On Creating

I’ll admit it. I am prone to feeling like I should be doing what everybody else is doing. Or believing that common thinking has the authority over my own thinking. In this case, the belief is that “if I want something to happen, all it takes is my sheer willpower and committed effort to force it into being.” This is neither the time nor place to lay out why exactly this messaging is so powerful in culture, or in my own thinking, but suffice it to say that fighting against this belief is a daily struggle. I’m very rarely able to create anything when I operate in this manner, but I still feel overwhelmed by guilt every time I choose not to just buckle down and force something to come into existence.

Five years ago I encountered a man whose views on the process of making—making a life or otherwise—fundamentally shifted how I think about what it means to live, to create, to become. I didn’t meet him personally (yet!), but he comes to life in his writings, he brings life through his writings.

In Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, anthropologist Tim Ingold painstakingly lays out his philosophy on what it means to create anything. The part of his argument that has remained with me long since I first read the book is that the process of creating is not the imposition of form on a preconceived idea of a precise end result. Rather, it is the engagement in the world of materials and processes that are already unfolding — the creator working together with a multitude of materials and processes to help form emerge. How, exactly, this process will unfold cannot be predicted from the onset. And, with a few exceptions, the end result will likely be different from that which was preconceived. This is not to say that there isn’t an idea about what one is to make and what it will “look” like in the end. But only that it is not the idea of the end result that makes creation happen or strictly dictates how creation will evolve.

Ingold uses the terms hylomorphic and morphogenetic to further illustrate his philosophy. Hylomorphism, he explains, is the idea that things are made because a person has a concrete idea in their mind and then imposes that internal idea onto the external material world. In contrast, morphogenesis indicates that “form is ever emergent rather than given in advance” (Ingold 2013, 25). Essentially this means that things come about as the result of various materials and forces interacting. Furthermore, these things, these creations, are never “complete”—they are always in movement, in transformation, in process of becoming.

When I set out to create anything—a painting, a business, an article, a strategy deck—I always experience a sense of paralysis. I can never quite picture the end result, in a tangible, visual way. Instead, I can sense the end result—I can feel what it feels like, I can perceive the emotion, the visceral reaction to the thing I want to create. I can sense what it does in the world and how it makes other people feel. So, for me, the problem is never the inspiration, it’s what comes next: how does this inspiration take concrete shape and how do I begin to bring it into being?

Of course, it is a fallacy to believe that the creation of anything begins at the moment that we attempt to put physical form to what resides in a thought, a feeling, an emotion, a knowing. That creation was birthed long before we decided to do anything about it—it is the convergence of a lifetime of thoughts, observations, emotions, ideas, and experiences.

I find some solace from my overwhelm in an anecdote I once heard about Michelangelo’s creative process. In the creation of a masterpiece, Michelangelo spent the first four months staring at an 18-foot block of marble each day before returning home for supper. Three years later, that block of marble became the statue of David, arguably one of the most masterful works in the western world. That it took him three years to sculpt David is not the remarkable part to me. It is those four months of observing, thinking, and imagining, that transpired before he ever picked up a mallet and chisel. As the story goes, whenever he was asked what he was doing in those four months of staring at marble, his response was “I’m working.”

I find further inspiration from Henri Matisse who, in his Jazz writings, speaks to the pleasure and charm that come from the spontaneity of creation, and not the intentional forcing of creation:

During a walk in the garden I pick flower after flower and amass them in the crook of my arm, gathering them randomly one after another. I return to the house with the idea of painting these flowers. After having arranged them in my own way, what a deception: all of their charm was lost in the arranging. What could have happened?

The unconscious arrangement made during the picking, through the pleasure that prompted me to move from one flower to the next, was replaced by a wilful arrangement derived from reminiscences of long-dead bouquets left in my memory a charm of yesterday with which I now burdened the new bouquet. Renoir once said to me:

Inspired by Ingold, Michelangelo, and Matisse, my own philosophy of creation has begun to emerge. And it is this: That whatever one is trying to bring into the world, whether that be a written piece, a painting, a business, a solution for a client, (or hell, even a web presence!), it will not come into being because one pictured the precise outcome before one ever started the endeavor in the first place. It will come as a result of engaging in the process of making, alongside the external forces and materials that may or may not be beyond the control of the maker.

Furthermore, it cannot be forced or manufactured. And when it is, as Matisse and Renoir point out, it loses its charm, its soul, the thing that made the prospect of the creation come alive in the first place.