Also by John Briggs

Metaphor:

The Logic of Poetry

Fractals:

The Patterns of Chaos

With F. David Peat

Looking Glass Universe

Turbulent Mirror:

An Illustrated Guide to

Chaos Theory and the

Science of Wholeness

Seven Life Lessons of Chaos

FIRE IN THE
CRUCIBLE

Understanding the
Process of Creative
Genius

J O H N    B R I G G S

A

P H A N E S   P R E S S

An Alexandria Book

An Alexandria Book

Alexandria Books explore intersections—the meeting points between culture, philosophy, myth, and the creative spirit, www.cosmopolis.com

© 2000 by John Briggs.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, with the exception of short excerpts used in reviews, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Phanes Press, PO Box 6114, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49516, USA www.phanes.com

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Briggs, John, date.

Fire in the crucible : understanding the process of creative genius / John Briggs

p. cm.

“An Alexandria book.”

Originally published: Los Angeles : J. P. Tarcher, 1990.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-890482-78-1 (alk. paper)—ISBN 1-890482-77-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Genius. 2. Creative ability. I. Title

BF412.B824 2000

   153.3’ 5—dc21

00-061157

This book is printed on alkaline paper which conforms to the permanent paper standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the following sources for permission to reprint. Figure 1 is here reprinted by permission of Lillian Schwartz. Figures 2 and 3 are here reprinted by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Figure 4 is here reprinted by permission of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Figure 5 is here reprinted by permission of Monica McGoldrick and Randy Gerson. Figures 6, 7, and 8 are here reprinted by permission of the Museo Nationale del Prado and the Artists’ Rights Society of New York. Figures 9 and 10 are here reprinted by permission of Pilobolus Dance Theatre.

For my mother and father

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE
Introduction	Smoke from the Fire—A Parable • Some Prejudices and Premises • Sources • Genius Preliminarily Defined

PART 1: Vision and the Prima Materia

Overview
Chapter 1	Qualities of Mind—Einstein's Compass • Hidden Themes • Where the Needle Pointed
Chapter 2	Subtle Vibrations—The Light Through the Window • Other Cases of Nuance
Chapter 3	The Open Brain—Nuance Cycles • The Possibility Cloud • A Caveat: Edison's Game
Chapter 4	As Above, So Below—Part Prologue to the Whole • The Whole Truth • At the Center of Things • The Work as a Whole: the Individual-Universal Equation
Chapter 5	Contraries—Some Polar Chemistry • Ambivalence • Negative Capability
Chapter 6	Omnivalence—The Hunger of ‘More’ • Creators and Mystics • A Myth of Creativity

PART 2: The Distilling Agents

Overview
Chapter 7	Quicksilver—What Measure of Genius: the Search for the Brainpower Secret • In the Prodigy Lab • Lab Lessons
Chapter 8	Mercurial Maps—The Many-Intelligences Approach • Of Talents and Feedback • Three Funny Things About Talent • What Goes Around Comes Around
Chapter 9	Insight Architecture—Buttresses of Light • Thinking Like a Mirror • The Creative Mind's Sorting Processes • Panoramic Images
Chapter 10	The Absorbing Flame—On the Hot Side of Mercury • Two Apparent Paradoxes of Absorption • Absorption: Its Nature and Nurture • Child's Play, Courage and Other Conundrums
Chapter 11	To Burn with One's Time—Fires of Heaven; No, Earth • Some Trips Around the Sulphuric Möbius Strip • Co-incidence Twists • History and the Individual: Which Distills Which?
Chapter 12	Madness and the Mirror-Maker's Nightmare—How Dangerous Is It? • On the Edge of Reality

PART 3: The Great Work

Overview
Chapter 13	Constructing the Egg—Crystallizing • The Unfolding Context • The Daily Obsessions
Chapter 14	Germinations from Salt—The Final Reagent • The Whole of the Virus • Different Germ Experiences • Two Examples
Chapter 15	More Salt Grains to Stone—Turning Over a Few Germs • The Birth of a Painting • Tales of Two Composers • Where Was the Germ for Relativity?
Chapter 16	Companions in Quest—The Myth of the Lone Creator • Indirect and Domestic Collaborations • Direct Collaborations • Dance to the Grail
EPILOGUE
NOTES
INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A heartfelt thanks to all those I interviewed for this book. I'm grateful not only for the time and enlightenment they offered but especially for their extending themselves to help me explore my particular angle on creativity. Many also extended themselves further to review the text for misperceptions and errors.

Deep thanks as well to the following: Muriel Briggs for her penetrating review of the psychological aspects of the Emily Dickinson literature; Mark Hussey of Pace University for his trenchant general critique of the manuscript and for his special critique of its Virginia Woolf material; Joe McLaren of Mercy College for his reading of the Ellington, Toomer, and Hughes material; Lynn Goldsmith of the MIT Career Development Project, and giftedness teacher Tonia Grote for the challenging and extremely useful comments they made of the draft text; Frank McClusky of Mercy College for his close, honest, incisive, and humorous readings; Joseph Lauinger of Mercy College for his ever-alert eye and sympathetic mind during his review of the text; Signe Hammer of the late Science Digest for incentive to make initial contact with several of the creativity researchers reported on here; Peter Senge of the Sloan School, MIT, for his help in clarifying several issues about systems thinking, an approach that as I wrote this book became increasingly formative; composer Stephen Dydo for his always keen observations about the process of composition; Jerry Monaco for his help on Orson Welles; Hal Bowser for his sage editorial advice; Debbie Posner for her heroic job of copyediting; Judy Willington for her generous help in the process of proofreading; St. Martin's executive editor Tom Dunne for waiting patiently while the scope of this book expanded frighteningly beyond its deadline; my agent Adele Leone for her continuous encouragement during dark months; my wife Joanna for much more than I can say, and last but not least, the members of my classes at the New School for Social Research who over the years have provided an unending source of inspiration through their insights and enthusiasms about the subject of creativity.

A NOTE ON GENDER

The historical development of the English language has yet to produce a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. This poses a problem for an author. I have addressed it in three ways: by trying to write sentences so as to avoid the use of the singular third-person pronoun; by using the neologism “(s)he” in the nominative case; and by occasionally using the technically incorrect plural “their” in place of “his” and “him.”

PROLOGUE

This book about the roots of genius is essentially a book about the roots of creativity. In researching the one, we research the other. More important, in researching genius, we are researching ourselves. In the pages that follow the reader will scrutinize the workings of some of history's most remarkable minds. The question is: Are these minds like our own or are they in some respects so vastly different they should qualify as another species?

The question is far from academic. In asking about creativity we are really asking about what is best, what is deepest in life. Perhaps most of us would say we do as well as anybody at living deeply. But we see the genius seems to do it better. Through a science or an artform—through creativity—the individual genius seems to live at the exhilarating edge of what it means to have our human mind. How did the genius come to that edge? Are geniuses born or made?

It would be easy to think that they're born. If so, we could excuse our own failures of creativity. On the other hand, it would be more comfortingly egalitarian to think that geniuses are made, and that with the right kind of effort or environment anyone can be a genius.

In the pages that follow we will discover the curious fact that geniuses are not born, nor are they made. We may all have in us intuitions and perceptions that could take us to the deepest place that genius inhabits. But can we access these intuitions? And how? The study of genius may tell us.

Confrontation with genius thus forces us to acknowledge the. originative power of life, which we may and commonly do neglect….

—MICHAEL POLANYI, Personal Knowledge

The way in which Leonardo or Newton were unlike other people is precisely what they are known and remembered for.

—DORIS WALLACE, “Giftedness and the Construction of a Creative Life”

INTRODUCTION

Smoke from the
Fire

A PARABLE

Picture the medieval alchemist in a flickering chamber of arches and icons. Retorts bubble an intoxicating, noxious steam. Beakers swirl with strange colored fluids and precipitating crystals. In the center of a table littered with pipets, measuring weights, and brass plates of herbs is an ovoid vessel, the alembic or “philosopher's egg.” This sealed crucible is the focus of his work. There is the air of the wizard about him but also that of the scientist. Reason inhabits the room and something other than reason—a vast mystery which he is trying to draw down into his alembic.

We are told that this adept is not, as has been popularly supposed, devoting his energies to the untenable commercial fantasy of transforming lead into gold. His project is much more incredible. He is trying to fabricate the prima materia, the First Matter, that ethereal protoplasmic substance out of which all other substances are born.

By some ancient accounts, this substance will precipitate in the alembic as a red stone, called variously the Bird of Hermes, the elixir of life, the philosopher's stone, the sophic fire and a score of other names. It is this fire in the crucible the adept seeks. With it, the ancients have told him, he may perform miraculous transmutations. The cold red stone of infinite energy has been likened to a cornucopia, to a seed crystal for matter, and to the powers by which Christ produced the loaves and fishes for the multitudes. Not the least of its powers is its ability to bestow immortality on its possessor.

Perhaps this last power is the reason certain esoteric accounts suggest that the real, the ultimate, object of the alchemist is to transform himself into the philosopher's stone. These ancient texts insist that the adept is simultaneously the crucible and the fire, the lead and its resulting gold, and they stress that his process, too, is riddled with paradox. For example, his alchemistry involves an expansion yet negation of his knowledge. Also, virtually all reports agree that while the apprentice alchemist should consider himself as a part of a long tradition of brethren, he must puzzle out the Hermetic secret for himself. In order to do that he requires (another paradox) both daring and patience.

As the following chapters will illustrate, the above description of the alchemist could also apply to the creative genius. The possibly mythical quest of the alchemist to find the root of matter is a metaphor for the literal quest of a Darwin, Einstein, Bohr or Watson to disclose the essence of natural law; of a Picasso, da Vinci or van Gogh to express the essences of form and color; of a Shakespeare, Dickinson, or Woolf to name the secrets of the human spirit. Like the alchemist seeking to turn himself into an immortal philosopher's stone, the genius seeks to become the immortal source of creativity.

The alchemy metaphor has several appeals. For example, alchemy is generally credited as early chemistry. Newton dabbled in alchemy, as did Francis Bacon, the reputed founder of the scientific method. At the same time, alchemy was magic. Indeed, the science and magic of alchemy are inextricable. For example, a number of creditable scholars contend that Newton's belief in the alchemical principle of sympathetic forces led directly to his formulation of the law of gravity.

Thus, in its duality as science and magic, the alchemy metaphor can illustrate what might be called the “lucid” and “opaque” sides of contemporary creativity research, the research that sheds the most light on the extraordinary powers of genius. On the lucid side, there is the fact that a surprising amount of creative process has become accessible to the instruments of science and reason—and perhaps in the future, no aspect of it will remain totally beyond their reach. On the opaque side is not so much a fact as an observation: that every probe into the creative realm seems to become infused with a magic and mystery which seem to infuse the probe with a glow. The scientists interviewed for this book are, for example, probably as lucid as any human beings can be about creativity, yet inevitably in their words and gestures a glimmer of the opacity appears.

The Hermetic ideal that the alchemist, his devices, his process and his product are all inseparable, dynamic and interwovenly circular also makes the alchemy metaphor a particularly apt one for creative genius. How great creators work, why they work as they do, the way creative techniques and talents appear, and the flowering of a particular creation—all are one movement, not a matter of stages and elements. It's not a smooth movement by any means; indeed it's often extremely turbulent and turbid, but it has wholeness. The alchemistry metaphor serves nicely as a reminder of this wholeness. One particularly delightful instance of the reminder lies in the felicitous phrase magnum opus. So often applied to superior creative productions, the term originally was alchemic, referring both to the final product of the hierophant's activity, the philosopher's stone, and to the ongoing alchemical activity that created the stone.

Felicities and Newton's alchemy notwithstanding, however, by using this metaphor I am neither affirming nor denying any of the claims of alchemy as such. Also, in an actual (as opposed to a metaphorical) sense it should be kept in mind that geniuses are quite unlike alchemists. For one thing, the esoteric tradition asserts that any alchemist who had succeeded in concocting or discovering the prima materia would be totally enlightened, a kind of bodhisattva or saint. Very few geniuses have exhibited anything close to spiritual enlightenment, aside from their work. Another difference is more germane. Unlike the alchemists who vanished historically into their enlightenment or their ashes, the great geniuses have left their philosopher's stones, the fruits of their alchemic process, behind them. These treasures are hoarded in museums and recorded in history books. They are the discoveries and the works we consider the high points of our civilization.

SOME PREJUDICES AND PREMISES

Every author has them. Most of mine probably stem from a career-long devotion to aesthetics. W. H. Auden used to say that when he didn't want to talk to people near him on an airplane, he simply told them he was a medievalist. Telling someone you're an aesthetician can elicit a similar reaction. Simply stated, my interest as an aesthetician has been on the way creative things like paintings, poems and scientific theories are put together and how and why they affect people. How do certain works—the works of genius—embody “truth,” “beauty” and “universality”? It is an interest that has naturally formed a bias to this book's approach to the quite different set of issues: What, in fact, makes for a creative genius? What are the roots of the creative enterprise? How does genius evolve?

The volume of literature on creativity and genius is mind-boggling, evidencing the great scholarly and popular fascination with the topic. Even a modest hometown library is likely to contain a shelf or two on creativity, ranging from self-help books on harnessing one's own creative powers to the standard tomes on creative process like Rollo May's The Courage to Create and Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation. In addition, there are hundreds of biographies on geniuses in every field. Because of my bias, in reading this literature and in interviewing researchers I inclined toward information and insights that could illuminate the motivations, talents and processes that lead a creator to the creation of a truthful, beautiful and universal object. My bias was also spurred by a desire to make sense of a tangle of contradictions that have plagued the traditional explorations of genius. To mention a few:

• Some geniuses have brilliant childhoods. At six German prodigy Karl Friedrich Gauss raised his hand almost at once when his teacher asked the class to add up all the numbers from one to ten. He explained that he had immediately seen the answer and discovered a formula that would solve all similar problems. Stories of geniuses who started out as prodigies abound. But genius is not always quick to emerge. Einstein didn't talk until he was three, and he failed his admissions exams in science at the Zurich Polytechnic. Joseph Conrad didn't begin writing fiction until he was thirty-one. Jazz musician Duke Ellington showed little promise until he was nearly thirty and didn't start doing his best work until he was forty. Balzac, Darwin, Mendel, Tolstoy, Rembrandt, Titian, Turgenev, Faulkner—all were relatively undistinguished in their youth.
• Some geniuses seem able to create extremely quickly. Mozart spilled the overture to Don Giovanni straight from his brain onto the page in the few hours before the premiere. Tiepolo painted the Twelve Apostles in ten hours; the great twentieth-century mathematician John Von Neumann could sometimes puzzle out an abstruse problem in a matter of seconds. Opposing this picture is Beethoven, who literally worked on some of his compositions for years; Darwin, who took almost two decades to write On the Origin of Species; and Flaubert, who was wont to spend an entire exhausting day on a single sentence.
• The image of genius as full of conceit and megalomania has plenty of support in cases like Hemingway, who seemed to tout his masculinity and writing skills at every opportunity; great scientists like Newton or Watson can be fantastically ambitious and concerned with their reputations. Yet Einstein's humble nature was legendary, and virtually everybody who ever met the writer Jorge Luis Borges was impressed by his genuine humility and self-effacement.
• Some geniuses are “omnibus,” to borrow a term employed by Tufts psychologist David Feldman, that is, multitalented or multiperceptive. William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus, was by profession an orchestra conductor; da Vinci, prototype of the Renaissance man, was as proficient in science and architecture as he was at art. But most creators are brilliant in only one field.
• Some geniuses have distinguished forebears, lending credence to the idea of inherited traits or, at the least, of the mighty influence of their intellectual environment. Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus, was a famous biologist; Margaret Mead's parents were both distinguished academics. Other geniuses, however, have sprung from the genetic and cultural shadows. Shakespeare (unless you believe the chauvinist claims for Francis Bacon), Newton and Einstein all set forth from unprominent backgrounds.
• The popular romantic image of the genius as neurotic, even psychopathic, is not without foundation. There are plenty of examples of mental illness in genius to point to: van Gogh and Virginia Woolf driven by their interior demons to suicide; inventor Nikola Tesla regularly dining alone and obsessively polishing all the silverware and china on his table at the Waldorf-Astoria. Yet the accounts of Niels Bohr, Einstein and Louise Nevelson show that great creators can also lead mentally balanced and “normal” lives.

Such apparent contradictions cast doubt upon large blocks of the creativity and genius books on the shelves of the library because most of the approaches that have been taken to explain high-level creativity are reductionistic. They are attempts to squeeze the whole of genius down into a simple cluster of traits or mental attributes. A reductionist approach treats the human mind as if it were a computer whose complexity may be explained by the logic of the computer language and the on-and-off status of the electromagnetic switches. But the mind is not a computer and during the past few years a growing number of scientists and philosophers of science have pointed out the serious problems inherent in this view that the universe is fundamentally mechanical and reductible. In the study of genius the drawbacks of reductionism seem especially huge. Saying that creativity is at bottom a compensation for psychological inadequacy, a function of manic depressive illness, dependent on IQ, right hemispheric dominance, a skill at problem solving or the ability to perform a certain kind of thinking is not just to miss something about the process, it is to miss everything. Everything that is important to the creator, everything important to the culture that treasures a creator's work. It is to miss the very smile of Mona Lisa. Creators create in order to find some truth about life and we value them precisely because we see that they have found it and have bequeathed to us their mind-altering vision.

Curiously, the notion that a great genius possesses “vision” is usually slipped into even the most reductionist discussions of creativity—an element assumed but not defined, vital but almost totally ignored. “Truth,” however, is a word seldom used by creativity theorists—though it is not uncommonly found in statements by creators. Perhaps modern researchers are a little shy of talking about truth because it reeks of metaphysics, and science presumably left metaphysics behind when it separated itself from philosophy. Indeed, it's a little hard to imagine that you could say much scientifically about a person's intimate sensations of truth.

Nevertheless, the obvious fact is that the lives of great creators are importantly motivated or guided by some quest for truth, some vision, some inner spirit, like the voice of Socrates’ daemon, which he consulted when he was worried about going off in the wrong direction. Joseph Conrad called it “the inward voice that decides.” Such a view of genius is contained in the Latin origins of the word, genius, which meant a god or demon who presided over a person's birth and destiny.

The sense of an “inward voice” seems related to the reverence most creators have for the mysterious and even mystical side of their creative activity. Evelyn Fox Keller, biographer of Nobel prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, says that mysticism “plays an essential role in the process of scientific discovery. Einstein called it ‘cosmic religiosity.’”

In the arts, creators frequently speak of a mysticism and mystery that permeate the creative process. A statement by Hemingway is typical: “…There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new.”

Vision and truth are somehow entangled in such amorphous mystical perceptions, but in what way? The question is not about whether there is “truth” to mystical claims—such a question could never be settled—but about the nature of the role of the mystic state of mind in the creative process, its relation to vision. What is vision? Is it some single truth held by the creator? A feeling? How are all the complex processes involved in the development of a creator and in the creation of any particular work connected to creative vision and the quest for truth? Has anyone studied these things scientifically?

SOURCES

In looking for answers to these questions I explored the findings and speculations of a diverse cadre of researchers. Several, including Gerald Holton, Monica McGoldrick, David Feldman, Doris Wallace, Howard Gruber, David Perkins, Reese Jenkins, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Albert Rothenberg are a new breed of investigator using multiple techniques—interviews, self-reports, notebooks, and letters—to peer into the creative mind. Others, like Howard Gardner, William Gray, Paul LaViolette, Matti Bergstrom, Gerald Edelman and Charles Laughlin are molding observations in neuroanatomy and psychology into new theories of the brain and its extraordinary capacities. Still others, like Maurice Wilkins, a Nobel laureate in biology, and physicist David Bohm are exceptional creators who have themselves become interested in creativity as a subject of study. Together, these and other scientists represent an impressive convergence of fields: psychology, brain science, systems theory, cybernetics, the history of science and technology, historiometry, psychiatry, physics, biology.

Most of the above researchers I was able to meet with personally. Though often the investigations they were pursuing did not deal directly with the questions I was asking, all I spoke to were kind enough to help me probe the implications of their findings for the puzzle of creative vision and its role in the alchemy of genius. The reader should not, however, hold them responsible for this attempt to make a synthesis of their work. Aside from interviews with researchers, the major sources for Fire in the Crucible were biographies, autobiographies and observations about creativity made by creators themselves. Certain problems that are inherent in these sources should be noted.

Geniuses, like other people, tend to load their reflections about their own experience with assumptions that give a distorted or idealized picture. Biographers, too, are caught in assumptions and sometimes in myths about their subjects. Not infrequently they are also tripped up by faulty data. For every interpretation by a biographer there exists a potential counterinterpretation by another biographer; for every fact there may lurk an as yet undiscovered fact that could dramatically change the meaning of a biographical statement or event.

A possible safeguard against such a swarm of uncertainties might be to cross-check several biographies of geniuses against each other. Or, better, to deal only with original sources. Several of the researchers I interviewed use this method, immersing themselves for years in the biographical materials of a single creator. For obvious practical reasons neither the extensive cross-checking nor the in-depth approach was feasible for dealing with the wide range of geniuses I'd chosen to discuss here.

But the disadvantages of a wide-scale approach are negated to some extent by an advantage that comes frcm sampling the biographies of geniuses representing many time periods and creative professions. Such a sampling allows a cross-checking among statements by and about highly creative persons to see what there is in common.

The organization of this book reflects the sampling approach.

Throughout I've kaleidoscoped together the lives and thoughts of a broad variety of geniuses in order to emphasize the underlying unities of creative process. To further highlight these unities, the book returns frequently to the processes of two geniuses—Albert Einstein and Virginia Woolf. No doubt my attraction to Woolf and Einstein—particularly to Woolf—has much to do with their wonderful eloquence about the subtle aspects of how creative works unfold.

To catch the different dimensions of that holistic unfolding, this book has been organized into three parts. Part 1 asks, What is creative vision and where does it come from? Part 2 discusses the standard equipment of genius such as talent, the ability to think profitably by means of contradictions, comparisons or images, and the necessity of the creator to interact with the forces of history. This part ends with a chapter considering whether a touch of madness is also a necessary part of the creative equipment. Part 3 traces some of the key movements involved in the lifelong process to create a particular work that shows genius, a magnum opus.

GENIUS PRELIMINARILY DEFINED

But at this point the reader may begin to wonder just what is meant by the term “genius.” It's often a loosely used word. Here is the starting point.

The geniuses discussed in this book are, for the most part, women and men who have altered in some significant way our perception of a major field of human endeavor. The number of fields they represent, however, is restricted here to those usually covered by the concept of creativity: science, invention, the plastic, musical and literary arts. In the case of the arts, significantly altering a field means leaving an indelible impression of vision. Nearly everyone has a feel for the distinctiveness of Melville, Cézanne, or Brahms. These artists brought new perceptions to the world through their artforms.

The reader will probably accept that most of the illustrious people used as examples here were (or are) geniuses. But there may be a few that the reader will object to. This is fitting because any overall picture of genius must also include the fact that some part of genius lies in the beholder's eye.

There is some interest among creativity scientists these days in the concept of a “moral giftedness” and surely Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Krishnamurti would fit a definition of genius in this sense. The problem is that at this point there isn't enough known about these types of creativity to see how they fit or whether they fit what we know about the traditionally recognized fields of creative activity.

Not included here are geniuses in fields like politics and sports. Machiavelli, Queen Elizabeth I and John Kennedy; Wilma Rudolph; Babe Ruth and Bill Russell certainly had profound effects on their respective fields—but was it genius? Possibly, but here, again, we don't know enough at this point about the nature of creativity in these fields to decide.

Another important aspect of definition: psychologist David Perkins, codirector of Harvard's Project Zero and author of The Mind's Best Work, has cautioned that creativity shouldn't be defined as a single faculty but as a “combination of ingredients.” The warning is sound. Genius is a mix—another reason to favor the alchemical metaphor. Vision is only one of the ingredients.

A major objective of this book is to show how the combination of these ingredients—including such elements as vision, talent, absorption, courage, even history—together form a whole, integral process, a single gem: a fluid gem in this case. A second major objective will be to show why each gem (or genius) is a lens for the universal and yet is necessarily unique.

The book also aims to review the fascinating new research being done into creativity, and to expose a number of myths about creative genius, among them: the myth of inspiration, the myth of the lone creator, the myth that creators are motivated by the desire to make something new, the myth that creativity is primarily an unconscious process, the new myth that it's primarily a conscious one, and, finally, the growing myth that intelligence and creativity may one day be duplicated in a machine.

INTERROGATOR: Pardon me, Mr. Author, this document you're composing, is it a theory about creative genius?

MUSING AUTHOR: Not really. Perkins has also made a good point about that when he notes there are basically two kinds of work in the field of creativity that are useful. The first is research conducted according to scientific protocols. The second is what he calls a “construal” of the data. A construal isn't necessarily testable itself but can give a useful orientation into what is going on. So to answer your question, this book is not a theory but a try for a good construal.

INTER: Humph. Well, construe if you will, but I'll be keeping my eye on you.

I should explain that this curious fellow is either an alter ego or some scalawag fragment of mind left over from the time of the alchemists (actual) whom I discovered while lurking about in the shadows of the alchemists’ dens (metaphorical). His ostensible task will be to pop up from time to time to interrogate us on the sticky points.

PART 1

VISION AND
THE PRIMA
MATERIA

The only reality that I recognize is my reality—through the work.

—LOUISE NEVELSON

There's a certain slant of light
On winter afternoons
That oppresses like
The weight of cathedral tunes

…Heavenly hurt it gives us
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are…

—EMILY DICKINSON

And when it is accomplished—behold!—all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision.

—JOSEPH CONRAD

Dadd has painted the vision of the act of vision, the look that looks at space in which the object looked at has been annihilated. The axe which, when it falls, will break the spell that paralyzes them, will never fall. It is an event that is always about to happen and at the same time will never happen. Between never and always there lies in wait anxiety, with its thousand feet and its single eye.

—OCTAVIO PAZ, The Monkey Grammarian

…The Rosarium says: “At the end of the work the king will go forth for thee, crowned with his diadem, radiant as the sun, shining like a carbuncle…constant in the fire.” And of the worthless prima materia they say: “Despise not the ash for it is the diadem of thy heart, and the ash of things that endure.

—C.G. JUNG, Alchemical Studies

OVERVIEW

In a little book called A Step Ladder to Painting, Jan Gorden suggests the vital role of vision in creativity.

Looking at any single object the spectator is easily able to decide; “Yes, that is a nice shape” (or ugly shape as the case may be). In selecting another object he can also decide; “This, too, has a nice shape.” But here comes the test of artistic vision. In placing the two objects together in a group is he able to decide whether the group-shape is also nice?”

Imagine Picasso, Cézanne, Breughel and Dali contemplating, say, a tin plate and assorted fruit on a kitchen table. Clearly the vision of each artist would arrange and portray such a still life differently and render it in a way that would be immediately recognizable as the work of that creator. Each in his own fashion would make a group-shape not just “nice” but stunning—revealing something unexpectedly profound.

The ability of someone to choose and arrange the details of their creative field guided by a vision is a major hallmark of a genius. In the case of a great painter, the vision directs which features of an object to paint or not to paint, which angles to take things from, which shapes and perspectives and colors to mix. Vision guides a great scientist fatefully toward those problems whose solution will eventually shatter the conventional wisdom of the day. Vision seems to make it possible for the creator to see things freshly and more deeply, not just by some clever permutation of the previous way of looking, but by coming up with a new way of looking. Philosopher Edward von Hartmann observed, “Millions stare at the same phenomenon, and one genius finally grasps the concept.” The well-known theoretical chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi said: “…The vision of a hidden reality, which guides a scientist in his quest, is a dynamic force. At the end of the quest the vision is becalmed in the contemplation of the reality revealed by a discovery.…” And Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One's Own that the artist's chief task is to find a hidden reality and communicate it to her readers.

Confronted by the shapes on the kitchen table, most of us would be left flat. We wouldn't know where to start arranging and ordering such details. We would probably conclude we had no vision. Does that mean that only great geniuses have unique and significant visions? Probably not. The word “vision” is a metaphor of seeing, perception—and, as the research in the next chapters will indicate, it's plausible to maintain that because each of us is different, each is endowed by those differences with a special sensitivity to some subtle dimension of reality that others overlook. And why not? After all, the universe itself is infinitely subtle, as a review of the staggering catalogue of discoveries and perceptions recorded in the history of science and the arts would suggest. Probably from time to time nearly everyone has felt the rise of their unique vision into awareness—as nuances, as uncanny moments, as a fleetingly strong sense that a mix of different contours and feelings one has about the world must somehow go together. These instants of vision are extremely tacit. They are sensations we have no words or forms for and which other people don't seem to experience, or at least don't experience in quite the way we do.

But, of course, we're not committed to those elusive perceptions the way the genius is. For the genius such fugitive sensations of what Polanyi called a “hidden reality” are everything. They are—or become at some turning point in the creator's life—more important than family or money or security, even fame. While for the rest of us our unique mix of subtle perceptions, our vision, becomes submerged and fragmented, carried along by the way the consensual world perceives things, the genius is able to make a concrete discovery or history-shaking work because (s)he develops the vision within the confines of some creative field. There, as in a secret laboratory, (s)he works like the ancient alchemist to distill and further distill that vision until it condenses, coalesces and emerges in a miraculous and powerful form. As psychologist Howard Gardner observes: “[The creator] must feel compelled to express [his] vision, over and over again, within the symbolic medium of his choice. He must be willing to live with uncertainty, to risk failure and opprobrium, to return time and again to his project until he satisfies his own exacting standards, while speaking with potency to others.”

This could equally be a description of the alchemist's quest for the prima materia.

According to alchemic tradition, the prima materia or true state of matter is produced by taking as raw material some compound of common matter and gradually distilling or “improving” it. In the arcana of the Hermetics, there is a debate about what that proper raw matter is, and some adepts have argued that it could in fact be anything because at the root of all things lies the prima materia. For the creator the raw material, the “anything” are the tacit sensations of vision. In themselves those sensations are perhaps no more extraordinary than anyone else's, but creators concentrate their fire on them. Both creators and the alchemists are materialists at heart, but of a special kind. They crave possession of a material or objective form (a scientific law, a painting, a concerto—a philosopher's stone) to capture something exquisitely nonmaterial like a truth or subtle perception. Alchemists claimed that the process of distilling the raw material into prima materia releases a spark of life. The spark is a return to “inspiration,” that is, the vibration breathed into all diverse things at the first creation.

Richard Cavendish, a modern scholar of Hermetic texts, observes that alchemy “is based on the belief that the universe is a unity. The alchemists found a principle of unity and order in a substance called First Matter, which remains unchanged behind all diversity. First Matter is not matter in any normal sense of the term, but the possibility of matter.” The First Matter for a creator is the distillation of vision.

Once the crystal gleam of First Matter has been distilled, and its spark of life released, First Matter and spark are then recombined into a philosopher's stone (genius) from which new and amazing properties emerge. The prima materia (vision) now possesses the ability to produce new elements, convey immortality and ascend to the power of what alchemists call “multiplication or augmentation,” i.e., the ability to produce more of itself. Polanyi says of the scientific genius whose vision of a “hidden reality” has led him to a great discovery: “…The vision is renewed and becomes dynamic again in other scientists and guides them to new discoveries.” Something similar could be said of the philosopher-stone visions of a Picasso or Brahms.

Creativity, like alchemistry, is perplexing work, There are devilish paradoxes in the process. “Circular paradoxes,” they might be called: The distiller is the very thing distilled. The creative prima materia (the vision) is both the object sought and its own raw material. Conceit begets humility; uncertainty, a certainty; the individual, the universal…

INTER (threatening, stepping out from the shadow of an arch): Hrrumph. Possibly you're not aware that the great Gothic cathedrals of our age were built on alchemic formulas. But those were more serious times. I remember the architect of one of our cathedrals used to say, “God is in the details.” What evidence is there for all this expatiation about alchemistry and vision?

MUSING: I was getting to that.

INTER: Yes? You mean you have a plan?

MUSING: We do. In chapters 1, 2, and 3 we'll examine evidence for what vision is, where it comes from and what recent scientific research suggests about these matters. In chapter 4 we'll look at how vision is the creator's attempt to mirror “the whole.” Then, finally, in chapters 5 and 6 we'll consider a visionary paradox that connects the everyday experience of ambivalence to the enlightenments of mystics.