acts of creation

Well bless me, there is sun out there and blue sky. Kimmie sent me an e-mail, two floors below her (she can do that now), commenting on the beauty of the sunlight touching the orange leaves of the maples on the boulevard. The deluge is over.

Yesterday I had the fun of receiving a book in the mail. If you order enough books online, you don't know what has arrived until you open it, which gives the experience more of a Christmas feeling--it's fun! It was a used book, not a purchase from Amazon. I saw a Chicago postmark, but didn't remember what book I had bought from there--and didn't want to remember. I tore open the envelope, and unwrapped the hardcover book, which someone had carefully shrouded in pages of the Chicago Sun-Times' sports and metro sections. Then it was revealed: a compact, quite pristine 1969 copy of Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation--a book I'd forgotten altogether that I'd bought.

I subjected it to my usual process for receiving a used book: I carefully wiped down its (surprisingly intact) dustjacket with a damp cloth to remove the grubbiness and organic flecks that accrete on book covers. This made the book feel clean and new. Then I inscribed my name and the month and year on the inside.

I forget now exactly what prompted me to buy the book. It may have been part of my research into the phenomenon of identity. In this book Koestler examines the psychological phenomenon of creativity, more specifically the event of creation: the individual creative act. Where do new ideas come from? How are they formed or discovered?

These questions fascinate me for several reasons. For one thing, I'm a creative type. I'm interested to know more about this aspect of myself. For another, I want to look into the mysterious borderline between the mechanical and the free. For as living beings, we are combinations of the two: the great majority of the processes of our lives happen automatically, by reflex. But floating on that automatic flow is a free agent, an entity who chooses--and who creates. Where is the border between the automatic and the free? How does it work? How does it change? I expect Koestler to examine those questions.

Then there is the fact that creation, in the words of religious scholar Mircea Eliade, is "the divine act par excellence." Creation is finally the prerogative of the gods. When we humans create, we partake of the divine.

The kicker for me was the fact that I had so enjoyed Koestler's later book The Ghost in the Machine, actually the third book in a trilogy of which The Act of Creation is the second book (the first is The Sleepwalkers--a copy of which I've owned since 1986 but have not yet read!). I've talked about The Ghost in the Machine before. I found his ideas powerful and persuasive. I admired his boldness and originality as a thinker, as well as the clarity, vividness, and passion of his prose--that interesting and humbling phenomenon of the foreign-born (Hungarian in this case) writer taking up English and beating most native writers in its use. As an explicator of scientific ideas, he belongs in the pantheon along with (in my opinion) Isaac Asimov. (Interesting side-note: all the writers I've mentioned here--Koestler, Eliade, and Asimov--were polymaths and creators whose works spanned both fiction and nonfiction in various fields; plus they were all of East European birth, with Eliade born in Romania and Asimov in Russia.)

In The Ghost in the Machine Koestler developed the powerful new idea of the holon--a unit of spontaneous organization in an "open hierarchical system", which means any "system", including especially living organisms, that behaves in organized, purposive ways. In this theory, any such system is made up of relatively autonomous parts, which in turn are made up of other complex and relatively autonomous parts, and so on down the line. For example, we, as living beings, are made up of organs. The brain is a relatively coherent unit, although it forms only a part of the whole person; likewise the heart and the stomach. But the brain is made up of substructures, each of which has its own comparative autonomy within the system. There are structures specifically devoted to processing visual information, and for coordinating balance, and regulating speech, and so on. Thus, each "part" is also, from another perspective, a "whole" in its own right. In Koestler's terms, each is a holon: a neologism signifying something that is a "whole-part".

I've taken up Koestler's holons as part of my own developing theory of identity. Another thing I enjoyed about The Ghost in the Machine was how Koestler did not merely suggest a few new ideas, he boldly explored their implications as far as he could. He developed a whole system. In short, he took the ball and ran with it all the way to the end-zone: no timid half-steps for him. The book does not stretch a couple of thoughts into book length; it is a banquet of well-worked-out ideas, a feast--and I love that.

Given the author and the subject-matter, I have every reason to expect much enjoyment from my "new" used book. I started it yesterday at tea-time. So far, so good.

the dead hand

Coming down a bit early today to do my post. Rain drips down from a drenched cotton-batting sky. Kimmie's office is having a barbecue at a coworker's house. I'll be heading up in due course, so I wanted to take care of this, and also get some afternoon reading in before attending the gathering.

I've been meaning to do a post based on the powerful and chilling term dead hand. Here is my faithful Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition:

dead hand 2: the oppressive influence of the past

The term swam up into my mind when I was writing something a few weeks ago. When I looked it up I was surprised at its strength. The oppressive influence of the past is a vast topic, and, phrased that way, also chilling.

It feels very relevant to the writer of historical fiction. One question I sometimes ask myself is, Why write (or read) historical fiction? Robert McKee's answer (in his storytelling text Story):

Many contemporary antagonisms are so distressing or loaded with controversy that it's difficult to dramatize them in a present-day setting without alienating the audience. Such dilemmas are often best viewed at a safe distance in time.

He of course is talking about screenwriting, and how to justify the tremendous added production expense of setting a story in a past period, but I believe the argument translates to fiction-writing as well.

While I'm sure there's something to that, I don't believe McKee's explanation gets to the heart of the matter. I'm thinking that historical stories have, for one thing, a quality of "once upon a time"--they evoke the mythical realm of the fairytale. Closely related to that is that they show people of remote times to be the same as we are now, merely with different fashions, social codes, language, and technology (which in turn reveals all these things to be incidental to the human condition). The problem of life, of how to live, was ever the same. The human condition has an eternal quality, which points to questions of meaning, of the spiritual.

At the same time, those very differences call attention to the corresponding aspects of life in our own time: we are thereby made aware of our own existence by seeing it through the eyes of another time, so to speak. We may notice afresh, and appreciate--or question--the social structures and things in our world that we usually take for granted.

And now: the dead hand of the past. In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus says, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." I'm sure many neurons have fired in the effort to unpack his meaning. Mircea Eliade, in his The Myth of the Eternal Return, says that for archaic man,

neither the objects of the external world nor human acts...have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in so doing become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them.... [H]uman acts...are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning...by gods, ancestors, or heroes.

Later on he says:

[I]nterest in the "irreversible" and the "new" in history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity. On the contrary, archaic humanity...defended itself, to the utmost of its powers, against all the novelty and irreversibility which history entails.

For archaic man--who, after all, is us under our Calvin Klein briefs--historical acts, that is, acts that were not performed originally by a god or hero or ancestor, are necessarily imperfect and in fact sinful. It is the accumulation of these sinful, profane acts that is wiped out each year with the ancient New Year festival--a rite we still practice with our saturnalian New Year's party and list of resolutions. In the ancient world, much more than now, life started afresh after the New Year. History was erased like an Etch-a-Sketch and everyone was reborn.

What I seem to be creeping toward, here, is the idea that the dead hand is the accumulated dead weight of profane history--the irreversible events that have piled one on another since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, or since the Big Bang, depending on your view. The dead hand makes its way into spiritual thinking as the doctrine of original sin, or as karma: what was done in the past, by people we no longer identify with as ourselves, catches up with us.

The dead hand says that past and present are connected, not only in obvious ways, but in a deep mysterious way that affects each of us like a powerful current we usually don't even know we're swimming in--or drowning in.

I'm not quite sure, but I think I'm suggesting that historical fiction, historical drama, brings us closer to this reality by showing us the relativity of time. The past is now if we know how to look.