Defining Creativity

If it was possible to define creativity in any meaningful way, restrictions would have to be placed on the idea, in order to contextualize it within bounds. How to isolate creativity? If it was possible to isolate creativity, then creativity itself would not be necessary.

Creativity is so ubiquitous throughout in the human condition that it isn’t helpful to ask “what actually is creativity”? A more effective question is “what actually isn’t classed as creativity”? That is a more creative question – the question of creativity requires a creative answer.

• Creativity is not a response to a challenge where everything that needs to be said or done is known in advance. In other words, creativity is not the ability to follow instructions.
• An antonym of “creation” is “destruction”. But destruction can be creative as well as destructive, as I’ll discuss later on at some point
• Creativity is not a polar opposite of logical reasoning. Some people think it is.
• Creativity does not answer questions without there being a context within which other solutions a possible. Creativity is not the realm of 100% possibilities.
• Creativity is not realistically confined to dictionary definitions  or encyclopaedic entries, especially not Open Source Software platforms like Wikipedia.
• Creativity is not an idea to be applied in financial accounting. This could land you in prison!

The best way to deal with the question of creativity is not to ask what it is, but rather what it is not. How creative was this post? The answer to this question is another question:  How creative are you? This is both a question and an answer. A creative person can work out how this post relates to creativity, because to ask what doesn’t come under the banner of creativity was paradoxical enough to be classed as creativity. There is indeed a relationship between paradox and creativity, which will be elaborated on at some future point. Although creativity is not universally paradoxical, and in fact paradox may be just one form of creativity, but there is a strong connection between the two. Creativity most definitely is about making connections between things, especially the right things.

People Need to be Creative

Members of the scientific community stereotype creative people as hippies and air-heads. It’s just not true. All kinds of people from all walks of life can be described as creative. What these people need to realise is that there are different types of intelligence. Also, it is quite common for successful scientists responsible for breakthroughs to say that they sought out inspiration from artistic sources, such as poems for example.

People need to be creative. Poetry is an arena for people to exercise their creativity in harmless ways. Poetry is perfectly harmless and satisfying to write, especially when confined within the bounds of meter and verse form. Creativity can be dangerous when expressed in real life situations and can be very destructive, especially when things don’t go to plan. How creativity is exercised is therefore very important and there is a need for society to start giving this more thought. Poetry is an arena or people to express their creativity in harmless ways.

There is, however, a more serious side to poetry. Poems from celebrated poets are subject to rigorous and sometimes brutal critiques from academics. The suspicion here however is that the academics are analysing aspects of writing that didn’t concern the poets enough to give such aspects any attention to detail.

One important aspect of poetry is subtlety. Amateur poets find subtlety very difficult to achieve, especially when trying to write poems in a particular verse form. Consequently, Free Verse has become very fashionable amongst amateur poets. This is especially noticeable in the world of blog poetry. There are thousands of poetry blogs out there, most of which from my own personal experience seems to comprise mainly of Free Verse endeavours.

Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with Free Verse, but my own personal view is that the very challenge of poetry, and indeed the very vehicle on the path to creativity, is being forced to conform to meters and verse forms.

Cultivating literature

Text flows, ideas flow, objects flow. Generally, things just seem to flow. Time flows too but perhaps not in the way we think it does. This blog will flow eventually, once I get the wheels in motion and the cogs turning properly. What about abstract flows? Abstract flows are intangible flows emerging from the infinity of the human imagination. These flows do not exist unless someone is there to notice them. Even then they have to be interpreted, and quite often the interpretation is the responisbility of the readers, the audience, as opposed to the author. The author of course will have their own interpretation of what they write, and their interpretation of what they write will influence what the write.

In addtion to flows (of various types), ideas can pile up on themselves. Please note I’m being very metaphorical when I talk about flows. Very metaphorical. Also, this is a random post. The product of this page is coming about live, real time, with no drafting or re-drafting or anything like that. This will change in future posts.

Change is a flow, and flow is a change. Change and flow are one and the same thing. The letters in this text change from one letter to the next. Flow, and therefore change, can be horizontal, as well as vertical and, actually, pretty much any direction between these. It is maybe more appropriate to quote direction of change in degrees as opposed to up,down,left,right. Degrees here, of course, refers to some form of metaphorical direction measured in fictional metaphorical degrees, analogous to the real mathematical version.

The future structure of this blog will be exactly that – it will have a consistent structure. According to WordPress, consistency is very important in blogging. I shall try to be just that. I will consistently discuss topics such as concrete writing in all from all kinds of areas from poetry to logic. I will discuss my own philosophy and  science generally. I have my own philosophy without ever having studied philosophy formally. I hope to offer unique perspectives as a result. I am also interested in the recursive structure of nature. Recursion appears every in life, from life itself to computer programming.

Above all, I like to cultivate literature – my own and other sources of literature. What do I mean by this? You will hopefully find out over time.

The Glorification of Specialist Knowledge

“Expertise” is not a tangible concept. As important as they are, it is an abstraction used to glorify people who profess specialist knowledge in specific areas.

Western societies really do become confused with their over reliance on the expertise of a few individuals. From personal observation, this seems to be on the increase and the question is one of whether or not we need to be concerned about it, and if so what to do about it.

As individuals we are very smart but collectively we concede that this is not the case. We all individually need to take the utmost responsibility for our actions when we are capable of doing so. This means taking responsibility for personal development and the development of skills etc..

When health complaints arise, the expertise of clinicians are most welcome. Welcome also are the computer experts of both hardware and software when malfunction takes place. Researchers in academia do a most splendid job expanding the frontiers of human knowledge and the application of such.

This is not an attack on people with specialist knowledge. On the contrary, this is call to the people to not become experts on experts, but to become experts for themselves. The development of specialist skills is a truly wonderful thing and no amount of ridicule should be directed to such an idea whatsoever.

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