Creativity (26 page)
Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Yalow explains her success very simply: “I was always interested in learning and I was always interested in using what I learned.” Basically, she spent her life talking to physicians, finding out what problems they encountered, trying to think of a way to solve the problems by experiment, then running the experiments. Experimental results are rarely conclusive; so she reflected on what she found, talked it over with colleagues, ran some new tests, and repeated the cycle several times before—if she was lucky—something interesting turned up. For instance, this is her account of her major disc
overy:
Something comes up, and you recognize that it has happened
. I mean, just like the way in which radioimmunoassay developed. We were testing a hypothesis that diabetics destroyed insulin quickly, and this is why adult diabetics did not have enough insulin. So we gave labeled insulin [that is, insulin marked chemically so that its site and rate of absorption can be measured] and we saw that it did not disappear quickly; it disappeared more slowly! So now we had to examine why it disappeared more slowly. And we discovered the antibody. So we attempted to quantify the amount of ant
ibody, and when we did that we realized that we could measure the insulin reciprocally. We did not set out to develop a radioimmunoassay; it fell out from an unrelated question. Now, then, when we had the radioimmunoassay, we said, “Ah! We can use it to measure all kinds of things.”
Of course, this makes it sound all so easy. It compresses into a few sentences years of exciting but exhausting work. Nevertheless, the general outline is the same whether the breakthrough occurs in art or physics, poetry or business: A new way of doing things is discovered because the person is always open to new learning and has the drive to carry through the new idea that emerges from that learning. It may be interesting to compare Yalow’s career with that of an artist.
When I interviewed Michael Snow in 1994, the streetlights of the city of Toronto were festooned with colorful banners featuring the most famous image Snow had created:
Walking Woman
, the outline of a strangely dynamic and seductive female figure. The banners were announcing three separate retrospective shows of his work: one taking up most of the temporary exhibit space in the huge Ontario Gallery of Art and two in fashionable venues in other parts of town. At the same time, concerts of his music were being held, and some of his experimental films were being shown. The day of the interview he a
nswered long-distance calls from Lisbon concerning a show of his work next fall; from the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where some of his sculpture had been vandalized; and a request to borrow a few of his paintings to complement an exhibition of the works of the Belgian artist Rene Magritte. Michael Snow’s career has certainly reached an apogee few artists ever reach. And like the careers of other creative artists, it was not one that could be traced to any existing pattern.
Snow says that his protean interests “started with confusion, which I tried to dispel by concentrating on one or the other of the mediums I was interested in.” One of the media was music:
My mother was a very fine classical pianist—she still is, at ninety; she is not a professional and never wanted to be, but she really can play very well. She wanted me to take piano lessons and I refused. She tried in many ways to convince me that I should, and I just wouldn’t do it. I guess it was in my second year in high school, I happened to hear some jazz things on the radio which really more than impressed me. I never heard anything like it, and it just knocked me out. And I started to become interested in jazz, and in a really kind of zealous way I listened to everything, and I met o
ther people who were interested in it. I wanted to play that way so I started to try to teach myself how to play.
We had two pianos, one upstairs and one in the basement. I used to play in the basement. And once my mother came down and listened to me for a while before she made herself evident. And we talked. You know, the first thing she said is, “You’re playing the piano. How can you be playing the piano?” So we had this little talk and I said, “Well, I just became interested in playing it.” And she said, “Well, you should take lessons.” And I said, “No, I’m doing OK.”
So Snow went on to join experimental jazz groups, spent some years in New York learning from the local music scene, founded his own group, did some recordings, and ended up having quite an influence on the development of contemporary Canadian music.
He had the same unorthodox approach to the other forms of art he set his hand to. In high school, the one subject he did well in was drawing. So he decided to go to art school, where he met an influential teacher—that is, a teacher who responded to his work, commented on it, suggested books to read and artists to look at. He also suggested that Snow submit a couple of paintings to a group show of the Ontario Society of Artists. “And they were accepted, which turned out to be kind of sensational because no student work had ever been accepted before.” As he finished college, his abstract pain
tings were beginning to attract attention. But Snow, like many of his contemporaries, was impatient with the limitations of two-dimensional surfaces and suspicious of the use that paintings were put to by those who bought them, usually as part of a “decorating scheme.” So he moved into sculpture, photography, holography, and filmmaking, exploring the possibilities of various media and materials. All through this time he still felt confused and unsure of himself. The first time he realized that he was becoming a real artist was in the mid-1960s:
Yeah, it’s almost embarrassing. In a way it depends on recognition. Certainly it does. I guess there shouldn’t be anything embarrassing about that. The film
Wavelength
won a prize in a film festival. It got a lot of publicity, and I won five thousand dollars, the grand prize. I didn’t think of it going on down the ages at all. I thought, I’m going to make this thing, and I hope it’s good. And then it won the prize, and it got me a lot of publicity, and I was
asked to do a tour of Europe with my films, and I was in some collections, and I did have a career, yeah.
Although all creative persons, in breaking new ground, must create careers for themselves, this is especially true for artists, musicians, and writers. They are often left to their own devices, exposed to the vagaries of market forces and changing tastes, without being able to rely on the protection of institutions. It is not surprising that so many promising artists give up and take refuge in teaching, rehabbing old houses, and designing for industry rather than flounder forever in the uncharted seas of so vague a profession. Those who persevere and succeed must be creative not on
ly in their manipulation of symbols but perhaps even more in shaping a future for themselves, a career that will enable them to survive while continuing to explore the strange universe in which they live.
T
HE
T
ASK OF
G
ENERATIVITY
According to the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, the defining task of a person’s middle years is to achieve generativity. This involves being able to pass on both one’s genes and one’s memes. The first refers to leaving children, the second to leaving one’s ideas, values, knowledge, and skills to the next generation. It is much easier to come to terms with one’s mortality when one knows that parts of oneself will continue to live on after one’s death.
There is often a presumption that these two ways of being generative—the physical and the cultural—are at odds with each other. The Romans had a saying:
libri aut liberi
(books or children), referring to how difficult it was to have it both ways. In fact, in many cultures it has been the case that those who wrote the books—the monks in early Christendom, the Tibetan lamas, or Buddhist monks—were not supposed to have children, at least officially. Yet there are of course many notable exceptions, and the people in this book in general are among them. Most respondents had childre
n whom they appreciated greatly (“my children” was probably the most common answer to the question about their proudest accomplishment), and they had the opportunity to see their ideas carried on by students or followers.
Here is the historian John Hope Franklin:
I would say that one of the major sources of pride is the cadre of Ph.D.’s that I trained at the University of Chicago and who are now many of them distinguished historians. They range from being in government service of one kind or another all the way to department chairman at various institutions, and they have produced a very considerable body of writing, largely on the nineteenth century, which is my own specialty. So that aside from my own personal creativity, I would say my projection in them is itself a great source of satisfaction. That is, the fact that they have taken what I have taught
them and what they have learned in the process of associating with me and they have gone on to replicate my career in some ways.
Ravi Shankar expresses a similar idea but focuses on a different aspect of the master-student relationship, the effects of the younger on the elder partner:
I feel more creative when I am amidst musicians, namely, my advanced students. When they are around me, even one of them, when I’m teaching him I become much more, you know, animated, and the music just gushes out like a fountain. All that I have learned and all that I have thought. And by doing that you go on growing, you know? And when I teach, that’s what I said earlier, that you learn at the same time. Because you’re doing new things, without trying to.
The physicist Heinz Maier-Leibnitz also answered the question about his greatest source of pride in terms of his relationship with students:
But then I came to Munich and having all those students, and being able to do more than I could do by myself, and having them becoming independent, this was really quite something which I shall never forget. When you teach, you know, it’s not like learning from a book. What you do is present yourself, whether you like it or not. The hope is that the students will learn by looking, by feeling what the teacher feels.
Brenda Milner, who decided against having children because she did not think herself cut out for the role of a mother, nevertheless is very explicit about the importance of being generative:
I think that your only chance to achieve, well, not immortality, because there is no such thing, but your only way of continuing really to have an influence, is through students. I mean, [Donald O] Hebb is active through his students. I am only one of them. He has had a variety of students who have gone into different fields, but you see his influence, the influence of his thinking. Even if you look at Peter, my ex-husband, who was greatly influenced by Hebb. I feel that this is very important. It keeps you part of the ongoing stream, even as you get older.
T
AKING A
S
TAND
Although one of the most obvious traits of creative individuals is utter absorption in their projects, this single-mindedness does not prevent them from becoming deeply involved with histor
ical and social issues. Sometimes the involvement comes after the person has already achieved renown in a particular field, but it can also be part of the warp and woof of a person’s entire adult life. The number of individuals in our sample who have run risks in defense of their beliefs is rather astonishing. The two causes that generated the greatest concern were environmental deterioration—including here the nuclear arms race—and the Vietnam War. In the second half of our century these two issues appear to have mobilized creative people the most.
After winning a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 and being listed at least by one publication as one of the twenty greatest scientists of all time, Linus Pauling turned his energies to warning his colleagues and the population at large about the dangers of nuclear war. He organized conferences and demonstrations during which he occasionally was detained by the police. He was accused of being a Communist, and his passport was revoked, even though in 1962 he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Physicist Viktor Weisskopf devoted much of his energies to fighting the arms race as a
board member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Benjamin Spock, the author of the baby book that has supposedly sold more copies than any book in the world except for the Bible, also became a vigorous protester against the nuclear arms race and later against the Vietnam War. He too was detained by the police several times and finally tried to organize a third party and ran for the U.S. presidency in an attempt to implement his beliefs. A similar course was taken by Barry Commoner, who abandoned a blossoming scientific career in order to organize a movement for environmental responsibility. He also ran unsuccessfully for the U.S.
presidency. And so did Eugene McCarthy, although in his case, as a U.S. senator, the presidential attempt was not a career change.
The actor Edward Asner became heavily involved in union and antiwar activities, and the photographer Bradley Smith spent time in Southern jails as a result of trying to organize workers in the cotton fields of Louisiana and Mississippi. The artist Lee Nading has been arrested by several sheriffs in the Southwest for defacing public property, because he used to paint giant hex signs on roads leading to nuclear installations. Natalie Davis exiled herself to Canada in protest against the Vietnam War. John Gardner left his position of power in Washington to organize grassroots movement
s such as Common Cause. György Faludy spent many years in concentration camps, first under the Nazis because he was a Jew, then under the Communists because he wrote poems critical of Stalin and the system. Eva Zeisel was put in solitary confinement in Ljublianka prison for more than a year because she had insisted on making beautiful dinnerware in the factory she ran for the Soviets instead of just making it as cheap as possible.
The saga of Naguib Mahfouz is a good example of the troubles that an artist with integrity can run into. Mahfouz is a shy, retiring man who loves the relaxed, dreamlike rhythms by which the Cairo leisure classes live: “After graduating from the university, I wanted to have a job and a new lifestyle: to work until afternoon, walk around in the evenings, go to a club, go to a cafe.” But when he described realistically in his novels what his countrymen did and thought, and the profound changes in values that have washed over Egypt in the past several generations, he incurred the displeasure of
the government and was kept under house arrest for years. And then, ironically, his objective descriptions of the way people lived also alienated the fundamentalist Islamic factions that thought Mahfouz did not respect
the absolute authority of religion and was offensive toward it. At one point the writer signed a statement denouncing “cultural terrorism” and was quoted as saying, “The censor in Egypt is no longer the state; it’s the gun of the fundamentalists.” Recently the police discovered a death list that included Mahfouz near the top; the government then offered him armed bodyguards. But unlike other threatened intellectuals, Mahfouz refused protection. Then one October evening in 1994, as the eighty-two-year-old novelist was walking to his favorite coffeehouse to relax in the company of
other writers, a Mercedes pulled up behind him, and a man jumped out and stabbed Mahfouz in the back.