In an early radio report of the recent upstate New York prison break, the reporter made a point of emphasizing that Governor Cuomo “seemed truly impressed” with the sheer accomplishment of the escape. Vicious murderers they may be, the governor seemed to think, but you have to admire the creativity. There was a touch of reproof in the reporter’s surprise at the governor’s attitude, as if it seemed wrong somehow to see hardened criminals as creative.
But the meaning of the word “create” is to “bring (something) into existence. Cause (something) to happen as a result of one’s actions.” Note that there is nothing in that definition about the virtue of what is created.
No doubt those convicts were exercising creativity in escaping. (We even have the term “escape artists.”) They were creating freedom for themselves. The trouble is, their creativity also created fear for people living in the area.
What’s a creative solution for you may be be a problem for me. The very creativity of an argument you make in town meeting advocating buying a new fire truck , including the charm with which you make it, becomes a problem for me if I think spending that money would be bad for the town (or for me). My creativity is in producing a compelling counter-argument.
The most infamous of all solutions, the Nazi “final solution”, is laden with such horrible irony that it is forever banished for non-ironic use. But it was definitely creative. Its perps brought something new into the world, even now widely seen as a previously unimaginable sort of social engineering. And a solution that was a big problem for the rest of the world to solve.
But bad creativity is not limited to the non-artistic sort.
The creativity of art itself—the stuff of museums and concert halls—is not necessarily good. The trouble with the common “art appreciation” approach is the tendency to see all art as one of the “finer things” of life, all on the good side of the ledger. So what do we do with D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”? It is both honored as an innovative, creative early film; and deplored as a thoroughly racist celebration of the KKK.
Some art pushes the world in this direction, some pushes it in that direction.
All artists—at least those we end up talking about— may be creative in bringing something new into the world, but they hardly regard everything fellow writers produce as good or valuable. Hemingway paid tribute to his hero novelist Joseph Conrad by way of sacrificing the famous poet T.S. Eliot: “If I knew that by grinding Mr. Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Mr. Conrad’s grave Mr. Conrad would shortly appear, looking very annoyed at the forced return and commence writing, I would leave for London early tomorrow morning with a sausage grinder.”
Mary McCarthy, famous novelist and critic, about Lillian Hellman, famous playwright: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
Sartre said that “ hell is other people.” But other writers provide a certain amount of the reason to write for a lot of writers, their own creativity sparked by the need to correct (if not obliterate) that of fellow writers.
Hemingway didn’t as I remember say anything negative about his famous contemporary Faulkner, but Hem’s short, clipped, exclusive sentences and Faulkner’s long, rolling, inclusive sentences implicitly duked it out for marketshare of hearts and minds.
Like other forms of creativity, art too is down in life’s trenches.
No Comments