C is for Cars - no - Creativity. No, Cars!

Good grief. I want to write about both. Cars could instead be Autos or Creativity could be Art but A is long gone in either case. Cars could be Vehicles but I really wanted to do Volunteering. I suppose that could be Helping Hands but I really wanted to do Hugs. Yikes. What a pit of tinkering and negotiation I've fallen into with this A-Z thing.

Okay. I have E still open. Hugs can instead be Embraces. Done!

Now, where was I?

Ah, yes. Creativity. I could talk for hours on this subject. In fact I have talked for hours on this subject. But let me be succinct here tonight, and it doing so, I will speak boldly without the added verbosity that comes with qualifying my opinions. I'll say it once. All that follows are my opinions. Though they are understandings based on very honest and arduous exploration. Here we go:

What makes us human; sets us apart? There is nothing special about the human body. Every feature exists in other species and in some, much superior versions. Intelligence? We are more intelligent perhaps but only by degree. Plenty of intelligence exists in other mammals and perhaps their levels of intelligence are actually superior because perhaps their levels are sustainable whereas our capacity to invent and technologize may very well spell our undoing.

No, it is imagination and creativity that set us apart. It is these that are uniquely human.

Every person is a poet, a writer, an artist, a musician, a dancer, an actor. We all have these rare, strictly human capacities and yet most of us deny it.

"Oh, I have no talent for that..."

Bullshit. We can all do these things but we lose sight of that because we don't practice such art forms for years or decades. And we think we have no talent because we compare our self to the masters of our global pop-culture. We think we can't compete with Stephen King or Ansel Adams or Norman Rockwell or George Clooney but compete how so? For money?

The great money-winners are largely false artists. They only do what is perceived as marketable, which is to cater to the lowest common denominators of the dull masses.

True art is not about money and it's not about pleasing the dull masses. It is about the process. It is about facing the blank page. It is about solitude. It is about asking the big questions or the scary questions and slowly discovering the big answers - or the scary answers. It is about true learning; that which stems from your honest observations and which only can be devised and constructed through sustained contemplation. It is about revelation and enlightenment. It is about real intelligence; about empathy, the precursor to real love.

Most people who have no creative outlets are just part of the big ugly economic machine with no vision for making life better for themselves, other humans and other stakeholders in the planet. They're slaves to their greed and ego. They're all about chasing false promises of happiness, making more money, buying more useless crap and burying it in the ground and training their children to be equally useless in their own lives. With no real intelligence they borrow sound bytes to pass as an illusion of intelligence while they blindly follow the asinine preaching of the so obviously corrupt leaders of society.

William Blake and other poets have claimed, in essence, that mankind will never climb out of this pit we have dug for ourselves until everyone becomes a poet.

Now - that said: There are plenty of exceptions. I know people who don't seem to be creative and yet they are intelligent and loving and contribute to efforts to make the world a better place. How do they do it? I don't know. I don't know everything. I know how writers and artists and musicians do it and it makes sense to me. To you exceptions out there: You have my admiration.

Okay. I think I'm missing a lot here but I've been half asleep the whole time and I must get to bed. I have to be up early tomorrow to go to the Princess of Schools and work with a bunch of excellent kids with their novel reading and creative writing; to hopefully instill in them a permanent habit for creativity and imagination!

Peace.


There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease. A cancer of this planet; a plague.- Agent Smith (film: The Matrix)

For the first time he contemplated, lovelessly but with pity, the lamentable human flock, born to graze and die.
- Georges Bernanos (novel: Under Satan's Sun)

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Albert Einstein