Creativity: Soul Speak

 

 

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
― Pearl S. Buck

There is nothing magic or inherited about creativity.  It is a process.  It means you are practicing your soul speak.  It starts with one pencil mark, one pen line, on stroke of a brush, one glob of glue, one splotch of color… but it starts and from a deep space in the soul comes wisdom, memory, experiences, thoughts, feelings, hopes drams.  This is the sacred altar of creativity. 

I biological aspects, creativity is said to reside in the frontal cortex where short term memory is stored for working and thinking.  Creativity can be described as four types.  Deliberate cognitive creativity is a mental process that relies on existing knowledge and we ae aware of this knowledge.  Deliberate and emotional is creativity that can be used to create new ideas.  There is spontaneous and cognitive creativity that means that we simply self-generate thoughts that come from sensations and experiences we have had and are not controlled by anything that stimulates us from the outside. (spontaneous) meaning it just comes on its own.  Then there is spontaneous emotional creativity where we naturally have a plan I mind and we work through that plan for a final project.  These four types of creative thinking are what we sometimes refer to as our “Muse”.  With all this in mind, (literally) ,creative thinking makes us a more interesting personality who enjoys solving problems.

Being creative comes from our need to have some kind of control in life because of life’s uncertainties.  Creative people have a need to “fix” things.  Thus it is that, when there is no great life problems, our brain will dream up artistic ways of solving a chosen problem with the four types of creative thinking.  We place a blank substrate in front of ourselves and due to a challenge given or simply the blank substarte gives rise to creative thought to solve the blank canvas problem.

It is said that religion was created to solve the problem of our fear f unknown certainties of life (and death).  We attempt to solve our emotional problems, in creative ways.  Art being a way to express, sometimes, what we cannot explain or give language to.  That is when big life problems need to be solved and we are driven to solve such like solving the problem of aching teeth.  We are driven to solve it.  The smaller problem of solving a blank substrate is a much smaller solution we desire to make sense of.  Creativity is used in most life situations.  Artists choose to solve artistic problems.  This is where creativity steps in and sometimes we refer to what solves it as our “muse’ taking over.  We had a need, and have, to solve things and that process used to do so is called creativity (creative thinking of the four types).

This is heavy stuff, but I have a “need” to try to put into words how “something” takes over and creates an image in my head, or my hand and tool simply begins to make marks and the process of making art happens and follows through to a finished product.  I sometimes call my art-making “Soul Speak” because I feel like making art is soul work.

How do you explain creative thought?

©Carol Desjarlais 5.20.23