I have no creativity.
No way. Here’s why.
When I think about creativity, the first name that comes up to my mind is Rollo May. In his book “Courage to Create” he talks about a painting done by Cezanne and says;
“I never really saw a tree until I had seen and absorbed Cezanne’ s painting of them.”
Which I believe grasps what creativity is all about. If all of us sit in front of a tree and try to paint it, it will all turn out different, as well as if we look at the same painting we will all see something different. To take a deeper look, when we paint it, it is not a tree, it is a painting of a tree, we only tried to see and capture the essence of the tree and created something new.
Creativity comes from Latin roots, term creō, which means “to create, make”. To create something destruction is needed. Every word requires it’s opposite. There is no beauty without the definition of ugly. No life without death, no sadness without happiness, and no such thing as cold without warm. Sometimes these terms are so combined that, it creates a contrast, you can express cold as “not so warm” , or warm as “not so cold” which shows how opposite definitions are needed when defining one.
Getting back to our topic now, to define such a thing as creative, there should be destruction first. In words of Picasso;
“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”
Both of these terms are urges, as humans we have undeniable urges to create and destroy. For such thing, interaction is the key, there is something hidden, and there is your essence, separate from each other. When your essence interacts with what’s out there, you automatically create a new thing. If there is a book standing in the corner of your room right now, when you look at the book, what do you see? It is basically paper and some words in it. It is extremely horizontal. It still exists, even when you didn’t give it any life. But, when you read it, imagine it, now it becomes real and expresses something that is very vertical. You just gave that book life, you just created something new, something new is born because you created it with your essence. Your essence interacted with the horizontal and gained depth, now there is a story you created from the book, how do you know if you created the same story that the author meant? You’ll never know and this is the fun part. The author wrote the book and leave it to the world to let it define itself. Even the author itself couldn’t define the book now, because it is now something new and separate from the author, the book exists by itself.
They always say art is self-explanatory, but why do they say that? Should the artist itself is the one who created the art? Well, basically no. Art expresses itself, you can’t express a book to someone, you can’t express a painting to someone, whenever you try to express it, you change it, because it interacts with your essence, and that’s why artists have this tendency of not explaining their works, so it can exist without them. They say, if an author is smarter than their pen, then they are not good authors. One day while we are discussing something, a lovely professor of mine asked me this “Can you shorten a melody without changing its essence?”, not going to lie it gave me a lot to think about, which triggered these exact thoughts that I’m writing right now.
So, where is the destruction part? The destruction part existed even from the start. You split your essence into different pieces, your pieces still make a whole which creates who you are. A whole can’t be defined without its parts. Let’s say you love to paint and you are going to be huge someday, but you have not reached that part yet. Does that mean that part of yours does not exist? It still exists within you. The intersection of creation and destruction may be blurry. The creative side requires you to work through, release, or understand your own destructive urges and these destructive urges are a part of your essence. Even if you don’t want to, you’ll always create something when you interact both with your inner and outer world, because creativity is in our essence.
