parabola | For thousands of years people have wondered about creative power. All this world around us was believed to have been made
and did not just happen. Yet humans themselves make things. Are we then
creators within a meta-Creation or mere “apes of god”? A primary realm
of experience in which these and far more profound questions played out
was in the making of words, or poetry. The authenticity of our poetry
had to be granted us. This was the origin of the idea of the muse. The word itself has origins associated with mind, deriving from the proto-Indo-European root men “to think.”
Mousika,
from which we get our word “music,” was performed metrical speech. The
speaking of verse was once the recognized form of intelligence and Plato
had to argue it should be superseded by philosophical discourse (prose
one might say) to open up to sceptical enquiry. This had vast
implications since the very meters of verse were considered gods. (The
secularization of language was completed only about five hundred years
ago with the emergence of the form we call “sentence.”) Practically, for
example in Norse poetry, there were different meters for different
purposes, such as Fornyrðislag or “meter of ancient words” and Malahattr
or “meter of speeches”. By following and excelling in the forms, the
bards were in tune, we could say, with the gods. The idea of
intelligence and even “sacredness” residing in language itself rather
than in people (capable only of temporary ableness) came down through
the ages to Giambattista Vico and James Joyce and continues in modern
commentators such as R. Calasso and George Steiner.
The making of verse and other manifestations of the Muses were expressions of making as
such, including the making of the world and even evolution (in its
various senses over the ages) once identified by the idea of the demiurge as
in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. The demiurge became the
arch-villain in Gnostic writings because he was seen as tied to the
material world and creating a “prison-reality” such as depicted in the
film The Matrix.
In many cultures the role of the demiurge was symbolized by the potter.
Pottery and its art were deeply revered and appear to go back at least
to Palaeolithic times. The abstract idea of it is that the demiurge has
to use already existing material to fashion a world in contrast to the
higher creation of ex nihilo, “out of nothing.”
On a personal level, the early Greeks had the idea of the daimon. It is mentioned in the Symposium
that Socrates had problems with his daimon because it would indicate
dangers but never tell him what to do–which is rather as we picture the
unconscious these days.
R.B. Onians, who comments extensively on the terminology of early
Greek thought, avers that the daimon had a personal physical location in
the head and was associated with sex. It was only later,
around the time of Plato, that the idea of thought originating in the
brain was entertained. It is possible then to see the daimon in the head
as a placement of creativity beyond the conscious mind. Onians traces
the image into later times and links it with the appearance of energy
around the head that became the “halo” of sacred individuals. The daimon
as sexual and creative was also considered “irrational” and then became
the “evil” demon. There are a myriad of evolutes of the idea including
its translation in Roman times into the term “genius.” This very
multiplicity of meaning is essential to its meaning. Just consider that
special people (such as Lamia the queen of Libya) could become a daimon. Philip Pullman turned daimons into animals in his novels.
The people we imagined around their camp fire look to their
artificial blaze and cannot see the deeper light in the “black” that
surrounds them. Creativity has to be beyond consciousness. Yet, only in
the world of consciousness can we seem to have choice and will. In the
practical world–such as in industry or in psychotherapy–we strive to
find ways of co-operation between the conscious and trans-conscious
realms. Nobody knows what happens at the critical moment which makes a
process creative; consciousness is always somewhat downstream from
reality. When Christ said while on the Cross, “Forgive them for they
know not what they do,” it was the declaration of the central human
predicament.
Commonly, people have located higher intelligences in the atmosphere or inside the sun. A more interesting “location” is the future,
or at least in some order of greater time than our own moment. Until
quite recently these intelligences were located in the “far-past” as in
the days of creation. Bennett places them in a special time he called
the hyparchic future, a phrase which means what is ahead of us capable of altering present time. Such a quasi-scientific view carries a sense of dealing with the higher intelligence and ourselves as a system.
There is an aspect of all this that is mathematical and technical
with no particular stake in spirituality. This is to look into process
or action when they are self-reflective. An action that feeds into itself is infinite and requires no entity to “do” it but will exhibit what are called eigenvalues that
appear as entities (that can be named). Speculatively, then, higher
order operations or actions will incur higher beings. One of the most
intriguing speculations in modern physics is that the very existence of
the universe requires a multitude of what are called “Boltzmann
observers.” And, as far as the reality of “I” is concerned there is a
parallel in the singularity at the heart of a black hole in that it
remains uncertain whether it can ever be observed.
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