Sunday, November 9, 2014

Inspiration Sunday

Hope you had a very good week last week and these quotes get you going for creating next week.

I have quotes today from Rollo May from his book The Courage to Create mainly from the chapter, Creativity and the Unconscious.  And, I have some interesting art to accompany these quotes today.  Perhaps to pose the question; can meaningful art and dogmatism co-exist?

genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it.  In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. . . . "Creativity," to rephrase our definitions, "is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world."

A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what he or she consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born.

Carl Jung often made the paint that there is a polarity, a kind of opposition, between unconscious experience and consciousness.  He believed the relationship was compensatory:  consciousness controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the unconscious, while the unconscious keeps consciousness from drying up in banal, empty, arid rationality.

The moment the insight broke through, there was a special translucence that enveloped the world, and my vision was given a special clarity.

Kim Jong-un

This is one aspect of what is called ecstasy--the uniting of unconscious experience with consciousness, a union that is not in abstracto, but a dynamic, immediate fusion.

. . . . insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation.  It comes at a break in periods of voluntary effort.
Stalin
The experience that "this is the way reality is and isn't it strange we didn't see it sooner" may have a religious quality with artists.  This is why many artists feel that something holy is going on when they paint, that there is something in the act of creating which is like a religious revelation.

[if we] lose this free, original creativity of the spirit as it is exemplified in poetry and music and art, we shall also lose our scientific creativity.  Scientists themselves . . . . have told us that the creativity of science is bound up with the freedom of human beings to create in the free, pure sense.
Franco
Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators.  He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power.
Chavez

Dogmatists of all kinds - scientific, economic, moral, as well as political - are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist.  This is necessarily and inevitably so.  We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems.  For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by its very nature, a threat to rationality and external control.


Hope your Sunday is everything you want it to be.  I will see you tomorrow or Tuesday, depending on how much I have stacked up tomorrow.

'Til then!
~Alex