The Act of Creation (21 page)

Each step involves processes more or less removed from focal awareness.
The code which guides the focal beam of consciousness functions more or
less unconsciously. (It could not be otherwise, for if the beam were
guided by the beam, we would be landed in the paradox of a little man
inside the brain with a little man inside his brain, and so forth.) The
codes of grammar and syntax function unconsciously; the meaning you
wish to express provides the strategy for selecting the proper word. The
words -- just like the towns with 'M' -- were lying in darkness before
the beam searched them out and lit them up for a fleeting moment; then
they sink back into darkness again.
Thus all reasoning, even of a trivial order, is steeped in unconscious
processes. But when the task is of a more complex order, thinking may run
into difficulty at each of the steps which I have outlined. A situation
may share certain features with other situations encountered in the
past, yet the code of rules which enabled us to cope with them proves
mysteriously inadequate in the new situation. Bleeding and purging
the patient proved beneficial in a number of cases, so it came to be
regarded as an all-cure; why did it not work? We can bisect an angle
with compass and ruler, so it was assumed that we can trisect angles
by the same method; but it did not work. Sound waves are propagated in
thin air, so it was assumed that light waves are propagated in a thin
ether; but the analogy provided the wrong matrix. Circles turning upon
circles yielded an adequate description of heavenly motions, until Tycho
perfected the methods of observation; the new data disrupted the pattern,
and the matrix was blocked.
When a situation is blocked, straight thinking must be superseded by
thinking aside
-- the search for a new, auxiliary matrix which
will unblock it, without having ever before been called to perform
such a task. The essence of discovery is to hit upon such a matrix --
as Gutenberg hit on the wine-press and Kepler on the sun-force.
In the trivial routines of thinking, we are exploring the shallows on the
twilight periphery of awareness, guided by a more or less automatized
scanning procedure. In creative thinking we are exploring the deeps,
without any obvious guidance. Yet some guidance there must be -- unless
all novelty is due to random hits produced by the patient monkey on
the typewriter.
The 'Hooked Atoms of Thought'
Let me return once more to Henri Poincaré, who proposed a theory
concerning the nature of this unconscious guidance. We have heard him
describe how, on three different occasions, the solution of a problem
popped up spontaneously and ready-made, as it were, from the depth of the
unconscious. Further on in that famous lecture from which I have quoted
(
pp. 114-16
) he tried to give an explanation of
this phenomenon. His starting point was that mathematical discovery
consists in a 'combination of ideas'; and his description of this
process stresses the characteristic features of what I have called the
bisociative act:

Among chosen combinations the most fertile will often be those formed of
elements drawn from domains which are far apart. . . . Most combinations
so formed would be entirely sterile; but certain among them, very rare,
are the most fruitful of all.

Now these combinations are engineered by the unconscious or, as he calls
it, the 'subliminal self'; but how? There are, he says, two possibilities.
The first is that the unconscious 'is capable of discernment; it has
tact, delicacy; it knows how to choose, to divine. What do I say? It
knows better how to divine than the conscious self since it succeeds
where that has failed. In a word, is not the subliminal self superior
to the conscious self? I confess that, for my part, I should hate to
accept this. . . . ' So he rejects this first hypothesis in favour of
the second: the unconscious is an automaton which mechanically runs
through all possible combinations:

Figure the future elements of our combinations as something like the
hooked atoms of Epicurus. During the complete repose of the mind,
these atoms are motionless, they are, so to speak, hooked to the
wall. During a period of apparent rest and unconscious work, certain
of them are detached from the wall and put in motion. They flash
in every direction through the space . . . as would, for example, a
swarm of gnats, or if you prefer a more learned comparison, like the
molecules of gas in the kinematic theory of gases. Then their mutual
impacts may produce new combinations.
But two objections come to his mind. Firstly, is not the number
of possible combinations infinite, and the chance of hitting on a
favourable one infinitesimal? No, he answers, because during the
conscious preparatory work which preceded the period of unconscious
incubation, a first selection was already made of those atoms which are
to be unhooked from the wall; and although no satisfactory combination
of them was found, 'after this shaking up imposed upon them by our
will, these atoms do not return to their previous rest. They freely
continue to dance' -- until the one favourable collision in a million
occurs. (This is rather like saying that the chances of the monkey on
the typewriter hitting on a Shakespeare sonnet would be considerably
improved by building a typewriter which uses whole words as keys
instead of letters.)

The second objection which occurred to Poincaré is as follows:
although countless combinations are formed 'in consequence of the
automatism of the subliminal self, only the interesting ones . . . break
into the domain of consciousness'. But, if so, what is the nature of the
mysterious sieve which rejects the useless combinations and allows only
the lucky hits to pass into consciousness? Poincaré's answer is
that the selection is done by 'the aesthetic sensibility of the real
creator. The useful combinations are precisely the most beautiful,
I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility'.
This is certainly a more attractive answer than Taine's, who summons ideas
from the ante-chamber 'in a mechanically logical way'; yet Poincaré
himself felt its unsatisfactoriness. For it combines a mechanistic
theory about the random collision of atomic ideas in the unconscious,
with an aesthetic sensibility which resides in the conscious, and plays
the part of a
deus ex machina
. We do not doubt that this kind of
sensibility is present in the creative mind, and to inquire into its
nature is precisely what we are after; but Poincaré lets the
matter rest just where the problem starts.
Particularly fascinating in this lecture, delivered in 1908, is the fact
that Poincaré, after acknowledging his debt to the 'subliminal
self' and singing its praises, confesses that he would 'hate to
accept' that it might in some respects be superior to the conscious
self, and relegates it to the role of an automatic mixing machine
in the basement. He worked by intuition, but for all his modesty and
open-mindedness he was unable to shake off the rationalist hubris of
the nineteenth century.*
Exploring the Deeps
All we have gleaned from these excursions into the history of our subject,
from Plotinus to Poincar´, is firstly, a negative insight into
the narrow limitations of conscious thinking; and on the positive side,
affirmations of the superiority of unconscious mentation at certain
stages of creative work. But regarding the reasons for this superiority,
and the process by which it manifests itself, we got merely a few vague
intimations, or else unsatisfactory mechanistic hypotheses such as
Galton's and Poincaré's. Nor, I may add here, had Freud or Jung much
to say about the specific problem how unconscious processes lead to
new discoveries.
Let us at this stage follow the advice we have so often heard repeated,
and 'think aside' -- by turning, for a moment, from scientists to
poets. If we were to apply Poincaré's hypothesis we would
come to the conclusion that the poet has a conscious mind endowed
with aesthetic sensibility, and an unconscious mind equipped with an
automatic rhyme-computer (built on the principle of rhyming lexicons),
and also with an image computer (a kind of magic lantern with an
automatic slide-changer). Out of the hundreds of rhymes and similes
produced per minute the vast majority would, of course, be valueless,
and the aesthetic censor in the conscious mind would have a full-time
job rejecting them -- until he went out of his mind.
It seems neither an economical nor an inspired procedure. Now let us
listen to Coleridge's celebrated description of the genesis of Kubla
Khan. He is speaking of himself in the third person singular:

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had
retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton. . . . In
consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed,
from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that
he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance,
in Purchas's Pilgrimage:
Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built,
and a stately garden thereunto.
And thus ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed with a wall.
The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at
least of the external senses [sic] during which time he has the most
vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to
three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which
all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel
production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or
consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a
distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper,
instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.

This, of course, is an extreme case of unconscious production -- even if,
in all likelihood, it did not originate in a dream, but in an intense
daydream or hypnogogic state. (In another, and probably earlier, statement
Coleridge gives a different version: 'This fragment with a good deal
more, not recoverable, composed in a sort of Reverie brought on by two
grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery.' The 'reverie' version is
strengthened by the words 'in a profound sleep, at least of the external
senses' -- which point towards some intermediary kind of 'waking dream'.)
But whether he was asleep or half asleep is unimportant; the point
to note is the emphasis he puts on visual images 'which rose up as
things'. Unfortunately, no sooner had he started on the actual writing
down of the poem than he was interrupted 'by a person on business from
Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room,
found, to his no small surprise and mortification . . . that with the
exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest
had passed away
like the images on the surface of a stream into which
a stone has been cast
'. This incidental metaphor suddenly sets off in
its author another chain of visual imagery which illustrates how the dream
version of 'Kubla Khan' was lost, thanks to the gentleman from Porlock,
but reconstructed later on out of the remaining fragments. After the
'stone had been cast':

. . . all the charm
Is broken -- all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,
And each misshape the other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! . . .
The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo, he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.

The whole poem, with its rather striking allegory, grew out of a hackneyed
metaphor, which was meant to serve only as a visual illustration to
a verbal narrative. But all at once the servant becomes master, the
illustration takes over from the text; visual association, the logic of
the eye are in command, and the words must follow their lead. . . .
We further note that the whole sequence of 'not less than from two to
three hundred lines' of the Kubla Klan dream itself was triggered off
by a passage read in
Purchas's Pilgrimage
, as indifferent as the
simile of the stone cast into the stream: 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded
a palace to be built', etc. But at that point his imagination caught on,
the opium took effect, visual thinking took over, and images 'rose up
as things'.
Thinking in pictures dominates the manifestations of the unconscious --
the dream, the hypnogogic half-dream, the psychotic's hallucinations,
the artist's 'vision'. (The 'visionary' prophet seems to have been a
visualizer, and not a verbalizer; the highest compliment we pay to those
who trade in verbal currency is to call them 'visionary thinkers'.)
But, on the other hand, pictorial thinking is a more primitive form
of mentation than conceptual thinking, which it precedes in the
mental evolution of the individual and of the species. The language
of the primitive (and of the child) is, to borrow Kretschmer's simile,
'like the unfolding of a picture-strip: each word expresses a picture,
a pictorial image, regardless of whether it signifies an object or an
action'. In Golding's novel
The Inheritors
the Neanderthal men
always say 'I had a picture' when they mean 'I thought of something';
and anthropologists agree that for once a novelist got the picture right.
Thus the poet who reverts to the pictorial mode of thought is regressing
to an older and lower level of the mental hierarchy -- as we do every
night when we dream, as mental patients do when they regress to infantile
fantasies. But the poet, unlike the dreamer in his sleep, alternates
between two different levels of the mental hierarchy; the dreamer's
awareness functions on one only. The poet thinks both in images and verbal
concepts, at the same time or in quick alternation; each 'trouvaille',
each original find, bisociates two matrices. The dreamer floats among
the phantom shapes of the hoary deep; the poet is a skindiver with a
breathing tube.
Similar considerations apply -- and will be discussed in Part III --
to rhythm, metre, alliteration, assonance, rhyme. The rhythmic beat,
echoing the shaman's tom-tom, awakens archaic resonances and 'lulls the
mind into a waking trance' (Yeats). The rhyme appeals to the tendency to
vocal repetition in the language of primitives and children (kala-kala,
ma-ma), and to the equally deep-rooted tendency to associate by sound --
punning. To conclude this anticipatory excursion: the creative activity
of the artist involves
momentary regressions
to earlier stages in
mental evolution, bringing forms of mentation into play which otherwise
manifest themselves only in the dream or dreamlike states.
The Word and the Vision
Let us return from poets to scientists, and to the question what guidance
the latter could possibly derive from the intervention of unconscious
processes. The answer which, by analogy, now suggests itself is that
the temporary relinquishing of conscious controls liberates the
mind from certain constraints which are necessary to maintain the
disciplined routines of thoughts but may become an impediment to
the creative leap; at the same time other types of ideation on more
primitive levels of mental organization are brought into activity
. The first part of this sentence indicates an act of abdication, the
second an act of promotion. It will be useful to remember this dual
aspect of the Eureka act; it will be seen, later on, to correspond to
the destructive-constructive character of all great revolution in the
history of thought.
The scientific counterpart of the Coleridge episode is the Kekul´
episode (