Wonder, Creativity and Knowledge

Metcalfe - Wonder, Creativity and Knowledge - JCRT 1.3

Wonder, Creativity and Knowledge

Andrew W. Metcalfe
University of New South Wales

Grace

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth

day of life and love and wings:and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)‘’ '.

now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened’

-- e.e. cummings, 1994: 167, ellipsis added

I spent yesterday searching for where to start this article. Although I’d gone to the computer inspired, the rhythm failed and the words sounded false and forced. I countered this dispirited feeling with a renewed determination to find ‘the right starting point’, believing, crazily, that I couldn’t begin writing without it. As the discarded sentences continued to pile, however, I began taking their failure personally, splitting my attention between the problem of the starting point and the larger problem of me: why couldn’t I find where to start? My concern had initially been the intuition buzzing in my gut but now it shifted to a concern with the place where I should have been, and with this shift my failings and problems began multiplying, like the brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I could no longer hold a thought steadily. I was everywhere else, with nothing to hold me, no feeling of depth or resonance or belonging. My breathing was fast and shallow, as if I hadn’t time to breathe, as if I didn’t want the air inside me, as if it didn’t belong to me.

> The respiratory rhythm can acquire such a degree of interior manifestation that one can say: ‘I am all breathing.’ [Tr. This translation is but a feeble approximation of the German expression ‘Es atmet mich,’ literally ‘It breathes me.’ In other words, the world comes to breathe within me; I participate in the good breathing of’ the world; I am plunged into a breathing world. Everything breathes in the world’] (Schultz, quoted in Bachelard, 1971: 179).

Gratitude

Einstein was once asked, ‘What’s the most important question you can ask in life?’ And his answer was, ‘Is the universe a friendly place or not?’ ’ I tell my students that every time you see angels mentioned in the Bible you should think Einstein, because you’re dealing with the same issue. It’s the ultimate cosmological issue. Can we trust the cosmos? Is the cosmos benign? (Fox and Sheldrake, 1996: 12)

> ‘And’ is the decisive word in give-and-take. Mere giving is as lifeless as mere taking. If you merely take a breath and stop there, you are dead. And when you merely breathe out and stop there, you are also dead. Life is not giving or taking, but give-and-take. Breathing is an obvious example, but the same give-and-take can be found wherever there is life. It is the dynamic expression of universal belonging. (1984: 199)

Wonder

Artistic activity makes the artist aware that he is not the author of his works.’

This ’ age-old experience of inspiration ’ takes on exceptional weight when one asks oneself whether enthusiasm or possession are not concealed at the heart of all activity, even beneath the primordial activity of consciousness and language; whether a delirium more profound than thought does not support thought; whether language which claims to be act and origin ’ is not an inveterate passivity, the endless reiteration of an old old story, without beginning or end (Levinas, 1989: 151)

The wonderful

[In Fra Angelico’s painting, the] Angel for Vigils wears a dark scarlet garment and holds his horn as if he were ready to blow, but he is not yet blowing. His left hand makes a strange gesture that signals, ‘Wait; not yet.’ His eyes are turned upward. He waits in that reverent silence out of which every genuine sound must come. This angel personifies the expectant listening attitude that precedes genuine word or song.’ (Steindl-Rast, 1998: 24)

> a void which swells in the already said; a void which is determined in the sense that the one who is about to speak knows that there is something other and more to be said than what has already been said, but nothing positive beyond that fact, beyond the fact that it is not said by what has already been said. (Castoriadis, 1984: 132)

Annunciation

At the moment of the Annunciation, Fra Angelico gives his angel wings that are banded in rainbow colours… A man can only guess at the reality of a woman’s conception, via the imperfect analog of what happens with language: when an author thinks that he has something to say, before speaking or writing, his body, as if filled with love, becomes uplifted and vibrates like a rainbow. He doesn’t yet know where his idea will settle, or in which direction it will go, or in what shades it will be coloured. The bodily state which precedes the emergence of an idea in spoken form begins in an aurora borealis, a kind of totality shaped liked an opened-out fan, accompanied by such an emotion that the body experiences the word ‘emotion’ itself as that movement of soaring flight, enraptured and suspended, to which it refers. Hence these wings which beat like those of a bird fluttering over a fixed point without yet having decided on a direction, and which are shaded in every possible colour, of which, at the end, only one will remain. That is what intuition sees before the thing actually comes into sight. (Serres, 1995: 109; original ellipsis)

Knowledge and Mystery

Our Western culture which is famous for its activism has very underdeveloped muscles of receptivity. We tend to fill this hole with junk because we’re afraid of the dark or, if you will, afraid of nothingness. (Sheldrake and Fox, 1996: 126)

> the reality of the process of writing: a small glimmer illuminates the initial moment of creativity - next to the writer, outside of him, outside of his body, his pen, his page, his table… Who is the shadow that holds it? Is this an angelic figure that resembles him like a brother? Is it a demon seeking to put him to death? Or is it the owner of a storehouse or treasury in which he can fish, before then, in turn, taking his place as an intermediary?

Notes

I would like to thank my friend and colleague Ann Game, as well as Jane Ussher and Anita, Leo and Max Sibrits.

References

Bachelard, G. (1971) The Poetics of Reverie. Tr. D. Russell. Boston: Beacon.

Bataille, G. (1985) Visions of Excess. Tr. A. Stoekl, C.R. Lovitt and D.M. Leslie. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Caillois, R. (1984) ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’. Tr. J. Shepley. October, 31: 17-32.

Castoriadis, C. (1984) Crossroads in the Labyrinth. Tr. K. Soper and M.H. Ryle. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society. Tr. K. Blamey. Cambridge: Polity.

Cixous, H. (1988) Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of H’l’ne Cixous. Ed. S. Sellers. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Crites, S. (1989) ‘The Narrative Quality of Experience’, in S. Hauerwas and L.G. Jones (eds), Why Narrative? Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.

Cummings, E.E. (1994) Selected Poems. Ed. R.S. Kennedy. New York: Liveright

De Certeau, M. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dillard, A. (1989) The Writing Life. New York: Harper & Row.

Duran Ryan, C. and Lobel, A. (1986) Hildilid’s Night. New York: Macmillan.

Eliade, M. (1971) The Myth of Eternal Return. Tr. W.R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fox, M. and Sheldrake, R. (1996) The Physics of Angels. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Irigaray, L. (1993) An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Tr. C. Burke and G.C. Gill. London: Athlone.

Levinas, E. (1989) The Levinas Reader. Ed. S. Hand. Oxford: Blackwell.

McNiff, S. (1995) Earth Angels. Boston: Shambhala.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1974) Phenomenology, Language and Sociology. Ed. J. O’Neill. London: Heinemann.

Serres, M. (1995) Angels: A Modern Myth. Tr. F. Cowper. Paris: Flammarion.

Sheldrake, R. and Fox, M. (1996) Natural Grace. London: Bloomsbury.

Steindl-Rast, D. (1984) Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer. New York: Paulist Press.

Steindl-Rast, D. with S. Lebell (1989) Music of Silence. Berkeley, CA.: Seastone.

Andrew Metcalfe teaches Sociology at the University of New South Wales. With his colleague Ann Game he published Passionate Sociology in 1996, and they have just completed a new book, Doing Nothing and Other Ways of Being.

2000 Andrew W. Metcalfe. All rights reserved.
Updated 07/28/21 .
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