Sunday/Creativity

 

"Resentment is a passion, implanted by nature for the preservation of the individual.  Injury is the object which excites it.  Injustice, wrong, injury excites the feeling of resentment, as naturally and necessarily as frost and ice excite the feeling of cold, as fire excites heat, and as both excite pain.  A man may have the faculty of concealing his resentment, or suppressing it, but he must and ought to feel it.  Nay he ought to indulge it, to cultivate it.  It is a duty.  His person, his property, his liberty, his reputation are not safe without it.  He ought, for his own security and honor, and for the public good to punish those who injure him…. It is the same with communities.  They ought to resent and to punish."

John Adams wrote that.

"I have written this book in a bitterness that knows no limits."

Francois Bizot wrote that, introducing The Gate .

These opinions are, I believe, good summaries of how most see underlying the creative process: Creative sparks from the collision of ideas, individuals and circumstances. Of what is and what should be.

T.S. Eliot, in his essay on "Tradition and Individual Talent", writes: "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material." 

But, as deep and profound those passions might be, their cold synthesis and elaboration is what makes art more than a scream.