In this era of artificiality, lots of ‘change’ has happened around creativity and art. Including the ‘change’ of what creative and artistic works mean. Creativity, whether creative writing or art, has become mass production machinery. It’s no longer born from one creative impulse. Creativity is more of a production from an accepted and conforming standard, also according to a definition of creativity, which unfortunately no longer holds its meaning.
Where this leads to
Nowadays, every piece of writing should meet a certain standard to be considered ‘good’. This also means a creative writer should obey the rules and the norm in order to meet the standard and be known as a creative writer. It’s just like the same meaning has served us, but in different languages over and over. Instead of being introduced with a different meaning and vocabulary for multiple languages, we dictate to ourselves to internalize the same meanings in different languages and externalize as if we are fluent in many languages when we only know one word in different languages.
In this situation, we are heading toward a monotonous mind and the replication of feelings. We’ll drag ourselves farther from our essential selves.
Apollo, God of Light, Eloquence, Poetry and the Fine Arts with Urania, Muse of Astronomy, Charles Meynier, 1798[/caption]
Creativity and freedom
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being, he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist, he is “man” in a higher sense – he is “collective man, a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Literature.
I don’t agree with any definition of arts and creativity other than Jung’s definition of them. For Jung, creativity comes from the realm of the unconscious and from creative instinct. By having this understanding, everyone has the same possibility of being creative if they only want to work from their creative instinct. Hence, I believe in art and creativity; it is not something that you have taught into; it is something that happens through you.
You don’t teach yourself how to be an artist; you let yourself be an artist. The same thing with creative works: you are its channel. You don’t own them. You are only its medium. But as any medium should be, you should first have a healthy container as its channel. This is one way to be a mediator in the collective unconscious realm.
Creativity is freedom in exploring the collective unconscious. Yet it is not an easy task. According to Jung, the collective unconscious is where the archetype lies. The archetype itself contains a tremendous amount of energy that will overwhelm anyone who identifies with it.
Inner Work and Creativity
Therefore, we need a healthy container, not an ego complex or an inflated one. In order to have a healthy container, one should swim through his or her personal unconscious. There, one can learn how to communicate with his or her personal symbol and work to wait for the archetypal image to arise in their consciousness. Therefore, to get in touch with our creative impulse, we must do the inner work and be aware of the autonomy of personal complexes.
The more we can acknowledge and loosen the grip of our personal autonomous complexes, the more we can swim through the collective unconscious. We can contribute to expanding our collective consciousness sphere, not only making arts our self-expressions.
Conclusion
The thing is, if it quite settles us with artificial arts, we won’t be able to recognize real art. We will become monotones, pretending to be polytonal. We are no longer an orchestra of multiple instruments but only echoes of a cacophony.
Previously posted on loveroftheory.com on September 2, 2023
