The Act of Creation (20 page)

Such mechanical virtuosity has probably reached its highest development
in the Japanese arts inspired by Zen Buddhism: swordsmanship, archery,
Judo, calligraphic painting. The method to reach perfection has been
authoritatively described as 'practice, repetition, and repetition
of the repeated with ever-increasing intensity', [19] until the adept
'becomes a kind of automaton, so to speak, as far as his own consciousness
is concerned'. [20]* That is the method by which Professor Skinner of
Harvard University, a leader of the Behaviourist school, trained pigeons
to perform circus acts, intended as an explanation of mental development
in man.
Exploring the Shallows
We have heard conscious thoughts being compared to icebergs, or islands
in the ocean of unconscious mentation; we have heard Einstein affirm
that 'full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully
accomplished'. Let me proceed from these metaphors to a closer analogy,
which may help to dispel common illusions about the clarity of conscious
thought.
Most people with normal eyesight tend to the flattering belief that
they see the world around them at any time in sharp focus; in fact,
however, they see a blur. Only a minute fraction of the visual field
-- about one-thousandth of it -- is seen distinctly; outside of this
centre vision becomes increasingly vague and hazy. If you gaze fixedly
at a single word in the centre of the page you are reading, and try to
prevent your gaze from straying along the line (which is not easy because
reading is an automatized skill), you will see only about a couple of
words sharp in focus, the rest of the line on both sides trails off into
a haze. And how about the whole page, and the rest of the room around you?
Focal vision subtends an angle of only about four degrees, less than
the angle at the point of a pin, out of a total field of a hundred and
eighty degrees. Yet we are unaware of this, because we constantly scan
the field with, mostly unconscious, movements of the eye, to bring the
blurred periphery into the narrow beam of focal vision -- pinpointed at
the fovea, the tiny spot at the centre of the retina which alone conveys
true and distinct sight.
This much every schoolboy learns (and forgets); but in 1960 experiments
at McGill University led to the rather surprising discovery that the
unconscious movements of the eye are not merely aids to clearer vision,
but a
sine qua non
of vision. When the subject's gaze remained
really fixed on a stationary object (by means of a mechanical device,
see Book Two, X), his vision went haywire, the image of the object
disintegrated and disappeared -- then reappeared after a while but in
distorted shape or in fragments. Static vision does not exist; there is
no seeing without exploring.
With due caution we can draw a limited analogy between visual scanning
and mental scanning -- between the blurred, peripheral vision outside the
focal beam, and the hazy, half-formed notions which accompany thinking
on the fringes of consciousness. 'Every definite image in the mind',
wrote William James, 'is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows
round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the
dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is
to lead. The significance, the value of the image, is all in this halo
or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it'. [21]
If one attempts to hold fast to a mental image or concept -- to hold it,
immobile and isolated, in the focus of awareness, it will disintegrate,
like the static, visual image on the fovea: a word, constantly repeated,
becomes meaningless; an idea, stripped of its hazy penumbra, vanishes
like the Cheshire Cat. Thinking is never a sharp, neat, linear process;
it could rather be compared to the progress of a boat on a lake. When
you day-dream you drift before the wind; when you read or listen to
a narrative you travel like a barge towed by a tug. But in each case
the progress of the boat causes ripples on the lake, spreading in
all directions -- memories, images, associations; some of these move
quicker than the boat itself and create anticipations; others penetrate
into the deep. The boat symbolizes focal awareness, the ripples on the
surface are the fringes of consciousness, and you can furnish the deeps,
according to taste, with the nasty eddies of repressed complexes, the
deepwater currents of the collective unconscious, or with archetypal
coral-reefs. When thinking is in the tow of a narrative, focal awareness
must stick to its course and cannot follow the ripples on their journey
across the lake; but it is their presence all round the horizon, on the
peripheries of awareness, which provides resonance, colour, and depth, the
atmosphere and feel of the story. When it comes to productive thinking,
however, the metaphor breaks down -- unless we equip it with an outboard
motor, a gyro-compass, servo-steering, and other paraphernalia.
The existence of an intermediary region between the 'limit case'
of sharp, narrow focal awareness and the vast unconscious regions of
the mind has been recognized for a long time. Fichte (and later Freud)
called it the pre-conscious (
das Vorbewusstsein
), James called
it the fringe; Polànyi 'subsidiary awareness'; the analogy with
vision yielded 'peripheral awareness'; but since awareness is a matter
of degrees, it would be mistaken to draw a sharp line between pre- and
unconscious processes, between the shallows and the deep. What matters
is the distinction between the single event (the percept, or concept,
or word, or muscle-action) which for a fleeting moment occupies the
focus of attention -- and the processes on the periphery which define
the context, the purpose and meaning of the former.
But how do they interact? How do pre- or unconscious processes
influence the direction of thought; how do some enter focal awareness
and sink back again into twilight and darkness; how do they assist mental
creativity? The answers we have heard up to now were of a general nature;
they all asserted that such assistance was indispensable and did in fact
occur; but they had little to say regarding the concrete mechanism or
procedure through which it was rendered. Perhaps the most lurid attempt
in this direction was made by that versatile genius Francis Galton in
a famous analogy:

When I am engaged in trying to think anything out, the process of
doing so appears to me to be this: the ideas that lie at any moment
within my full consciousness seem to attract of their own accord the
most appropriate out of a number of other ideas that are lying close
at hand, but imperfectly within the range of my consciousness. There
seems to be a presence-chamber in my mind where full consciousness
holds court, and where two or three ideas are at the same time in
audience, and an ante-chamber full of more or less allied ideas,
which is situated just beyond the full ken of consciousness. Out of
this ante-chamber the ideas most nearly allied to those in the
presence-chamber appear to be summoned in a mechanically logical
way, and to have their turn of audience. [22]

The italics are mine, and are meant to register protest. Assuming
the idea in the presence-chamber of my mind is, as it happens to be,
Mr. Galton himself, I can recall six distinct occasions in the last few
months when I thought of him. He helped to ease the gloom of my last
birthday -- because Galton lived to the age of eighty-nine; and the idea
'most nearly allied', which was summoned from the ante-chamber 'in a
mechanically logical way', was 'Methuselah'. On another occasion I read
about the acquittal of a woman who had been tried for the mercy-killing of
her malformed baby; Galton was summoned because he had invented the word
'eugenics'; next came, logically, the 'most nearly allied' idea of Adolf
Hider, whose S.S. men practised eugenics after their own fashion. On yet
another occasion the closest association was 'colour-blindness' -- first
studied by Dalton which rhymes with Galton; and so forth. Each summons
into the presence-chamber had its own 'mechanical logic', if you wish
to call it that; and the choice of the 'most nearly allied idea', the
order of precedence in the ante-chamber, depended on what sort of logic,
or rule of the game, was at the time in control of the mind. Gaiton was
a pioneer of the experimental method in word-association tests; but as
a follower of the English associationist school, he failed to realize
that association is always controlled by a code of rules, whether the
subject is aware of it or not; and that different codes are active at
different times.
Thus the famous analogy of the ante-chamber of the mind does not get
us much further; but it helps us to clarify the problem by showing the
pitfalls of the mechanistic approach, and leading us back, as it were, to
our starting point. It was the comparison between the blurred periphery
of the visual field and the vague intimations which pass through the
twilight of the pre-conscious. We can now venture a step further, and draw
a parallel between the part-automatic visual scanning of a landscape, and
the mental scanning of a kind of inner landscape in purposive thinking. In
both cases, the scanning process is controlled by a specific, selective
code that determines which features in the landscape are relevant and
which are not. Scanning a panorama through my window purely for pleasure
corresponds to the aimless drift of thought along the most gratifying
features -- memories, images, pleasurable anticipations -- of the inner
landscape. But if I explore with my eyes the mountain before me for
the safest route to the summit, or the amount of timber it will yield;
for a sign of edelweiss, or a strategic gun-site safe from air attack,
the whole visual field will in each case become organized and patterned
in different ways; and the scanning motions of my eyes, guiding the beam
of focal vision, will automatically be governed by certain rules which
I am unable to name, and by a purposeful strategy determined by the lie
of the land.
In this example visual exploration and mental exploration are actually
indistinguishable; the observational data derived from looking at the
rock face, and the lessons derived from previous experience combine
into one. In other situations, the exploratory process may be confined
to the inner landscape, to the exclusion of all stimuli from the world
outside. The poet's or the mathematician's trance-like condition while
he concentrates on a problem, the vivid fantasies of the day-dreamer,
the delusions of the insane, the dreams of the sleeper, are products of
widely different games of the mind; but they all have this in common,
that the beam of focal awareness is exploring the inner environment,
and ignoring the input from the senses. The features on which the
beam alights are images of a pictorial or verbal nature, memories in
abstracted, conceptualized, or distorted shape; in a word, they are
past experiences internalized. The inner landscape may be regarded as
a kind of private, miniature model -- or caricature -- of the world in
the subject's brain-mind (see Book Two).
Thus the
objects
of the scanning process are ultimately the
individual's past experiences (including his prenatal past) incorporated
in one form or another into his mental landscape. And the
rules
which control the scanning process (the pattern of 'mental eye motions',
as it were) are also derived from past experiences by abstraction and
generalization; they are the results of learning compressed into the
operational codes of thinking skills.
As an example, take the parlour game 'Towns with M' (see
page 38
). The moment I start playing it, a fixed
code takes control of my mental processes, and their freedom is whittled
down to strategic choices. These may be based on exploring an imagined
geographical map, or on the 'tuning-fork' method. The mental map is a
blurred, hazy, and distorted rephca of what I learned in school and on
travels; but as I proceed to scan it, from west to east with the mind's
eye, name after name emerges from the misty twilight: Manchester, Munich,
Moscow, Murmansk, Michigan, etc. If, on the other hand, I apply the
tuning-fork method, Manchester will call out Mannheim, Madrid, Madras, and
so forth. All of these names were learned in the past; all of them were
members of the 'M' matrix (otherwise they could not have been summoned on
the 'wavelength' of that particular code); all of them were unconscious
or pre-conscious the moment before the beam of focal awareness alighted
on them. The beam was guided firstly by the
rule
of the game
('find
towns
with M, not
rivers
with S'), and secondly
by
strategy
('move from west to east'). The rule was fixed,
the strategy variable. A further point to note is (though it does not
concern us yet) that strategy operates by a kind of
feed-back
from the lie of the land: I was searching for towns with 'M' between
Munich and Moscow, but found none: so I moved on. Other factors enter:

I might have remembered Mannheim, but did not because of an unpleasant
experience there: emotional disturbances interfering with
'mechanical logic'. Incidentally, the forming of a sentence in ordinary
conversation follows a similar pattern. Instead of scanning a map for
towns with 'M', you must scan your vocabulary for words which will fit
a given meaning.

Take an even simpler practical example. I live in London and have to
spend a day in Paris some time next week to see my French publisher. If
this were a pleasure-trip the fringes of my consciousness would at once
be crowded with half-remembered, floating images of bistros, streets,
galleries, métro stations; but, as it is a business trip, a different
code enters into action and the matrix is cluttered with timetables,
appointment books, galley proofs, and dustcovers, which strategic planning
must co-ordinate into the proper sequence.
Purposive thinking, even of this ordinary, humdrum kind, proceeds in
several steps. First, the code of rules appropriate to the task is
'tuned in' -- by dint of analogy with similar tasks encountered in the
past. As a result, a matrix will emerge, a kind of patterned mental grid
or chessboard, which provides a preliminary selection of permissible
moves, a first guidance for the exploratory process. Next comes strategy,
dependent upon the particulars of the situation.