What is their origin? The big ideas, the groundbreaking inventions, the great leaps forward in art or poetry or music?
This article and two related articles on Suite 101 (Seeking Innovation from Tradition and Spirit and Experience) explore answers to the age-old question: what is the source of creativity and inspiration?
Considering these answers, these various theories on the “wellspring of the muse”, could help you think about your own creative instincts and how to nurture them.
This article looks at why generations have considered the source of creativity as an important question, and considers the idea that inspiration comes from within, either from a spiritual source or from the physical workings of the brain.
“Seeking Innovation from Tradition” presents arguments that creativity is primarily externally generated, by our environment and through accumulated knowledge and tradition.
“Spirit and Experience” looks at theories combining internal and external approaches to creativity, in particular links between creativity and memory, as well as insights gained through the Buddhist practice of “mindfulness meditation”.
“Why Ask?” and the Greek Tradition
The Muses in Greek mythology were nine sisters who sparked creativity in human beings. The word “music” is linked to “muse”, and musicians and artists across the centuries have felt supported—or abandoned—by their “muses”.
A visit from the muse is seen as something different from merely a fresh approach or a good idea. It is that good idea manifest, made through art in whatever form into something that commands attention.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Collins, 1996) expresses why people are interested in the roots and operation of creativity. “When we are involved in it, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life.”
Creativity Comes From Within
Brother to the Muses was Apollo, the god of light. In the essay Mnemosyne and Apollo: The Role of Memory in Musical Creativity, American composer Joseph Dillon Ford links Apollonian mythology to art forms such as “classical” music, tonal music of “expressive beauty” and “clarity”, which “even after the advent of Christianity in the West was still believed to be inspired by a transcendent intelligence existing beyond the confines of the artist’s personal consciousness.”
Those who consider that creativity comes from within believe in either a spiritual or a physical (brain or mind) source, or sometimes both.
In her book Walking in This World (London: Rider, 2002), Julia Cameron comments that “creativity is a spiritual rather than an intellectual endeavour”.
Other would argue that the source is in the brain, mind or subconscious, or at least channelled through it. Varela, Thomson and Rosche in their book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1991) observe a popular loss of faith in “reason” and an accompanying rise in belief in a “developmentally and symbolically primitive subconscious”.
There are many examples of creative innovators, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Allen Ginsberg, who have experimented with the impact of mind-altering substances on their work. Less interventionist are artists such as Julia Cameron who link creative ideas with exercise and in particular with walking.
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