Creativity and karma

Rainer Maria Rilke tells us that a good poem can only emerge from a lifetime of experiences, which are not only remembered but, you might say, inhabited. (Or you might say that they inhabit you.)

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back …

And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Mitchell 1982, 91)

If we turn from the creation of a poem to the creation of the cosmos, turning the act of creation inside out (as it were), we get the concept of cosmic memory or karma. This is epitomized in Bhagavad-Gita 8.3, as translated by Gandhi (1926/2000, 136-7): ‘The Supreme, the Imperishable is Brahman. Its manifestation is adhyatma. The creative process whereby all beings are created is called karma.’ Gandhi’s comment on this verse personalizes the process into an act: ‘Creating all beings and keeping them in existence is an act of renunciation and is known as karma.’ In the act of creation, Brahman renounces His Supremacy and Imperishability.

This seems to resonate with the Joycean idea that creation was the fall and the sin of the All-Father. Joyce would not have described creation as an act of renunciation, but Alan Watts (1966) comes close in his version of the Vedic story: the One Subject of experience disguises himself as myriad sentient beings, each of which forgets his identity with the cosmos and takes his individual role to be his real self. The object of this differentiation game is to remember the cosmic self – which cannot be truly remembered (experienced) unless it has been forgotten! So here too we have the One renouncing its omniscience in order to rediscover it. The equivalent in the Joycean myth is the felix culpa, ‘fortunate fall’ or ‘happy fault.’

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of my covenant between me and the earth.… the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.

— Genesis 9.13-15 (KJV)

There can be no rainbow without the rain (as well as the sun), no covenant (and no Ark) without the Flood. The bow is the sign of creative tention (Chapter 3).

Seeing things

We see what we focus on: what we see distinguishes itself from the visual field: the dynamic object determines the sign to determine its interpretant. Cognition begins by making distinctions; recognition continues with emergence of relations among things, now that things have emerged from the scene.

A road is made by people walking on it; things are so because they are called so.

— Chuangtse 2 (Watson 1968, 40)

The chaotic background murmur and crackle of neurons firing, cells doing what they muddily must to stay alive, organizes itself into definite rhythmic patterns, and lo, forms emerge and begin to branch. Presence parts from itself and proliferates as the branches take names. But a metaphor can reverse the process by unmaking a familiar distinction, revealing a richer and stranger relationship. By thus renewing our vision, metaphors ‘literally create new objects’ (Jaynes 1976, 50) – immediate objects. Naming is creation, metaphor recreation. “A road” is a metaphor: a road is made by people walking on it; things are so because they are called so.

Nature’s imagination

Life imitates art. We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.

— John M. Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan” (Saturday Review, 1967)

Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature’s imagination is richer than ours.

— Freeman Dyson, ‘The Scientist as Rebel’, in Cornwell (ed.), Nature’s Imagination

The process of natural design, it seems, will routinely outrun the imaginings of human theorists.

— Andy Clark (1997, 97)

Do you mind?

As the sole Reader of the Book, you are entrusted with its meaning. Just so, according to Rumi, Adam was entrusted with the naming of all beings, and humanity was entrusted with all creation.

You are an ocean of knowledge hidden in a dew drop, a world concealed in [a few feet] of body.… So man is in form a branch of the world, but in attribute the world’s foundation.… Whatever appears within him is His reflection, like the moon in a stream.… The Prophet said, ‘He who knows himself knows his Lord.’

— Rumi (Chittick 1983, 64-5)

Continue reading Do you mind?

Enough already

Creation is always also destructive – especially if we suppose that the universe is created out of nothing. Talk about disturbing the peace!

And why not let matters rest there? For this way of talking surely says everything we want to say, and everything that can be said. But we wish to say that it can also be put differently; and that is important.

— Wittgenstein (1930, 84)

Peirce on imagination

When a man desires ardently to know the truth, his first effort will be to imagine what that truth can be. He cannot prosecute his pursuit long without finding that imagination unbridled is sure to carry him off the track. Yet nevertheless, it remains true that there is, after all, nothing but imagination that can ever supply him an inkling of the truth. He can stare stupidly at phenomena; but in the absence of imagination they will not connect themselves together in any rational way.

— Peirce (CP 1.46, c. 1896)