Creativity & The Unconscious In The Time Of COVID-19
The following blog post is a conversation between myself and my partner, Dr. Bruce Sawhill, Stanford educated theoretical physicist and mathematician.
On this fifteenth day of March, 2020 we observe the Ides of March. In 44 B.C. the assassination of Julius Caesar precipitated a turning point in Roman history. Two thousand years later, we may be at another turning point in history.
The Death of Julius Caesar 1806 -Vincenzo Camuccini
The world is now well-acquainted with the spread of COVID-19, the coronavirus. It reared its ugly spiked-protein head surreptitiously, shapeshifting from animal to human form, like something out of Greek mythology.
At first wreaking havoc as it flew with its leathery, rustling wings into Wuhan. like a marauding bat- dragon laying low anyone in its path with its poisonous breath.
Later, it would shape shift again, this time exploding with blistering speed onto the world stage like a war horse in a dead run.
We’re seeing exponential growth of coronavirus cases.
Unless extraordinary measures are taken to stop it, this virus will end up infecting most of the population of the Earth at some point.
This COVID-19 pandemic could end up being as widespread as previous ones such as the Spanish Flu (1918-1920), the Black Death (1331–1353) and the Plague of Justinian (541-542).
Those earlier afflictions infected vast numbers of people, even in civilizations without planes, trains and automobiles to connect people across vast distances.
Life finds a way
Jeff Goldblum ruefully opined in Jurassic Park
Fortunately, COVID-19 so far may not be as pervasively deadly as some of the previous pandemics, but that is no reason to be complacent. Things can change.
The coronavirus points out the dark side of creativity and the implacableness of Nature.
For new things to arise, old things must decline.
Creativity in Nature is not all platypuses and rainbows, it is also plague and ruin and unstoppable change, extinctions and revolutions.
Life is both beautiful and terrifying, and made all the more so by its finite duration.
And evolution never stops. There is no permanent winner.
It’s like the game of rock-paper-scissors (rochambeau), in which no single action can prevail for long. It just keeps churning.
Creativity implies impermanence, and one must come to terms with this, in one’s own life and in the world at large.
If it were permanent and unchanging, it would not be Life.
This “churn” is further illustrated by a concept from the branch of mathematics of game theory called The El Farol Problem or more commonly and dryly, The Minority Game.
In Santa Fe, New Mexico, there is a centuries-old Spanish stables that was converted to a restaurant and bar, now very popular, especially among scientists from the Santa Fe Institute and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Under the low arched doorways and sagging ceilings held up by bowed pine trunks that were harvested before the French Revolution, the celebrations, intrigues and affairs of a small town take place at candlelit tables.
El Farol is a very small venue. People like to go there, but the crowds can be overwhelming, margarita swigging hordes six deep at the bar, leather lunged bellowers creating a deafening cacophony and escalating contest of conversation that nobody can win.
But some nights are quiet.
If you chance on one of those nights when you’re looking for a peaceful solo meal with a classical guitarist playing softly and the snow sifting down gently outside, there is no more charming place in town to be.
But what happens then?
You tell your friends.
Being good friends, they listen to you. They join you. Soon, their friends do also.
It’s like a viral epidemic of conviviality.
And guess what? El Farol is crowded again.
Perhaps some other night? And the churn goes on.
The Virality Of Ideas
But viruses and popular restaurants are not the only viral things out there.
Ideas can have virality as well.
People talk of a social media meme, event or personality “going viral.”
It has become a familiar concept in the Internet age, so when a particular social phenomenon shows up everywhere simultaneously, we are not at all surprised.
“It’s the Internet, dummy” is considered a sufficient explanation to fob off on anyone who has the temerity to dig deeper.
This was not always so.
Serendipitous Simultaneity
Harkening back to the dim ages before the Internet, there have been cases of serendipitous simultaneity across many fields of human endeavor that cannot be explained by a simple causal mechanism such as telling your friends in person or online.
It is almost as if peoples’ minds tap into some sort of Zeitgeist (literally ‘spirit of the time’) that is non verbal and non-isolatable, a kind of collective unconscious driving the creative evolution of civilization.
Bruce has been thinking about a mysterious concurrence in human artistic history for the last thirty years. Creating this blog post and being in conversation about the intersection of art and science has been an impetus for him to finally set pen to paper and organize his ideas.
Here is Bruce’s observation, a collection of four events that happened across four disparate areas of creative endeavor in a few short years around 1905-1909. I believe it shows that there are powerful non-articulable forces at work in the subconscious that have profound and widespread effects.
Four Events Across Genres Implying Relativity Of Time & Perspective
In painting, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907, a painting that did not have a single point of view to create a unified perspective around. Instead, it superimposed multiple points of view and was considered the first Cubist painting.
Les Demoiselles d Avignon- Pablo Picasso
One could argue that the time dimension has been added to the static practice of painting, and this was effected by the use of multiple points of view. Time is implied because changing points of view implies the painter or the subject moving, which would take time.
Other multi-perspective paintings followed from many painters, culminating in perhaps the most famous, Nude Descending a Staircase (Nu descendant un escalier n° 2) by Marcel Duchamp in 1912.
Nude Descending a Staircase-Marcel Duchamp
In music, the first atonal or twelve-tone pieces of music were being composed, arising in the works of Bartòk and Schoenberg in 1908. Although it was not yet called “twelve-tone” music, the fundamental principles of the genre were being explored at this time.
Combinatorial tone rows from Moses und Aron by Arnold Schoenberg pairing complementary hexachords
The concept of key or tonal center that had driven music for three centuries was eroded and ultimately discarded for music that had no tonal center.
Everything was relative to what was around it, and there was no preferred tonal center, just as in painting there was no preferred visual perspective.
In literature, Marcel Proust began In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) in 1909. In over three thousand pages and seven books spanning 13 years until his death in 1922, Proust explores multiple perspectives and the mutability of time and recollection depending on the point of view of the characters. Proust simultaneously addressed the importance and the subjectivity of time.
In Search Of Lost Time-Marcel Proust
What shows up again and again across different artistic pursuits is a new relationship with time, either explicitly (music and literature) or implicitly (art).
Time and perspective are inextricably linked and furthermore colored by subjectivity.
In science, something astonishing was bubbling up in the mind of a young man.
Albert Einstein
In Switzerland in 1905, a 26-year old patent clerk named Albert Einstein quietly publishes a revolutionary paper about a new theory called ‘Special Relativity’.
The theory states that the Universe does not have a preferred point of view (“reference frame”) and timekeeping is distorted by one’s point of view (clocks moving relative to an observer appear to run slower).
Again, time and point of view and subjectivity are inextricably intertwined.
As J.B.S. Haldane, the evolutionary biologist said,
Not only is the world stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
J.B.S. Haldane
Einstein’s theory was just a portent of strangenesses to come.
How and why did all of these perceptual and philosophical changes occur in such a short time?
It is hard to imagine that Schoenberg, Proust, and Picasso all read Einstein’s paper (and understood it) and made a conscious decision to apply the spirit of special relativity in their studios.
There is definitely correlation, but is there causality?
It is as if something bubbled up from the collective subconscious when the world was ready for it.
Studies of plagues have shown that often the virus or bacterium or organism was present all along, but for whatever reason it was unable to gain a foothold.
But sometimes, the collective circumstances of a civilization could change, generating a sudden transition, a phase transition, to a starkly different reality.
A phase transition is when something goes from one state to a completely different state seemingly all at once. For example, when you have a pot of water on a stove and as you heat it up, you get a bubble here and there and suddenly bubbles are everywhere as it boils. Where this happens is on the steep part of the curve of the graph below.
Phase Transition Graph
Issues such as widespread malnutrition, crowding, travel, poor crops and sick animals can change the variables just enough to tip the scales.
This is about the iceberg: how much of life is visible and how much is invisible.
New forms, new experiences arise at the boundary of the known and the unknown.
With gratitude from my studio to yours,
Nancy
P.S. If you enjoyed this post, you’ll love my book:
The Artist’s Journey: Bold Strokes To Spark Creativity, named one of the Best Creativity Books Of All Time by BookAuthority.
The Artists Journey Bold Strokes To Spark Creativity-Nancy Hillis MD
Thank you Nancy and Bruce. I am an accountant and artist and enjoyed the scientific approach that provides perspective and thought. Our lockdown has also been extended. Stay inspired.
Marina, Johannesburg, South Africa.
I really rely on your web site, have bought your ‘the Artists Journey and find it very inspiring. Wish I could afford to sign up for some of your visual tutorials. Keep going , your work si great.
Fascinating post, Nancy. I love the way you and Bruce think!
In addition to what you mention here, I’m struck by how wide-scale traumatic event plays a part. We had WWI, and that trauma shattered the way people viewed life. It catapulted them into a new way of being, and, as always, the artists, writers, and scientists were the first to see anew and express that impact through cubism, modernism, dadaism, and the like. The multiple viewpoints, to me, represent that shattering, a fragmentation of what used to be a perceived calm whole. The same phenomenon occurred after WWII as well, with the emergence of German Expressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism in art, and post-modernism in literature. (I can’t speak to the scientific movements, as I am almost entirely ignorant in that area, I’m sad to say.)
I wonder what the COVID-19 global trauma will shake up in us as artists. I for one, am approaching my art with a strange and new mixture of curiosity, excitement, dogged determination, anticipation, fear, and newfound sense of wonder and play. I know I’m feeling a dissatisfaction with the way I used to do things; yesterday, in the studio, I stopped halfway and said, “No, I need something different now,” and began to let that mysterious force inside guide me into a new direction. I have no idea what will happen with the piece itself or my process going forward, but I know I have to allow it the space and yes, time, it needs.
Thanks, as always, for your generosity of spirit and intellect.
Warmly,
Dawn
Thank you Dawn. It’s always great to hear from you. I love what you wrote. Warmly, Nancy
“…I for one, am approaching my art with a strange and new mixture of curiosity, excitement, dogged determination, anticipation, fear, and newfound sense of wonder and play. I know I’m feeling a dissatisfaction with the way I used to do things; yesterday, in the studio, I stopped halfway and said, “No, I need something different now,” and began to let that mysterious force inside guide me into a new direction. I have no idea what will happen with the piece itself or my process going forward, but I know I have to allow it the space and yes, time, it needs…”
_this!_ …my mind has been overloaded with thought-challenges & inter-related consternations, bubbling & roiling within the narrow confines of my brain with little means of (effective) venting… (a perpetual pressure cooker between my ears…) (Also reading/following Julia Cameron’s “…Way”. Thank you for some language that helps give release (& relief) to the tumult. I am printing & posting these words within my workspace…
As I have grown older I have felt very blessed that I was born long before the digital age, the population explosion, the technical advancement of the world and before the pollution, consumerism and “I, me, my”. I feel blessed because I have been able to witness and appreciate the pros and cons of all these changes and it has been, and still is, exciting to be here to watch. Over the past few decades we have been on a path of destruction with no thought given to this beautiful world. My late mother always said that when a new disease affected many people or there was some natural disaster, that it was Mother Nature trying to bring balance back to our planet. Something had to give and I doubt that our world will ever be the same again. I heard today that the canals in Venice are cleaner than they have been in decades and the air is cleaner in all of Italy. Is this a blessing in disguise to bring back a better, saner world? I strongly believe in a universal conscience that we are all connected to and having an interest in anything in particular will bring like-minded people into the same space. I had an experience about 30 years ago where I found a book on making miniatures as in dolls house miniatures. My interest was piqued and all of a sudden I found my world to be filled with articles, books and people who knew of clubs and so on. What fun! I started doing a painting a day in November last year and I am loving playing with art. It is so very therapeutic and I can totally lose myself and time in the process. My art is just for me and serves me very well!
Hi Diane,
Thank you so much for writing. I enjoyed reading your thoughts on this. Mother Nature is giving us a wake up call as animal habitats are being encroached upon and we’re seeing increasing incidence of zoonotic diseases as in this case of COVID19. We’re all connected in this ecology and our actions matter. That’s wonderful about your experience with doll house miniatures as well as your recent daily painting process. Warmly, Nancy
Love your article Nancy and Bruce….Fascinating!!! Thank you for sharing!
Stay healthy,
Thank you Julie! Big hugs and stay safe, Nancy and Bruce
What a very sensitive and so smart lady. You are a real gift to us all. Warmest regards from Nova Scotia Canada.
Ah…thank you dear Pamela. You’re so kind. Thank you for being here. Stay safe. Warmly, Nancy
Ah…thank you so much Pamela. Thank you for being here. Warmest regards from Santa Cruz, California!
This is the eternal cycle of change: Order….Disorder….Reorder. Another form: Brith….Death…Rebirth.
It may be the only cycle, but there are many variations of the same.
Yes Joana. It sure is. Thanks for writing.
You two are amazing in how you flow together at so many levels. I to have been seeing art & science right now with the power of our voice & vibrations of the earth. I began studying and reading on how our biratuins creat images at different megahertz. What we say & think right now is very powerful in what we will have faith to do! I painted about it and am shocked since I did, with everything happening. We are in a shift & our choices like the men if old. Our choices will lead us or stop us…in exploring the unknown & possible?
Hi dear Cindy! Thank you so much. It was wonderful being with you at the retreat. Wow! Your explorations sound fascinating! Yes, I sense the shift. Yes, the adjacent possible. May we step into the best possibilities, may we learn to create wonderful solutions. Warmly, Nancy
Talk about serendipitous simultaneity ~ so many of my thoughts have been orbiting the related concept of synchronicity (congruency, conjunction, juxtaposition) these days… your writing contributes to a language for these thoughts that I’ve long struggled to compose. What a wondrous precipice we seem to be sharing… ‘speaking of which, I’m assuming it’s OK to do so with this beautiful articulation of our coterminous ruminations…
Hi Kathleen,
Thank you so much for your kind words for my writing. You’re welcome to share my copyrighted material with appropriate attribution. Warmly,
Nancy
Oh Nancy I’m here in Dublin and the atmosphere is so restrictive and dystopian with all the changes Covid 19 has brought. Being Irish we’re very much mixers and minglers. . . Everything has come to shut down and self isolation which really kicked in these last few days and it’s very alien altogether. However after reading your wonderful and informed piece it’s shocked me into thinking outside of these newly imposed restrictions that this has always been the way nature/life on this planet has been !!! So many things struck me when reading your article and the blog responses to it that resonated with me , for instance that thing of thinking and/or feeling an idea then almost immediately seeing or hearing someone on radio or tv or in media about the same subject matter or object whatever. But I also believe in the causality of things and how that comes about . . . Not by accident at all it’s only in ‘rewinding ‘ that we realize it couldn’t have resulted in any other way. Thank you so much for writing that piece I’m going to send it on and refer to it on this LOCKDOWN week here and hopefully it’s going to aid me into a place to trust my playfulness in drawing/mark making for my printmaking work. Huge thanks again wish me luck I need it. Kindest regards Margaret
Hi dear Margaret,
I’m delighted that this blog post is meaningful to you. Yes, trust in your own playfulness and mark making. Creativity is about meaning and aliveness. Thank you for writing and I wish you all the best in the time ahead. Warmly, Nancy
Thank you Nancy for this interesting article.
You seem: to have answered a question repeating in my mind.
What is the message in the Coronavirus?
Now I accept that we brought it upon ourselves with our irresponsibilities.. Coupled with materialism and speed gratification.
Thanks again for an ellucidating article.
Regi
You’re welcome Regi! Thank you for writing. Warmly, Nancy
Wonderful post!! Thank you.
Thank you so much Theresa! And thank you for being here. Warmly, Nancy
Dear Nancy
What an outstanding, thought provoking and in many ways reassuring post.
Change is the only constant in life. We don’t always want it and it can be extremely painful but if we embrace it, or at least accept it, we can step into the scary unknown and find treasure.
Thank you and Bruce for taking the time to write and the generosity of spirit to share!
With love across the miles.
Dear Basia,
Thank you for your kind and lovely comment. Yes, life is change and there is treasure even in the darkest moments, even in the dark night of the soul. On the edge of that dark night is transformation.
Thank you for being here and being in my life.
With love to you too,
Nancy