The beauty of the creative act is that it moves us from thinking about or experiencing the world in one way to thinking about it or experiencing it in another way. Some creative acts are clearly evolutionary in nature. Mozart's work, for all it sparkling brilliance, was not far removed from Mendelsohn's. The fundamental expressive languages they use are quite similar.
One might argue that Beethoven's work moves music much farther than either of these two men. Beethoven, well played, can smoulder and brood or it can erupt into exhulation. And it can do it by departing materially from the mechanistic conventions of his predecessors in the Vienna school.
Consider Stravinsky. His work was so revolutionary that at least one drew rage and missile fire from the audience. There was nothing like it before. And there is a sense in which it was the final successful expression of classical music. I have not researched Stravinsky and I have not become acquainted either with his working habits or with his frame of mind. I heard once that his music succeeded because he painstakingly practiced to develop a unique and hauntingly beautiful new sonic language. And that this practice was something subsequent workers have sometimes done less rigorously. I don't have any idea if it is true, but it is sensible.
I find it to be a powerful metaphor. Great art is almost always highly idiomatic. Each artist develops a kind of language within his medium, one that is both uniquely his own and expressive of something universally held. The fundamental thing about language - whether it is a musical language or a spoken one - is that it has a set of rules, a syntax. And that syntax "makes sense" to a person who "gets inside" it. But the syntax sounds strange or foreign before this happens.
People who like things to be familiar and comfortable tend to reject these new languages. People who have adventuresome tastes will sometimes give them a try - they will suspend disbelief - until they have made a decision about the new language. One sometimes experiences a mystical sense when one is presented with a new language. One finds elements and relationships that have regularity but whose specifics are different from what one is used to. One must invent a new way of parsing the language. And that process will sometimes produce as sense of pleasure.
I happen to be a Beatles fan. The Beatles, it can be argued, were two distinct music groups. The early Beatles were straight-ahead simplistic rock and roll. Any two of their songs sound similar. I am not an early Beatles fan. But something happened round about the time of Rubber Soul. They started pushing their musical expression into new areas. Revolver, Yellow Submarine, Sergeant Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, White Album, and Abbey Road all give expressions to sounds that are new to the Beatles. And a friend who has taken an introductory music theory course tells me that a number of the chords and chordal progressions in the works on these albums is quite unusual. In short, the Beatles invented a new musical idiom.
There were a few groups that took Beatles' innovation engine and kept going with it after the Beatles broke up. Yes might be an example. But the level of abstraction eventually overbalanced the comfort factor. And before long the creative edge of rock soon had to find expression in newer and simpler idioms such as punk.
So what does all of this have to do with the Francis Crick, Nobel Laureate credited with the discovery of the double helix as the spacial form of DNA? Firstly, the double helix idea was a great leap of imagination. It was a creative idea with few parallels. In all of chemistry, only von Stradonitz' conception of the benzene ring comes close to being its equal - inspired by a ring of six snakes he encountered in a dream. Crick, then, deserves lots of credit for being bright and creative in his conception of DNA.
Crick had some help. Yes, he had Watson. And surely Watson was of much help. And he worked with a brillaint woman whose painstaking crystallographic work was completely necessary to proving his theory, Rosalind Franklin. Some workers have argued, in fact, that she deserves more credit than Crick, that she was at least as deserving of Nobel Prize recognition as Watson. Perhaps it is true. But Crick gets the credit for the idea. According to the story link above, the edge of Crick's creative genius sharpened by miniscule doses of the then new hallucinogen LSD.
Descriptions of experiences with LSD suggest that the chemical interferes with the processes by which we assign things to categories. So if one looks at visual information, it "swims." The brain keeps reinterpreting it in different ways, making "sense" of it in ways that, mostly, do not make sense. And each new interpretation changes our perception of the same visual scene. By this means, a perfectly static scene changes before our eyes. It swims.
The chemical may interfere with any of the set ways we have of interpreting the world. The effect of LSD is to cause the mind violate categorical bounds, to randomly take perception and experience where they do not normally go. When it comes to executing the normal drudge tasks that make up our daily lives, this kind of mental activity is almost uniformly destructive because we misinterpret what ought to be fairly robust perceptions about the physical world, relationships of space and time. It is especially dangerous when dealing with power tools or wild animals. And I have heard it told that in polite society, when a person is to embark on a chemically enhanced journey, sober friends offer to come along to help manage interactions with the real world that might otherwise become problemmatic.
Voyages that depart from the known are fraught with unseen dangers. Yet to the nations that explored the unknown new world of the Americas, those voyages eventually proved powerfully transformative in material and spiritual ways. Similarly, when it comes to creating new ways of looking at or experiencing the world, the hallucinogenic experience may actually prove to be of some help. Crick, evidently, found it to be so.
And in this his experience runs parallel to that of the Beatles. For it was not until their own experiments with the same mind-altering chemical that they produced the truly creative stuff of their second incarnation. When one looks at the Beatles' movie Yellow Submarine, in fact, it is like stepping into a hallucination. There are people who find that movie unbearable without some chemical help, I have been told. Yet it is clever, engaging movie. It places us in an interesting world and very convincingly distracts us from pretty much all that the world we normally inhabit is and all the problems it presents. It is simultaneously a creative product and a creative force.
There have recently been workers who have suggested that one of the most hopeful treatments for certain opiate addictions is a different hallucinogenic drug derived from a particular mushroom psillocybin. Evidently, when used in a particular regimen, it manages to "rewire" the part of the brain that accounts for the craving for narcotic. It breaks down a sort of hard-wired bad habit. Interesting. We do not intend this piece to be a discussion of the merits and hazards of a particular chemical or class of chemicals or of treatment regimens for addiction. That is a separate debate. We intend it, rather, to show that the creative act is closely allied with a giving up of certain mental habits. And that it is frequently by giving up mental habits that useful progress in science and the arts is realized.
Sometimes this "giving up" comes as we sleep and we dream. Sometimes it comes when we "give up" and work on some other problem. Or when we play. Sometimes it comes when we channel our thinking in different ways and try to practice new habits. And sometimes it comes with the aid of certain chemical substances. Man as a social animal is indistinguishable from the ant as social animal so long as one is considering his physical endeavors alone. It is our physical endeavors that provide us vital food and shelter. But it is our mental endeavors that make us human, that bring us inner vitality, meaning. It is our creative capacities that make us interesting, fun, truly human.
Without our abilities to create we would be mere machines; ants on a larger scale. Dreaming, creating, seeing the world in new ways - these are the acts that define who we are. But sometimes they require us to leave behind habits of the mind that prove unhelpful.
CPE Bach was probably the most musically successful of JC Bach's sixteen children. His music was written in "the new style." And for some time he eclipsed his father. The young crowd eschewed the works of "old Bach." JC fell into obscurity. And it was not until his work was re-introduced some time later by Mendelsohn that he was widely listened to across Europe.
This proves that sometimes we choose new primarily for the reason that it is new, not knowing how durable it will be. CPE Bach's work still commands some listening time, but today it is a tiny fraction of that of his father's work. Stravinsky is still listened to, and usually without the sailing fruits and vegetables. His sound still sounds fresh. So, to does the music of the Beatles, when it has not had the life Muzak'd out of it. There exist Rock Critics who insist that only old Beatles is real rock and roll, and that what Beatles in their second incarnation produced does not deserve to share the stage with Elvis or the Cars. Perhaps I can agree with them, but it would prove me to be not much of a fan of the classic genre.
Some creative work is durable. Other creative work amounts to a flash in the pan. Sometimes, when a work is new we can tell the difference. Often we fail to do so correctly. But even if our immediate judgments are wrong, creative work both defines who we are and makes us who we are to become. It is necessary to being human. Sometimes when one builds anew, one chooses a new site. Othertimes one must tear down the old and dysfunctional remnants of past failures and build anew on the same ground. The problem in building a creative, functional, durable, happy society is knowing when to do which.
Copyright: Stephen R. Brubaker, 2006. All Rights Reserved