THE SECRETS OF CREATIVE GENIUS

True genius sees with the eyes of a child
and thinks with the brain of a genii. -Puzant Kevork Thomajan

What is the difference between an ordinary mind and one of genius? Is it something mysterious and
available only to a few special individuals? The answer lies in the response of true genius to that question.
Below are excerpts of some truly creative genius’ to the query of how their creativity was inspired.

These are scientists and artists, for creativity is not limited to the arts. Creative thought abounds in all occupations and can be practiced and cultivated in anyone. Study their techniques, experience and revelations and adapt them to your own style.

ALBERT EINSTEIN        WOLFGANG MOZART                 D.H. LAWRENCE

HENRY MOORE                FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE       HENRI POINCARE

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Einstein is responding to a query by Jacques Hadamard asking of what use is internal or mental images to mathematicians in their work:

In the following, I am trying to answer in brief your questions as well as I am able. I am not satisfied myself with those answers and I am willing to answer more questions if you believe this could be of any advantage for the very interesting and difficult work you have undertaken.

“(a) The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined.”

“There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought – before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of sign, which can be communicated to others.”

“(b) The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.”

“(c) According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to certain logical connections one is searching for.”

“(d) Visual and motor. In a stage when words intervene at all, they are, in my case, purely auditive, but they interfere only in a secondary stage as already mentioned. ”

“(e) It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case, which can never be fully accomplished. This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness.”

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

In a letter from Life of Mozart by Edward Holmes:

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer – say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory, and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself.”

“All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost completed and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing takes place in a pleasing lively dream. Still the actual hearing of the toutensemble is after all the best. What has been thus produced I do not easily forget, and this is perhaps the best gift I have my Divine Maker to thank for.”

D. H. LAWRENCE

Though known for his literary works, he took up painting at the age of forty. Here are his own words about the creative process:

“I learnt to paint from copying other pictures – usually reproductions, sometimes even photographs. When I was a boy, how I concentrated over it! Copying some perfectly worthless scene reproduction in some magazine. I worked with almost dry water-color, stroke by stroke, covering half a square-inch at a time, each square-inch perfect and completed, proceeding in a kind of mosaic advance, with no idea at all of laying on a broad wash. Hours and hours of intense concentration, inch by inch progress, in a method entirely wrong – and yet those copies of mine managed, when they were finished, to have a certain something that delighted me: a certain glow of life, which was beauty to me. A picture lives with the life you put into it. If you put no life into it – no thrill, no concentration of delight or exaltation of visual discovery – then the picture is dead, like so many canvases, no matter how much thorough and scientific work is put into it. Even if you copy a purely banal reproduction of an old bridge, some sort of keen, delighted awareness of the old bridge or of its atmosphere or the image it has kindled inside you, can go over on to the paper and give a certain touch of life to a banal conception. ”

“It needs a certain purity of spirit to be an artist, of any sort. The motto which should be written over every School of Art is: “Blessed are the pure in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” But by “Pure in spirit” we mean pure in spirit. An artist may be a profligate and, from the social point of view, a scoundrel. But if he can paint a nude woman, or a couple of apples, so that they are a living image, then he was pure in spirit, and, for the time being, his was the kingdom of heaven. This is the beginning of all art, visual or literary or musical: be pure in spirit. It isn’t the same as goodness. It is much more difficult and nearer the divine. The divine isn’t only good, it is all things.”

HENRY MOORE

This is an excerpt from his Notes on Sculpture from The Painter’s Object by Myfanwy Evans.

“It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. By trying to express his aims with rounded-off logical exactness, he can easily become a theorist whose actual work is only a caged-in exposition of conceptions evolved in terms of logic and words.”

“But though the non-logical, instinctive, subconscious part of the mind must play its part in his work, he also has a conscious mind which is not inactive. The artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organizes memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time.”

“As far as my experience is concerned, I sometimes begin drawing with no preconceived problem to solve, with only the desire to use pencil on paper, and make lines, tones and shapes with no conscious aim; but as my mind takes in what is so produced a point arrives where some idea becomes conscious and crystallizes, and then a control and ordering begins to take place.”

“Or sometimes I start with a set subject; or to solve, in a block of stone of known dimensions, a sculptural problem I’ve given myself, and then consciously attempt to build an ordered relationship of forms, which shall express my idea. But if the work is to be more than just a sculptural exercise, unexplainable jumps in the process of thought occur; and the imagination plays it parts.”

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

“Can anyone at the end of this nineteenth century possibly have any distinct notion of what poets of a more vigorous period meant by inspiration? If not, I should like to describe it. Provided one has the slightest remnant of superstition left, one can hardly reject completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, or mouthpiece, or medium of some almighty power. The notion of revelation describes the condition quite simply; by which I mean that something profoundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes visible and audible with indescribable definiteness and exactness. One hears – one does not seek; one takes – one does not ask who gives: a thought flashes out like lightning, inevitably without hesitation – I have never had any choice about it. There is an ecstasy whose terrific tension is sometimes released by a flood of tears, during which one’s progress varies from involuntary impetuosity to involuntary slowness. There is the feeling that one is utterly out of hand, with the most distinct consciousness of an infinitude of shuddering thrills that pass through one from head to foot; there is a profound happiness in which the most painful and gloomy feelings are not discordant in effect, but are required as necessary colors in this overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces an entire world of forms (length, the need for a widely extended rhythm, is almost a measure of the force of inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything occurs quite without volition, as if in an eruption of freedom, independence, power and divinity. The spontaneity of the images and similes is most remarkable; one loses all perception of what is imagery and simile; everything offers itself as the most immediate, exact, and simple means of expression. If I may recall a phrase of Zarathustra’s, it actually seems as if the things themselves came to one, and offered themselves as similes. (“Here do all things come caressingly to thy discourse and flatter thee, for they would fain ride upon they back. On every simile thou ridest here to every truth. Here fly open before thee all the speech and word shrines of existence, here all existence would become speech, here all Becoming would learn of thee how to speak.”) This is my experience of inspiration. I have no doubt that I should have to go back millenniums to find another who could say to me: “It is mine also!”

HENRI POINCARE

“In fact, what is mathematical creation? It does not consist in making new combinations with mathematical entities already known. Any one could do that, but the combinations so made would be infinite in number and most of them absolutely without interest. To create consists precisely in not making useless combinations and in making those which are useful and which are only a small minority. Invention is discernment, choice. ”

“Such are the realities; now for the thoughts they force upon us. The unconscious, or, as we say, the subliminal self plays an important role in mathematical creation; this follows from what we have said. But usually the subliminal self is considered as purely automatic. Now we have seen that mathematical work is not simply mechanical, that it could not be done by a machine, however perfect. It is not merely a question of applying rules, of making the most combinations possible according to certain fixed laws. The combinations so obtained would be exceedingly numerous, useless and cumbersome. The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones or rather to avoid the trouble of making the, and the rules which must guide this choice are extremely fine and delicate. It is almost impossible to state them precise; they are felt rather than formulated. Under these conditions, how imagine a sieve capable of applying them mechanically? ”

“A first hypothesis now presents itself: the subliminal self is in no way inferior to the conscious self; it is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact, delicacy; it knows how to choose, to divine. What do I say? It knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed. In a word, is not the subliminal self superior to the conscious self? ”

“Several of the above quotes of creative genius were excerpted in part from the book The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin. This book contains the thoughts of thirty-eight different artists, mathematicians, poets, writers, and sculptors. It is worth reading if for creative inspiration.”

In the words of William Crashaw, “When human power becomes so great and original that we can account for it only as a kind of divine imagination, we call it genius.”

As evidenced by the above creative minds in their own words, genius is a quality of mind available to all. Find the genius within yourself and cultivate it
© J.L. Read, 1997. All Rights Reserved.