I've come up with three categories of such delights: settings, kinetics, contacts.

Gardens (after Julie Moir Messervy) are designed to represent in some way sea, cave, harbor, promontory, island, mountain, sky. They are archetypical places that speak to some of our most evocative childhood experiences. To occupy any of these (in the making or made) and look out from them is simply intrinsically satisfying.    

The movements of creating (or appreciating) include dancing, flying, climbing, extricating, walking, riding, and burrowing--dancing for its rhythm; flying for its grace; climbing for its exertion; extricating for its conquest of obstacles; walking for its steady progress; riding for its sense of control, burrowing for its dark passage. 

Touch, as of hand on body, lover with lover, for instance, or parent with child, is also one of the delights of creating. Drumming, stroking, kneading, scratching, tracing, twirling, probing, and the many moves that fall into these general categories, are ways we handle the stuff of creation: words, paints, sounds, movements, what have you. The pleasure is in contact made, or received, the mutuality of maker and material.  

These fundamental archetypical delights--settings, movements, contacts--simply start to happen when we start creating, as do the rewards when we begin to portray livingnesses or explore intimacies. This may be why we create. 

I put this forward not so much a proposition to be proved as a possibly useful perspective for people such as myself who want to stimulate themselves into making art. It may be that I just need to discipline myself to set aside time for creating. There's more that I need however than just time and maybe these reflections indicate what that is.  Perhaps the merest glimpse of something's potentiality, energy or power, the simplest acquaintance with a non-obvious aspect of something, the first touch with raw stuff will be enough to get me going. Let's see.