Creativity and Love (and doodles)

I’m composing this at Beaver Creek Valley, where about half the campers are Chinese and half are here for the archery season--with a lot of overlap. I saw one group running a blowtorch next to the grill cover, presumably to burn the crud off. It is noisy as all get-out and wasteful, but undeniably cool. But--why not add oxygen to the feed and make the flame strongly oxidizing? It would be faster and more dramatic--you’d have to worry about damaging the grill. This morning I moseyed over to the next campsite (they came in late and did the same thing while we were trying to sleep) and asked to see the result. Oops. I should have been wearing my glasses. Turns out they were cleaning squirrels; it is squirrel season too. Still, I like the grill cleaning idea. I’ll try it if I get the chance.

I remember overhearing the conversation between two brilliant scientists (one went on to win a Nobel prize) batting ideas back and forth. It was a joy to listen to, and also to participate in my own smaller way in similar discussions with friends. So what if most of the plans needed work, we could deal with the details when we picked a plan. (FWIW, both men were royal PITAs to work for. This may seem to sabotage my conclusion below, but the joy they had and I shared was real.)

Creativity can serve evil ends: history makes that overwhelmingly clear. But set that prospect behind us for now and think about other forms of creativity.

My experience and observation are naturally limited, but they are at least worth something. I find two forms of creativity.

One form is creativity oriented to some goal--getting a mouse out of the ventilation duct, or devising a faster way to clean the grill.

The other is creativity oriented to no immediate or even perceived goal--doodling a rocket ship in the margin of your English notes. Depending on your bent you might try to make the details aesthetic or functional, but my urge (and that of most I've watched) is to fill it out and not leave it schematic--unless that schematic has a beauty or completeness of its own. (Cartoons have their own aesthetic.)

I hesitate to call this "purposeless" creativity. The word "purposeless" is freighted with implications of randomness and waste. Neither corresponds with what I sense I am trying to do.

I'm composing this on a pad originally used by my youngest daughter for math. The inside front cover has a doodle of Legolas. She revised it here and there to make it more accurate. At the time she was captivated by Orlando Bloom as Legolas in Jackson’s movies. This had nothing to do with math, and she already had other and more accurate images of him—but she wanted to create something.

It seems as though creativity of this second sort is a fundamental urge or characteristic that isn’t derived from other thing--isn’t composite. In fact the first form of creativity--creativity aimed at some goal--is the composite, of "raw" creativity and filling a need.

At first glance goal-oriented creativity is easier to understand. I could try to define it as "If I have a need X, I think through the processes A, B, C that I know about to see if any of their goals or side effects can fit into a process that will achieve X." On closer inspection you sometimes have to define "process" so broadly that the description isn’t useful, and you wind up being circular with "creating new problems that solve the old."

You might sometimes look at non-goal oriented creativity as "make a problem and then solve it" where the problem is "This paper needs an image of Legolas" or "How convoluted an image can I draw in this margin without lines crossing?"

However you try to parse the definitions, creativity of any sort puts something in the world that wasn't there before. That shares in divine creativity, though we use an existing "something" to make our new things.

But creativity as we know it also comes with an impulse to do the thing well, whether that means beautifully or accurately or thoroughly, and we feel a lack when it falls short. The doodle among the English notes may have little time or care invested, but we’d really rather it looked good.

We want to make something new, something outside us, that we can make good, be happy with, and have affection for. Most of the time we will toss aside whatever resulted from the almost-aimless activity; judging it (correctly) not of the quality or importance to continue with, or perhaps a blind alley. But as for me I'd prefer that the margin's rocket design lack only the quotations for parts, and that not just the single dandelion I hold but the entire field explode in a whirlwind of fluff.

So creativity (as we know it) is generous--to the created thing. It seeks the best--of the created thing. It therefore--at least for human creators--partakes in the nature of love.

Given the rich detail of the world it isn't too far fetched to extrapolate that the creator of the universe created something outside himself that he could make well and be generous towards--be loving towards. (It doesn't matter if the creator is merely a gnostic demi-urge; the same extrapolation applies to whoever created the demi-urge up the fabulous gnostic chain.)

Is it possible that "God loves" is something we might have concluded from "God creates," in the same way that we might have (but didn't) conclude that God has the aspect of suffering servant from noting that God is just and that He hadn't destroyed us already? Some revelations seem needed to get through into our thick heads, and only after the fact can we say "of course!"