The Act of Creation (23 page)

p. 157
. Zen philosophy, in the form in
which it is taught by its contemporary propounders (foremost among them
Prof. D. T. Suzuki and his Western disciples), is a welter of confusions,
derived from the failure to discriminate between automatized skills
and creative originality -- between the 'downward' and the 'upward'
traffic to and from the unconscious. The former results in getting the
'knack' of a skill; the latter in the sudden flash of a new insight (the
'It'). The practitioner of the various applied Zen arts was trained to
act 'spontaneously, unthinkingly' -- and this led to the added confusion
between the pseudo-spontaneity displayed by the responses of a well-oiled
automaton, and the genuine spontaneity of original inspiration. (Cf. 'The
It
and the Knack', pp. 260 seq., in my
The Lotus and the Robot
,
1960).
To
p. 166
. Less understandable is the case of
Spearman, who wrote a book on the
Creative Mind
(1930) with only
passing mention of unconscious processes, the main reference being a sneer
at Freud's preoccupation with 'subconscious bestiality'. This was written
when Spearman was Professor of Psychology at the University of London.
To
p. 172
. The exceptions were G. D. Birkhoff,
Norbert Wiener (who said that 'he happens to think with or without
words'), and G. Polya.
VIII
UNDERGROUND GAMES
The Importance of Dreaming
To recapitulate: ordered, disciplined thought is a skill governed by set
rules of the game, some of which are explicitly stated, others implied
and hidden in the code. The creative act, in so far as it depends on
unconscious resources, presupposes a relaxing of the controls and a
regression to modes of ideation which are indifferent to the rules of
verbal logic, unperturbed by contradiction, untouched by the dogmas and
taboos of so-called common sense. At the decisive stage of discovery the
codes of disciplined reasoning are suspended -- as they are in the dream,
the reverie, the manic flight of thought, when the stream of ideation is
free to drift, by its own emotional gravity, as it were, in an apparently
'lawless' fashion.
The laws of disciplined thinking demand that we should stick to a given
frame of reference and not shift from one universe of discourse to
another. When I am arguing about
Richard III
and somebody quotes
'my kingdom for a horse' I am not supposed to shift my attention to my
chances of drawing a winner in the Grand National, however tempting it
may be. The strain of concentrating on an abstract subject derives mainly
from the effort to inhibit emotionally more tempting associations outside
of its field. But when concentration flags and primitive motivations
take over, thought will shift from one matrix to another, like a ball
bouncing down a mountain stream, each time an idea (like 'horse' in the
above example) provides a link to a more attractive context.
We might say that while dreaming
we constantly bisociate in a passive
way
-- by drift as it were; but we are, of course, unaware of it
because the coherence of the logical matrices is weakened, and the
codes which govern them are dormant. Hence, while dreaming, we do not
realize their incompatability; there is no simultaneous juxtaposition
of matrices, no awareness of conflict and incongruity; that comes only
on awakening. To put it in another way: the dream associates by methods
which are impermissible in the waking state -- such as affinities of sound
detached from meaning, and similarities of form regardless of function. It
makes use of 'links' which, while awake we 'would not dream' of using --
except where dream-logic intrudes into humour, discovery, and art.
It is not surprising, then, that we find all the bisociative patterns
that I have discussed prominently displayed in the dream: the
pun
:
two strings of thought tied together by a purely accoustic knot; the
optical pun
: one visual form bisociated with two functional
contexts; the
phenomenon of displacement
or shift of attention to
a previously unnoticed feature; the
concretization
of abstract
and general ideas in a particular image; and vice versa, the use
of concrete images as symbols for nascent, unverbalized concepts;
the
condensation
in the same link-idea of several associative
contexts; the unearthing of
hidden analogies; impersonation
and
double identity -- being oneself and something else at the same time,
where the 'something else' might belong to the animal, vegetable, or
mineral kingdom. The ensemble of these and related operations constitutes
the grammar and logic of dream-cognition. To go on with the list would
be tedious, the more so as the categories overlap; but one more trick
ought to be added to the repertory: the occasional reversal of causal
sequences. This, however, is putting the phenomenon into over-concrete
terms, since 'causality' (together with space, time, matter, identity,
etc.) appear in the dream in a semi-fluid shape like a half-melted
snowman; yet even a snowman may be standing on his head. Lastly, I must
mention the obvious fact of the dreamer's extreme gullibility. Hamlet's
cloud merely
resembles
a camel, weasel, or whale; to the dreamer
the cloud actually
becomes
a camel, a weasel, or whale -- without
his turning a hair.
A child, watching a television thriller with flushed face and palpitating
heart, praying that the hero should realize in time the deadly trap
set for him, is at the same time aware that the hero is a shadow on the
screen. A day-dreamer -- like Thurber's Walter Mitty -- is aware of the
fantasies which he creates for his own benefit; but also aware, though
less intensely so, of the fact that he is creating them. He lives,
like the spectator in front of the screen, on two different levels,
simultaneously or in quick alternations -- by mental quantum-jumps,
as it were. If he settles for a single level then either the illusion
ceases to function -- or it grows into hallucinatory delusion.
The dream occupies a privileged position among these ambiguous mental
states; privileged, in that it is included in the normal daily cycle in
spite of -- or because of -- its pronounced hallucinatory, 'abnormal'
character. Dreaming is distinguished from other delusionary states
by being transitory, easily interrupted, and by being confined to the
'inner landscape', by a more or less complete shuttering of the senses
(whereas in pathological states the senses may continue to function, but
perception may be perverted). On the other hand, dreaming is distinguished
from day-dreaming in that the dreamer is aware of the fantasies which
he creates, but unaware of the fact that he is creating them. He is
the spectator passively watching the sequence of images on one level,
which he actively produces on another; he is the cinema operator who
works the projection machine, and the audience at the same time. But
while the spectacle on the screen is visible, the operator is not. He
operates in complete darkness, and there is a good reason for it: the
production is frequently childish, obscene, confusing, an affront to
logic and common sense.
There is no need to emphasize, in this century of Freud and Jung, that
the logic of the dream is not the logic of Aristotle; that it derives
from the magic type of causation found in primitive societies and the
fantasies of childhood; that it is indifferent to the laws of identity
and contradiction; that the dream's reasoning is guided by emotion, its
morality blush-making, its symbolism pre-verbal and archaic. If these
ancient codes which govern the games of the dreamer were allowed to
operate in the waking state they would play havoc with civilized adult
behaviour; they must be kept underground.
But these underground, in normal states subconscious,
levels
or
planes in the hierarchy of mental functions must not be confused with the
linear scale
of awareness (
pp. 154-7
). The
latter forms a continuous gradient from focal awareness, through
peripheral awareness to unawareness of a given event; whereas the
levels
of the mental hierarchy form quasi-parallel (or concentric)
layers, which are discontinuous, and are under normal conditions kept
separate, as waking is from dreaming. The codes which govern organic
activities, automatized habits, and routine skills, function unawares
because they are either inborn or have been mastered by practice; the
'underground' codes function underground because they have been superseded
by the codes of rational thinking. In the first case we see the working
of mental economy; in the second, of mental evolution. Automatized
codes serve the maintenance of normal functioning; underground codes
disrupt routine in a creative or destructive sense. We are concerned
with the creative aspect only; but I should mention in passing that the
underground layers of the mental hierarchy must not be confused with
'repressed complexes'. The latter form a special category within the
much broader realm of subconscious phenomena. Complexes originate in
traumatic experiences; the underground games of the mind reflect the
facts of mental evolution.
The levels of mental organization have been compared to the archaeological
strata of ancient and prehistoric civilizations, buried, but not
irretrievably, under our contemporary towns. The analogy is Freud's [1]
but I would like to carry it one step further. Imagine for a moment that
all important written records and monuments pre-dating the Industrial
Revolution have been destroyed by some catastrophe like the burning
down of the library in Alexandria; and that knowledge of the past could
be obtained only by archaeological excavations. Without digging into
the undergound strata, modern society, ignorant of the culture of the
Renaissance, of Antiquity, Prehistory, and the Age of the Dinosaurs, would
be reduced to an unimaginably superficial, two-dimensional existence:
a species without a past and probably -- for lack of comparative
values -- without much future. An individual deprived of his dreams,
of irrational impulses, of any form of ideation except articulate verbal
thought, would be in much the same position. Dreaming, in the literal and
metaphorical sense, seems to be an essential part of psychic metabolism
-- as essential as its counterpart, the formation and automatization of
habits. Without this daily dip into the ancient sources of mental life
we would probably all become desiccated automata. And without the more
spectacular exploratory dives of the creative individual, there would
be no science and no art.
To sum up, there is a two-way traffic between conscious and unconscious.
One traffic stream continually moves in a downward direction: we
concentrate on new experiences, arrange them into patterns, develop
new observational skills, muscular dexterities, verbal aptitudes;
and when these have been mastered by continued practice, the controls
are handed over to a kind of automation, and the whole assembly is
dispatched, along the gradients of awareness, out of sight. The upward
traffic stream moves in the small fluctuating pulses from the unconscious
which sustain the dynamic balance of the mind -- and in the rare, sudden
surges of creativity, which may lead to a re-structuring of the whole
mental landscape.
I have illustrated this upward traffic by a number of examples. In
each case the creative act consisted in a new synthesis of previously
unconnected matrices of thought; a synthesis arrived at by 'thinking
aside', a temporary relinquishing of the rational controls in favour of
the codes which govern the underground games of the mind. We have seen
that the dream operates with a type of logic which is inadmissible
in the waking state, and which, for precisely that reason, proved
useful in critical situations where the matrices of conscious thought are
blocked. Thus the illogicality and apparent naïveté of visual
associations, or the indifference of the dreaming mind to convention and
common sense, turned out to be of great value in forging new combinations
out of seemingly incompatible contexts. All the bisociative mechanisms
of the comic we found in the dream freewheeling as it were, without being
harnessed to any obvious rational purpose. But when the whole personality,
on all its levels, becomes saturated with the problem in hand during the
period of incubation, then the freewheeling machinery too is 'engaged'
in its service and goes into action -- not necessarily in the dream,
but mostly on some intermediary, part-conscious level.
The examples in previous chapters had been meant to illustrate various
aspects of unconscious discovery. In the sections which follow I shall
try to show, a little more systematically, how the peculiarities of
subconscious ideation, reflected in the dream, facilitate the bisociative
click.
Concretization and Symbolization
The sleeper producing a Freudian dream, in which a broomstick represents
a phallus, has made an
optical pun
: he has connected a single
visual form with two different functional contexts. The same technique
is employed by the caricaturist who equates a nose with a cucumber,
the discoverer who sees a molecule as a snake, the poet who compares
a lip to a coral. When Jean Cocteau underwent a drug-withdrawal cure,
he drew human figures constructed out of the long, thin stalks of opium
pipes. William Harvey, watching the exposed heart-valve at work in a
living fish, suddenly visualized it as a pump -- but the analogy between
the gory mess he actually saw and the neat metallic gadget existed in
his mind's eye only.
These, however, are rather dramatic examples. As a rule, visual imagery
does not work in such precise fashion. The visualizer rather feels his
way around a problem and strokes it with his eye, as it were, trying to
fit it into some convincing or elegant shape; he plays around with his
vague forms like the couturier with his fabrics, draping and undraping
them on the model. Let me call on Einstein once more. We remember that
he described the 'physical entities which seem to serve as elements in
thoughts' in terms of 'signs and more or less clear images of visual,
and some of muscular type'. On another occasion, he described how the
basic insight into the relativity of Time, to wit, 'the knowledge that
the events which are simultaneous for one observer are not necessarily
simultaneous for another', came to him early one morning just as he got
out of bed. But that sudden moment of truth had been preceded 'by ten
years of contemplation, of considering a paradox which had struck me
at the age of sixteen: if I pursue a ray of light with the speed c --
the speed of light in a vacuum' -- I must accept such a ray of light
as a stationary, spatially oscillating electro-magnetic field'. [2]
In other words, if you travel with the speed of light, you will see no
light -- you will be, roughly speaking, in the position of the surf-rider
in whose eyes the waves around him form a stationary pattern. Yet --
'intuitively it seemed clear to me that, judged by such an observer,
everything should follow the same laws as for a stationary observer'. [3]
In other words, the traveller ought to see the world just as the person
sees it who remained at home on earth.