Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to look at a book as a mirror, when it should be a door. All good storytelling – be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song – really interests us because it opens the door to a world different from our own, something that clarifies our own, brings us back to it enlarged and intensified. In order to be able to build such a world, make it believable and illusory, to jump into the abyss that opens between any one consciousness and any other, the storyteller must draw from a great library of experiences and impressions from all the infinite field of life's possibilities – those building blocks with which we do the work of synthesis that we call the work of creativity.
Long before the neuroscientist poet Oliver Sacks described the three essentials of creativity, Nobel laureate Elias Canetti captured this well in his dramatic meditation on death, copying the “essential qualifications” of the great Persian storyteller from an anonymous book he was reading:
In addition to reading all the known books about love and heroism, the storyteller must have suffered a lot because of love, lost his lover, drank a lot of good wine, wept with many because of their sorrow, he has looked at death many times and he has learned a lot about birds and animals. He must also be able to transform himself into a beggar or a caliph at a moment's notice.
A generation before him, Rainer Maria Rilke gave a similar creative prescription to this young man who asked his advice on how to become a poet:
Because of the few lines one has to see many cities, men and things. One should know animals, should feel how birds fly and know how small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back on the roads in unknown places, unexpected meetings and long-seen separations; in childhood days that have not yet been described, for parents who had to be sad when they brought some happiness and the other did not catch it (it was someone else's happiness); in a childhood illness that began surprisingly with a number of deep and difficult changes, days in withdrawn and silent rooms and mornings by the sea, in the sea itself, in the sea, in the evenings of the journey that runs high and flies with all the stars – and it is not enough if one can think about all this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which are the same, the cries of women giving birth, and the light, white, women lying in bed, close again. But one must have been beside the dead, the other must have been sitting beside the dead in a room with an open window and suitable noise.
Some time before, Walt Whitman broke down these eternal truths even more. Under the heading “Laws of Creation,” addressed to “powerful artists and leaders… new relatives of teachers… and artists yet to come,” he looks at the basics of creative work:
Everything must refer to the unity of the world, and the unified reality of the world.
Whether a few or many words, literal or poetic, appear in all of them is the same basic truth about the nature of creativity, which calls for the same basic qualities: non-judgmental curiosity, compassionate thought, and a willingness to live imperfectly but fully.
