On Anthrocreationism
“At times I think there are no words but these to tell what’s true. And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.”
Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home
Contents:
1 The Beatles
2 Schizophrenia & Jordan Peterson
3 William Blake & Nick Drake
4 The Beat Generation
5 The Apostles of Cambridge & Bennington College
6 Paris is Paris is Paris is Paris
7 Conclusion
1 The Beatles
In early 1968, the Beatles set out to an Ashram, an Indian monastery, in the hills of Rishikesh to live simply, meditate and write for several months. The Ashram was under the direction of the Maharishi guru, whom the Beatles had met a year prior, and who had commercialized Indian mysticism to western audiences with his transcendental meditation. What followed was a month of daily meditation, vegetarian diets and prolific song writing. John Lennon would write Julia, Dear Prudence, Child of Nature, Bungalow Bill, Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, Across the Universe, Yer Blues, Cry Baby Cry, Look At Me, and I’m So Tired. Simultaneously, Paul Mc Cartney would write Blackbird, Obla Di Obla Da, I Will, Back to the USSR, Mother Nature’s Son, Rocky Raccoon, Why Don’t We Do It In The Road, Wild Honey Pie, Junk, and Teddy Boy. George Harrison would write Sour Milk Sea, and Circles. Ringo left early due to a lack of beans and eggs. Nevertheless, many of the songs would end up on 1968’s The Beatles, colloquially referred to as the White Album. The album’s four sides would make it the longest Beatles studio album.
Why was such an environment so conducive to improving the creative output of one of the most prolific music units in musical history? It may be the meditation, raising the Beatles’ level of consciousness. It may be the absence of distractions otherwise prevalent in the urban hellscape, known as London. It may be the drugs. It may be the physical proximity of creative people resulting in creative spillover. In any case, it is clear that there are grounds for exploring these explanations for creative output, and this is what we wish to discuss. What influences a person’s creative output? Why do some produce more than others? Finally, why do we feel the need to create in the first place?
2 Schizophrenia & Jordan Peterson
We begin by asking whether everyone can be creative, and what factors may influence pre-existing inequalities in creative output. The psychology of creativity suggests that some are innately disposed to greater creative potential. While avoiding the mythos of the tortured artist, evidence suggests that genetic proximity to mental illness increases creativity. Some argue that having Schizophrenic relatives increases levels of creativity, with examples including Einstein’s schizophrenic son and Bowie’s schizophrenic half-brother. Suggesting that while having a mental illness impedes one’s creative abilities, having a genetic propensity for the illness may be a positive factor. For instance, pattern recognition and paranoia are Schizophrenic symptoms, yet may in minor amounts promote the kind of thinking necessary for creative output. Evidence suggests the existence of an ‘inverted U’ relation between mental disorders and creative output. Exceptions to this trend being creatives who have mental illnesses themselves. Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath both had depressive episodes throughout their life and eventually committed suicide. Here, a variety of emotional experiences may inform the creative of emotional states others may not be privy to. Thus the creative is a tuned medium who translates these experiences into their work.
Apophenia is a condition wherein a person sees meaning and patterns where others do not. Higher rates are seen in schizotypal individuals, which can result in engaging with conspiracy theories, but can also result in unconventional thought and approaches to problem solving. Synesthesia is the crossing of neural pathways such that a person’s senses ‘cross’. Thus, those with synesthesia can taste colours or associate musical notes with colours. The most common type is Grapheme Colour Synesthesia, which associates letters and/or numbers with colours. For example, Vladimir Nabokov and Richard Feynman are both said to have had synesthesia.
Lobster enthusiast and vocal anti-aphrodisiac Dr. Jordan Peterson claims creativity is reducible to human biological traits. Using a 5-factor model, which scores humans on openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, he claims creatives tend to show high openness and neuroticism but low agreeableness. Furthermore, he argues these traits are inherent and environments can only repress, not aid the formation of these traits. Peterson uses this to justify the biological necessity of creative hierarchy and inequality. This result is similar to the ‘Pareto Principle’, observed by 19th century economist Vilfredo Pareto. Often shortened to the ‘80/20’ law, Pareto found that the top 20% of Europeans owned 80% of land. This phenomena is found in many human factors, including creativity. Thus suggesting that the innate productivity of the top 20% of creatives produces 80% of creative output. This approximation, however, is more of a ‘rule of thumb’ than a proven rule. This suggests that inherent inequalities in creative output exist which would persist even if everyone was given equal resources. However, psychological explanations may ignore the ‘intangibles’ which result in creativity’s interrelation with mysticism. Accounts of prominent artists’ experiences with the creative process imply something on the edge of their tongue, which they cannot quite articulate without metaphor or analogy. These things may only have meaning to those who experience them, with the key word being experience. The inner subjective experience of phenomena is rendered nonsense when articulated through natural language. Thus we now turn to the mysticism of subjective experience.
3 William Blake & Nick Drake
English poet William Blake combined mysticism and unconventional theism in his work. His poetry often centered on the sense experience of the outer world, which if we open ourselves up to we may be able,
‘To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.’
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence.
Since creativity requires the experience of experience phenomena, the creative’s task is to open themselves to the world of experience, divorcing themselves from human-constructed pursuits to the point of grasping the inner essence of objects. For example, Blake claimed to have visions of God and angels, reportedly seeing a tree full of angels in Peckham Rye Park as a child. An experience which differs greatly from the author’s experience at the park. Blake influenced the mystical revival of the 1960s, which we will now explore.
Nick Drake was an English singer-songwriter, active from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Like William Blake, he only experienced recognition for his work posthumously. Drake not only read Blake voraciously, but combined the mystical experiences of poetry with the mystical experiences of recreational drug use. Drake heavily utilised marijuana and LSD seeking the experiences which came naturally to Blake. Wherein, time disappears and the perceiver exists in eternal present alongside God. Objects are no longer merely sense-data, but hold meaning and cosmic significance. Thus, Drake’s lyrics are full of mystical illusions and a symbolism dictated by a private code:
‘Gonna see the river man, gonna tell him all I can about the plan for lilac time.’
‘If he tells me all he knows, about the way his river flows, and all night shows in summertime.’
Nick Drake, Five Leaves Left
Thus, his creative output arose from an attempt to experience the world differently. To find some truth which the earth-bound corporeal rest of us cannot comprehend, as we are too attached to our televisions, our restaurants and our reels. All that is fleeting and is washed away by the river man.
4 The Beat Generation
The Beat Generation is next in our exploration of the mysticism of subjective experience. A loosely defined collective of American writers originating in the 1950s, informing the counterculture of the 1960s. The three most notable being Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, the three most notable works being Howl, Naked Lunch, and On the Road respectively. Much of Beat literature addressed societal taboos around homosexual relations, drugs and Bohemian lifestyles. Naked Lunch and Howl explicitly dealt with grotesque imagery and were labeled obscene by the American establishment. The works were heavily influenced by drugs with Ginsberg promoting LSD & Marijuana usage and Boroughs writing his novel while on Heroin. As above with Nick Drake, Ginsberg claimed that LSD gave him the experiences which poets of the past seemed to have naturally. Ginsberg would later study Buddhism and Vaishnavism, famously singing the Hare Krishna mantra to William F. Buckley. The Beat generation’s literary style could at a stretch be called stream of consciousness, with On the Road resembling a diary and Naked Lunch reading as a sequence of loosely connected scenes with unexplained words. Note Burroughs’ term ‘steely dan’, which we allow you to google at your own behest. The Beat generation’s literary style suggested that the modern person did not think in complete sentences, but in a series of changing loose associations.
5 The Apostles of Cambridge & Bennington College:
We now consider instances of what we can call ‘creative convergences.’ Points in space and time wherein many creative people all closely familiar with each other’s work cooperate and interact in order to integrate the works of others in their way of thought and their own work. Why do these historical moments occur? Or equivalently, why can’t the same creative output be achieved by an equal number of people working in isolation in some cabin by a Norwegian Fjord? What is it about the proximity of creatives which results in this output? What does this tell us about creativity itself?
At the start of the 20th century, Cambridge housed many of the most prominent names in Philosophy, Economics, Mathematics and Literature at that time. Through the Apostles, a secret society, figures such as Bertrand Russell, A.N Whitehead, G.E Moore, John Maynard Keynes, Frank Ramsey, Lytton Stratchey, Leonard Woolf and later reluctantly Ludwig Wittgenstein, would all become intimately familiar with each other. The society would organise debates wherein a member would read from a paper written by them in any given subject. Cambridge would produce a swathe of intellectuals who would produce a body of work which includes: ‘Principia Mathematica’, by Russel and Whitehead, ‘Principia Ethica’, by Moore, ‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’, by Keynes, and the ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, by Wittgenstein. A London counterpart of former Apostles referred to as the Bloomsbury Group included Virginia Woolf, who could not study in Cambridge on account of being a woman. In Robert Skidelsky’s biography of John Maynard Keynes, he argues that Cambridge and particularly the Apostles was a place for those who ‘combined great cleverness with great unworldliness,’ those too shy, strange or eccentric for the Victorian morals and customs they inherited from their parents. Cambridge was also one of the few places in England where homosexuality was largely accepted at the time.
Another instance of a ‘creative convergence’ at a university was Bennington College in the 1980s. Bennington’s admission policy did not greatly emphasise grades as it had grown to be a centre for creatives and eccentrics who ignored the motivation for conventional academic success. Notable students were Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, David Lispky (of David Foster Wallace adjacent fame), Quintana Dunne (Joan Didion’s daughter) and several heirs to fortunes including Campbell’s Soup and Benson Hedges. Many students came from Bohemian backgrounds or were children of the very wealthy cosplaying as bohemian good-for-nothings. In the midst of the Reagan conservative revival, Bennington College housed a small inward-looking group focused on the esoteric pursuit of sex, drugs and literature. One alumni is quoted as follows: ‘The students at Bennington weren’t driven by grades, but there was a weird rigor. You had this feeling that life was performance art, that everybody was living in his or her fantasy. I’m trying to find language to describe the electricity that was there, the decadence, the feeling of mystery and enchantment in this ridiculously pastoral setting. Students were full-blown in this way that was very surprising for such young kids.’ Bennington influenced the work which its alumni would be made famous for. Tartt’s The Secret History and Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero would both depict fictional depictions of Bennington.
5 Paris is Paris is Paris is Paris
If any place on Earth could represent the influence of peer interaction on the artist’s creative output, it would be Paris. Historical examples of this phenomenon in the city are innumerable, but we will study one particular case: Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921 as a young recently-wed veteran with an insignificant journalism career. The signs of Hemingway’s talent were however, present, as seen in his first publication, Three Stories & Ten Poems, which explores the semi-auto biographical experiences of a WW1 veteran returning to America, with bare traces of his distinct style: Dogmatic thematic subtlety and strict adherence to simple, rhythmic prose. It is in Paris however that he would meet his mentor-turned rival, Gertrude Stein. Stein was the patron of Paris’ growing modernist scene, hosting many cultural giants at her now-famous salon in Montparnasse, 27 rue de Fleurus. Stein introduced Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, with whom Ernest formed an ardent rivalry/friendship after the success of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Hemingway would later claim that he was inspired to begin writing novels after reading The Great Gatsby. Many of the highest authorities of modernism in the visual arts frequented Stein’s salon, including Picasso, Matisse and Joan Miró, and Hemingway is said to have met these artists.
However, the greatest indirect contributor to Hemingway’s oeuvre is Ezra Pound. Pound met Hemingway at Sylvia Beach’s famous Shakespeare & Co bookstore in Paris. Pound had recently finished the editing of T.S Elliot’s monumental The Wasteland, and he introduced Hemingway to James Joyce, the Irish Modernist Titan, who had recently published Ulysses and was beginning his 16-year-long goliath task, Finnegan’s Wake. By 1924, Hemingway had met the American expatriates which would inspire his first truly brilliant work, The Sun Also Rises, and by 1926 Hemingway was divorced, married to his second wife, and off to Key West, to begin writing A Farewell to Arms. The tremendous change experienced by the writer, in less than 5 years, can not be stated properly within the scope of this paragraph, but must be experienced by reading him, and being so shocked that one man could have been author to the pitiable naivety of In Our Time, and the ageless talent of Men Without Women, written only years apart. All this said without listing the countless other figures who he wrote to, fought with or drank with in Paris, and how their stories also were forever changed by the city.
6 Conclusion
The question which naturally follows is whether St Andrews may be a new creative convergence. Specifically, whether Carnegie Club is the next instance of this. If we consider St Andrews in the context of the previously mentioned determinants, we can note that our town has considerable natural beauty, an abundance of creative individuals and an abundance of pharmaceutical stimulation. On the other hand, there may be other factors which inhibit the realisation of such a creative community: The lack of a single figure for it to develop around, akin to Russel for Cambridge or Kerouac for the Beat generation, the lack of independent firms in creative industries, akin to Hogarth Press for Cambridge or Olympia Press for the Beat generation, and the presence of wealth and privilege, which has a complicated relation with creativity. Although many Cambridge names came from prominent backgrounds, the Beat generation was an explicit rejection of privilege.
Why do we create in the first place?