Brewster Ghiselin

"The desired new order implicit in the stir of indeterminate activity cannot be seized in the abstract: it must crystallize in terms of some medium in which the worker is adept. Without craft it will escape." [pg. 25]

"All finished productions have the simplicity of order, which reveals itself rather than its origins." [pg. 29]

"Even the most energetic and original mind, in order to reorganize or extend human insight in any valuable way, must have attained more than ordinary mastery of the field in which it is to act, a strong sense of what needs to be done, and skill in the appropriate means of expression. It seems certain that no significant expansion of insight can be produced otherwise, whether the activity is thought of as work or not." [pg. 29]

"Often an untutored beauty appears in the drawings of children, and we rightly prize the best of them because they have wholeness of motive, but they have scarcely the power to open the future for us. For that, the artist must labor to the limit of human development and then take a step beyond. The same is true for every sort of creative worker."

". . . . a dim cloud of an idea which I feel must be condensed into a shower of words." [pg. 14]
Stephen Spender

"Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence."
William Butler Yeats
Last Poems and Plays

"The state of imaginative muddled suspense which precedes successful inductive generalization." [pg.14]
Alfred North Whitehead

". . . . The earliest effort may seem to involve a commerce with disorder. For the creative order which is an extension of life, is not an elaboration of the established, but a movement beyond the established, or at the least a reorganization of it and often of elements not included in it. [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 14]

"The first need is therefore to transcend the old order. Before any new order can be defined, the absolute power of the established, the hold upon us of what we know and are, must be broken. New life comes always from outside our world, as we commonly conceive that world. This is the reason why in order to invent, one must yield to the indeterminate within him, or, more precisely, to certain ill-defined impulses which seem to be of the very texture of the ungoverned fullness which John Livingston Lowes calls "the surging chaos of the unexpressed. Chaos and disorder are perhaps the wrong terms for that indeterminate fullness and activity of the inner life. For it is organic, dynamic, full of tension and tendency. What is absent from it, except in the decisive act of creation, is determination, fixity, any commitment to one resolution or another of the whole complex of its tensions. It is a working sea of indecision. . . . But if it were without order of some kind it would be without life." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 14]

"A state of complete suspense." [pg. 14]
Isadora Duncan

"This state in no way involves or suggests irresolution. Paradoxically it often appears as an enhancement of certainty." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 15]]

"It is as if the mind delivered from preoccupation with particulars were given into secure possession of its whole substance and activity." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 15]]

"The invention may appear spontaneously and without apparent preliminaries, sometimes in the form of a mere glimpse serving as a clue, or like a germ to be developed; sometimes as fragment of the whole, whether rudimentary and requiring to be worked into shape or already in its final form; sometimes essentially complete, though needing expansion, verification, or the like. [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 15]]

". . . . to deny that artistic creation involves problems and purposes would be to admit that an artist creates without premeditation, without design, under a spell. Therefore if an artist boasted to me of having written a story without a previously settled design, but by inspiration, I should call him a lunatic." [pg. 16]
Anton Checkhov

"Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which come from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours." [pg. 16]
Henri PoincarÚ

". . . . the steps, for my fable, placed themselves with a prompt and, as it were, functional assurance--an air quite as of readiness to have dispensed with logic had I been in fact too stupid for my clue."
Henry James in his preface to 'The Ambassadors'

"As for me, who now draw my narrative to a close, to plunge, voluntarily, into limitless adventure (the word 'plunge' being used advisedly), I will not conceal my native and comprehensive understanding of the old man's restless unease and dislike of any fixed habitation. For do I not know unease and dislike of any fixed habitation. For do I not know the feeling? To me too has not unrest been ordained, have not I too been endowed with a heart which knoweth not repose? The story-teller's star--is it not the moon, lord of the road, the wanderer, who moves in his stations, one after another, freeing himself from each? For the story-teller makes many a station, roving and relating, but pauses only tentwise, awaiting further directions, and soon feels his heart beating high, partly with desire, partly too from fear and anguish of the flesh, but in any case as a sign that he must take the road, towards fresh adventures which are to be painstakingly lived through, down to their remotest details, according to the restless spirit's will."
Thomas Mann near the end of the meditations which introduce his story of Joseph.

"The restlessness of the inventor is unending because he is an adept in realization, he has an inordinate appetite for discovery and the ability to satisfy it." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 18]

"He is often a specialist, with less psychic inertia than the average man, and sometimes, with less stability. But he is not inclined, as some imagine, to mere wandering, to dizzy excursions away from the determinate. . . . He is drawn by the unrealized toward realization. His job is, as Wordsworth says, "the widening the sphere of human sensibility. . . . the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe." He works toward clarification, toward consciousness. That opposition between the conscious and the unconscious activities in creation which we have noticed is only superficial, or rather is only initial. The new order which creation is concerned with has an affinity for consciousness." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 18]

"I do believe that a poet should know all he can. No subject is alien to him, and the profounder his knowledge in any direction, the more depth will there be to his poetry. I believe he should be thoroughly grounded in both the old and the new poetic forms, but I am firmly convinced that he must never respect tradition above his intuitive self. Let him be sure of his own sincerity above all, let him bow to no public acclaim, however alluring, and then let him write with all courage what his subconsciouss mind suggests to him."
Amy Lowell
"The Process of Making Poetry" from Poetry and Poets.

"Likewise in pure science the end is not novelty, but use. Neither in art nor in science is the use always anticipated. Application of a scientific truth to narrowly practical purposes may even never occur, and it often follows long after the discovery. But it is evident that in both art and science the inventor is to some degree incited and guided by a sense of value in the end sought, something very much like an intimation of usefulness." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 20]

". . . . .mathematicians have insisted on the importance of esthetic emotion as a guide in mathematical invention, among them Herni Poincaré', who has stated that what serves to bring certain ones (only the most useful) of all the teeming unconscious elements into the focus of the mathematician's attention is their power to affect his esthetic sensibility." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 20]

"In thus emphasizing the creative worker's dependence on affective guides rather than on any explicit intellectual process, the mathematicians are in essential agreement with the artists: William Butler Yeats believed that instinct led him to choose one subject rather than another; Willa Cather has said that the deeper sympathies dictate the choice. In all this it is clear that creative minds feel drawn toward specific material with which to work: the creative impulse is no mere appetite for novelty, for it is highly selective. It is so even when governed by no explicit idea of its end. The selection is evidence of an implicit end, however, to the nature of which the emotion is for a time the only clue. It is like the disturbance at the surface of the water which betokens activity beneath. The end to be reached, then, in any creative process, is not whatever solid or silly issue the ego or accident may decree but some specific order urged upon the mind by something inherent in its own vital condition of being and perception, yet nowhere in view." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 20]

"The fact is that the mind in creation and in preparation for it nearly always requires some management." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 21]

"The larger objects of management are two: discovering the clue that suggests the development to be sought, that intimates the creative end to be reached, and assuring a certain and economical movement toward that end. The indispensable condition of success in either stage of production is that freedom from the established schemes of consciousness the importance of which I have already pointed out. It is essential to remember that the creative end is never in full sight at the beginning and that it is brought wholly into view only when the process of creation is completed. It is not to be found by scrutiny of the conscious scene, because it is never there. . . . . What is necessary is to be able to look into the wings where the action is not yet organized, and to feel the importance of what is happening off stage. It may not seem to be much. . . . . no matter how meager, dull, disorderly and fragmentary the off-stage action, it must be attended to." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 21]

"Henry James describes the germinal trivia from which his stories developed as typically minute and superficially bare, but extraordinarily rich in their intimations of developments to be revealed. The very slightness of such elements is a guard against their taking the focus of attention or forcing a finished pattern upon the mind. On the other hand, it has the disadvantage of making them elusive. One must learn to seize and hold them without insistence, letting them agitate the mind when and as they may and make their own development, relinquishing them as they fade or fail or effect and taking upon others to be cherished without attachment in the same way, shaping the expression of the growing insight critically--that is, consciously and rationally, drawing upon all resources of craft and understanding-- in so far as that may be done without arresting spontaneous developments always preserving the stir of the excited mind out of which the development issues." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 25]

"Among the conditions to which every inventor must submit is the necessity for patience. The development desired may have to be waited for, even though its character has been clearly intimated." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 26]

T.S. Eliot in his introduction to the Selected Poems of Marianne Moore: "For a mind of such agility, and for a sensibility so reticent, the minor subject, such as a pleasant little sand-colored skipping animal, may be the best release for the major emotions. Only the pedantic literalist could consider the subject-matter to be trivial; the triviality is in himself. We all have to choose whatever subject-matter allows us the most powerful and most secret release; and that is a personal affair."

"Two important stages in it [the creative process] are predominantly conscious and critical, and in these the will properly functions. It is of use in that preliminary labor, or sometimes less burdensome preparation, without which there can be no significant creative activity, and in the work of verification, correction, or revision that ordinarily follows the more radical inventive activity and completes or refines its product. A great deal of the work necessary to equip and activate the mind for the spontaneous part of invention must be done consciously and with an effort of will. Mastering accumulated knowledge, gathering new facts, observing, exploring, experimenting, developing technique and skill, sensibility, and discrimination, are all more or less conscious and voluntary activities. The sheer labor of preparing technically for creative work, consciously acquiring the requisite knowledge of a medium and skill in its use, is extensive and arduous enough to repel many from achievement. Creative workers reporting their processes of production often inadvertently conceal the amount of conscious and voluntary work by their failure to stress it or to consider it in much detail, probably because so much of it belongs primarily or even entirely to the special disciplines of the worker's field and is thought of as wholly a matter of craft or technique. " [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 28]

"Management of the medium becomes more complex, and the technical processes merge indissolubly with the creative process, as soon as the use of substances and forms begins to be guided by a sense of their sufficiency or insufficiency in formulating insights and attitudes. Though the technical component of such work remains ponderable in itself, it is not completely understandable except as a part of the creative process." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 28]

"Freed of every irrelevance, especially the sweat and litter of the workroom, the work of thought or art or ritual stands as the simple formula of a subjective action. The impression it gives of unlabored force is not to be trusted. There are no certain grounds for disbelieving in the difficulty of any process of invention. [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 29]

"Every genuinely creative worker must attain in one way or another such full understanding of his medium and such skill, ingenuity, and flexibility in handling it that he can make fresh use of it to construct a device which, when used skillfully by others, will organize their experience in the way that his own experience was organized in the moment of expanded insight. Among the users of his device may be the inventor himself, who may recover the configurations of his insight in this way, though not the full activity out of which they were crystallized. His device may even fail to remind him of his labor." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 29]

"All finished productions have the simplicity of order, which reveals itself rather than its origins." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 29]

"Even the most energetic and original mind, in order to reorganize or extend human insight in any valuable way, must have attained more than ordinary mastery of the field in which it is to act, a strong sense of what needs to be done, and skill in the appropriate means of expression. It seems certain that no significant expansion of insight can be produced otherwise, whether the activity is thought of as work or not." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 29]

"Often an untutored beauty appears in the drawings of children, and we rightly prize the best of them because they have wholeness of motive, but they have scarcely the power to open the future for us. For that, the artist must labor to the limit of human development and then take a step beyond. The same is true for every sort of creative worker." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 29]

"The step beyond is stimulated by labor upon the limits of attainment." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 29]

"The secret developments that we call unconscious because they complete themselves without our knowledge and the other spontaneous activities that go forward without foresight yet in full consciousness are induced and focused by intense conscious effort spent upon the material to be developed or in the area to be illuminated. Though the tension of conscious striving tends to overdetermine psychic activity, to narrow and fix it, such tension gives stimulation and direction to the unconscious activity which goes on after the tension is released. The desired developments are usually delayed for some time, during which presumably something like incubation is going on and attention may be profitably turned to something else. Then without warning the solution or the germinal insight may appear. This was the usual experience of Henri PoincarÚ and of many others. But tough "inspiration" may be produced by such conscious labors, by what Katherine Mansfield called "terrific hard gardening," the procedure is not always successful; problems may remain unsolved, insights undeveloped, no matter how much effort is given to them." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 29]

"Although the work that tests, refines, and consolidates what is attained in moments of inspiration is not likely to be, in the arts at least, all conscious calculation, it is largely so. Its object both in art and in intellectual invention, is to make sure that the product is really serviceable." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 30]

"We must expect to live the orderly ways we have invented continually conscious of the imminence of change." [Brewster Ghiselin - pg. 31]