Today, in Part 4, Keith Johnstone writes more on how our society and education in particular inhibits creativity.
Many teachers express surprise at the switch-off that occurs at puberty, but I don’t, because first of all the child has to hide the sexual turmoil he is in, and secondly the grown-ups’ attitude to him completely changes.
Suppose an eight year old writes a story about being chased down a mouse-hole by a monstrous spider. It’ll be perceived as ‘childish’ and no one will worry. If he writes the same story when he is fourteen it may be taken as a sign of mental abnormality. Creating a story, or painting a picture, or making up a poem lay an adolescent wide open to criticism. He therefore has to fake everything so that he appears ‘sensitive’ or ‘witty’ or ‘tough’ or ‘intelligent’ according to the image he is trying to establish in the eyes of other people. If he believed that he was a transmitter, rather than a creator, then we’d be able to see what his talents really were.
We have an idea that art is self-expression – which historically is weird. An artist used to be seen as a medium through which something else operated. He was a servant of God. Maybe a mask-maker would have fasted and prayed for a week before he had a vision of the Mask he was to carve, because no one wanted to see his Mask, they wanted to see the God’s. When Eskimos believed that each piece of bone only had one shape inside it, then the artist didn’t have to ‘think up’ an idea. He had to wait until he knew what was in there – and this is crucial. When he’d finished carving his friends couldn’t say ‘I’m a bit worried about Nanook at the third igloo’, but only ‘He made a bit of a mess getting that out!’ or ‘There are some odd bits of bone about these days.’ These days of course the Eskimos get booklets giving illustrations of what will sell, but before we infected them, they were in contact with a source of inspiration that we are not. It’s no wonder that our artists are aberrant characters. It’s not surprising that great African sculptors end up carving coffee tables, or that the talent of our children dies at the moment we expect them to become adult. Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is.
(Friedrich) Schiller wrote of a ‘watcher at the gates of the mind’, who examines the ideas too closely. He said that in the case of the creative mind ‘the intelect has withdrawn its watcher from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.‘ He said that uncreative people ‘are ashamed of the momentary passing madness which is found in all real creators . . . regarded in isolation, an idea may be quite insignificant, and venturesome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance from an idea that follows it; perhaps in collation with other ideas which seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable link.’
My teachers had the opposite theory. They wanted me to reject and discriminate, believing that the best artist was the one who made the most elegant choices. They analysed poems to show how difficult ‘real’ writing was, and they taught that I should always know where the writing was taking me, and that I should search for better and better ideas. They spoke as if an image like ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’* could have been worked out like the clue to a crossword puzzle. Their idea of the ‘correct’ choice was the one anyone would have made if he had thought long enough.
* The multitudinous seas incarnadine
Macbeth Act 2, scene 2, 54–60
[Knocking within]
Macbeth:
Whence is that knocking?
How is’t with me, when every noise appalls me?
What hands are here? Hah! They pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
“The multitudinous seas incarnadine” is understandably confusing to modern readers, but Macbeth explains his meaning in the following line. Shakespeare makes a verb out of “incarnadine,” a sixteenth century adjective meaning “pink.” (The Latin root carn-refers to flesh, and thus, in its derivatives, to flesh color.) “To incarnadine” is thus to turn something pink or light red—what Macbeth imagines his bloody hands will do to Neptune’s green ocean [see A SORRY SIGHT]. After Shakespeare, the verb and adjective have both come to refer to the color of blood itself—crimson—rather than to the light red of a bloodied sea.
Macbeth has come to recognize that his guilt can never be washed off, even if the blood can be washed from his hands. Instead, his guilt will poison the world around him, which he compares to an ocean. He has already begun to hallucinate: here, he imagines hands plucking out his eyes in retribution for the murder of Duncan.