Showing posts with label Rollo May. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rollo May. Show all posts
Sunday, November 9, 2014
Inspiration Sunday
I have quotes today from Rollo May from his book The Courage to Create mainly from the chapter, Creativity and the Unconscious. And, I have some interesting art to accompany these quotes today. Perhaps to pose the question; can meaningful art and dogmatism co-exist?
genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. . . . "Creativity," to rephrase our definitions, "is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world."
A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.
Carl Jung often made the paint that there is a polarity, a kind of opposition, between unconscious experience and consciousness. He believed the relationship was compensatory: consciousness controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the unconscious, while the unconscious keeps consciousness from drying up in banal, empty, arid rationality.
The moment the insight broke through, there was a special translucence that enveloped the world, and my vision was given a special clarity.
Kim Jong-un
This is one aspect of what is called ecstasy--the uniting of unconscious experience with consciousness, a union that is not in abstracto, but a dynamic, immediate fusion.
. . . . insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation. It comes at a break in periods of voluntary effort.
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| Stalin |
The experience that "this is the way reality is and isn't it strange we didn't see it sooner" may have a religious quality with artists. This is why many artists feel that something holy is going on when they paint, that there is something in the act of creating which is like a religious revelation.
[if we] lose this free, original creativity of the spirit as it is exemplified in poetry and music and art, we shall also lose our scientific creativity. Scientists themselves . . . . have told us that the creativity of science is bound up with the freedom of human beings to create in the free, pure sense.
Franco
Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power.
Chavez
Dogmatists of all kinds - scientific, economic, moral, as well as political - are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control.
Hope your Sunday is everything you want it to be. I will see you tomorrow or Tuesday, depending on how much I have stacked up tomorrow.
'Til then!
~Alex
Tuesday, September 2, 2014
The Science of Beauty Everywhere
Anyway. Pardon the background of May. I make mention - just in case you might be interested. He wrote several books, I only have the one...and I wanted to share with you today what is written on pages 131-132.
Before this part of the book he is talking about mimes.
Yes, mimes...those people that get caught in invisible boxes all the time?
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| Marcel Marceau |
So. May brings mimes up to illustrate a point that mimes make a few motions, (and he gives the example of "walking a dog on a leash" that even though there is no dog and no leash) and our imaginations will fill in the gaps.
And he says the reason we do this is because human beings have a "passion for form."
The human imagination leaps to form the whole, to complete the scene in order to make sense of it. The instantaneous way this is done shows how we are driven to construct the remainder of the scene. To fill the gaps is essential if the scene is to have meaning. That we may do this in misleading ways - at times in neurotic or paranoid ways - does not gainsay the central point. Our passion for form expresses our yearning to make the world adequate to our needs and desires, and, more important, to experience ourselves as having significance.
The phrase "passion for form," may be interesting, but it is also problematical. If we used just the word form, it would sound too abstract; but when it is combined with passion, we see that what is meant is not form in any intellectual sense, but rather in a holistic sense. What is occurring in the person, hidden as it may be by passivity or other neurotic symptoms, is a conflict-filled passion to make sense out of a crisis-ridden life.
Plato told us long ago how passion, or, as he put it, Eros, moves toward the creation of form. Eros moves toward the making of meaning and the revealing of Being. Originally a daimon called love, Eros is the lover of wisdom, and the force in us that brings to birth both wisdom and beauty. Plato says through Socrates that "human nature will not easily find a helper better than love [Eros]." "All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making," Plato writes, "and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of arts are all poets or makers." Through Eros or the passion of love, which is daimonic and constructive and the same time, Plato looks forward to "at last the vision...of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere."
I love that. The Science of Beauty Everywhere.
I wonder what our world would look like if that was mankind's single science?
It was that single beautiful thought that I wanted to share with you before you and I begin our day today. I hope you have a good one!
'Til tomorrow.
~Alex
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