Читать книгу Creative Synergy - Bunny Paine-Clemes - Страница 39

So creativity is a paradox. It is both person and product, inspiration and perspiration, will and receptivity. It must also be novel yet acceptable. Jacques Barzun comments on the paradox often facing creators: “Most often their work has been hampered and ignored by the very society that now keeps boosting innovation. This paradox takes the form of saying, in words or by actions, ‘We want what is new and wonderful, not the strange and repellent thing you offer.’”⁶³ Something must be new—but not too new. If it is, the audience walks out of the performance or the critic savages the poem or art exhibit. If you could call up some great creative artists of the past, you could ask them how their iconoclastic new work was received at first. Ask Nijinski about the simulated masturbation in his ballet Afternoon of a Faun; ask Stravinsky about his revolutionary chords in Firebird. Ask Melville how Moby Dick was first received; Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats, how Romantic poetry was first received; the Impressionists, how their art was received. Ask Galileo how the church liked his refutation of Ptolemy. Ask John Lennon about the strong language in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”: “The way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me!”

Sternberg notes that creative people “often feel attacked for their ideas”—for good reason, “since their crowd-defying ideas are incompatible with conventional ways of thinking and vested interests.” What they don’t understand is that by presenting an idea in opposition, they themselves are generating the attack! “An antithesis is, by its nature, oppositional.”⁶⁴ Hence the need for such creators to have courage and stand by their independent judgment, which may be vindicated after their death. Vera John-Steiner, perhaps quoting Rollo May, speaks of “‘the courage to create’”:⁶⁵ to persist despite lack of support or inspiration.

In the next chapter I will present an idea that may seem oppositional. However, I believe that rather than an antithesis, it is a synthesis: a theory that can coexist with traditional views of creativity.

The letters that are bolded and underlined have been crossed out:

B S A I N X L E A T N T E A R S.

Yes, if you cross out “SIX LETTERS,” you get “BANANA”! (Ugh!)