In a recent conversation with my friend who is a natural scientist Alan Lightman, we discuss whether the creative spirit can be properly divided into art and science (Alan's view) or whether these are just different doors of our desire to close the story and the mystery in order to make meaning (my view), I was reminded of a speech I forgot by one of the most outstanding minds of the last century.
On Valentine's Day 1971, a year after his classic play was published To put it in the middlepoet and potter MC Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) was invited to speak at an art festival in Maine. From “horticulture to alchemy to the history of knowledge, there are a few poems sprinkled, and they rely heavily on confusion,” the speech he presented, later included The Crossing Point: Selected Speeches and Writings (public library), is one of the most honest, thoughtful, and clear investigations of creativity I've come across – bravely defying the collapse of a culture rooted in the fanatical insistence that “the center is everywhere,” that it's “made up of difference, of difference, in a web of relationships, connections, connections.”
At the center of his artistic cosmogony is the connection between the life of the individual and the life of the universe; between the invisible inner space, which he calls “power,” and the visible outer space of its manifestation, which he calls “the flower”; between the various disciplines and the work of study through which we explore these realms. You write:
Sometimes artists are very familiar with this connection, scientists too, mystical minds… There may be a message in this way of working. Perhaps that is what the subject is, a collection of ideas as driven by central influence. Like a magnetic field. Start the field moving, and the features start to populate. In what sense? With attraction. By resonance. Maybe that's what it's all about: a sense of attraction and harmony between ideas and people.
This feeling, Richard notes, is what we call art – the mystery we try to convey in the story – and it begins not in the mind but in the heart. Check out the power of the cabbage to bloom:
Cabbage… grows a big heart. Leaves come out of this heart. As the leaves grow, the heart grows. Cabbage gets its leaves from inside, where they don't belong. Cabbage grows from the inside, from the heart. And by growing up they build their hearts.
The Yale neurophysiologist says that the brain is also created this way: from energy that is not in the brain. He says that the human brain is created by thinking, that ideas and values create chemical reactions in the tissue. Like a cabbage, the physical form somehow grows out of nowhere.
This invisible realm must be a powerful creative region. It not only gives us cabbages and brains, but also our scientific ideas, religious experiences, and works of art.
Noting that works of art begin with “a sense of things, a sense that is a way of knowing about things,” he adds:
We are inclined to call any work art when it appears to be derived from the perfection of inner feeling and careful consideration of its appearance. Living and working in the world remembering the processes needed to imbue things with soul power, using techniques on behalf of living species, is a great art.
In this sense, you see, life itself is an art – the art of communication. Just as Erich Fromm was inventing ideas that would be The Art of BeingRichards writes:
Life is best understood and practiced as art, the way art is understood and practiced. We rely on motivation, sensitivity to materials, knowledge of how to put things together, patience, physical strength and the awareness that we are part of a process that we do not yet know much about but that we live in and are supported by. The verbal arts that we do, or the visual arts, or the visual arts, or the theatrical arts, or the musical arts, or the liberal arts, are part of something. It's not the whole story. And they are connected in the middle with all other parts.
The underlying pull of this interconnected whole is the core of all creative work. While a young Jane Goodall ponders the inseparability of art and science, Richards looks at what intelligence of all kinds asks of us and what it gives us:
Total concentration, total concentration, enjoyment, discovery, inner effort, creating something, feeling secure in the process but not knowing or wanting to know how it will turn out. Many things we do can have this quality. Take gardening, for example, or doing lab experiments, or creating a new equation, or cooking dinner, or having a child, or teaching a class, or running a college, or praying, or traveling, or getting married, or dying.
This feeling of not being able to produce – something that the artist Ann Hamilton described well for the generation after Richards – is also our best form of knowledge, which is part of the creative process of science:
If we live in the spirit of science, we live in the spirit of questioning, of wonder. We put one foot in front of the other, standing firm and balanced in the world, finding our way. Each step is an answer and a question. We both know and don't know what we are doing… We need to learn to hear yesof no; i no of yes. An unspoken feeling. To see the invisible.
This, of course, is why poetry and science come together so naturally, why openness to wonder may be the best measure and deepest meaning of our lives, the wellspring from which all creation springs.
