All The Kings Men - Order, Struggle and Creativity

In my blog A Universal Pulsing, I wrote that the human species has a negative bias - wanting to protect ourselves, we innately see potential danger or threat in anything not us - in the “other.” We yearn for order and harmony too and, through much of history, in one of the great paradoxes of our existence, we start wars in an attempt to impose the ideas of one group’s order on another. As though order and harmony can be imposed. These were the promises of Nazism, Fascism, Capitalism and various religious fundamentalist orders - only to dissolve into intolerance and oppression for those deemed as threats to the new order and harmony.

This could be a blog on that element alone, but I have a different curiosity about the relationship among struggle, creativity and order - and the part that each plays in a new order. Henry Miller praised struggle for its inherent confusion and “discordant spirit” out of which if embraced, new life may flow. A messy process -“over-elaboration” Henry Miller calls it - these seemingly random and discordant expressions- abhorrent to the idea of order and harmony and yet indispensable and inevitable to the birthing of “divine music.”

“What is called their "over-elaboration" is my meat: it is the sign of struggle, it is struggle itself with all the fibers clinging to it, the very aura and ambience of the discordant spirit. And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly, I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am unattracted . . . I miss the cloying qualities.

When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that [in] the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.” (Henry Miller)

Giving voice to our creative impulses is a way of resolving tension or as Miller says of the artist, “to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own.” We strive for a unity. Why I wonder don’t we just leave all the puzzle pieces at play on the table? Really who can pass a table of a half assembled jigsaw puzzle and not just take a look for that missing piece? Almost always through trial and error, we try all the numerous pieces in many configurations to complete the picture. Once assembled, we have both the momentary satisfaction and then the inevitable letdown of completion - our appetite for new challenges and struggle ever arising. 

In his book, The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow) states:

“The creative process starts with a sense that there is a puzzle somewhere, or a task to be completed. Perhaps something is not right, somewhere there is a conflict, a tension, a need to be satisfied.”

Today two things seems evident to me. Both at odds with the other. The first is that our society needs creativity to forge a different future - not thinking in the same way we did to get ourselves into our current situation (to paraphrase Einstein). But to imagine what could be next. Yet the obsession with a stringent, dictated order is blatant among a large part of the Country - a retreat to the “good old days” and Father Knows Best and Mother is in the kitchen. And all our neighborhoods consist only of “us.” There is no struggle for economic equality or civil liberties. Resources are plentiful, the seasons are well aligned, and waters run pure. This flash back mentality, absurdly romanticized, is the second evident factor of a society split between a past and a future.

If a society’s health and longevity is dependent upon consistently re-imagining a future we must allow for and encourage that space where communities join in dialogue to create their future. This requires a tolerance, for some period of time, of disorder - but a disorder underlined by faith that all the pieces of our jig sawed country can become whole - and not again - because when was that exactly? A new order that tolerates all that America is in its glorious diversity and abundant resources - a new order that protects this reality - for surely it is our reality - despite all the alternative facts - our diversity and natural resources stare everyone in the face everyday. You cannot complete a puzzle by just throwing out the pieces. We will always know some pieces are missing and this sense of incompletion will continue to haunt and divide us.

By Susan Wright, Democracy Is Us Board and Council member