cham was here: Interpreting the Language of the Soul

"Lake at Midnight" 01 January 2011

>>This is a participating post of Let's Blog Off, a biweekly event in which numerous bloggers write on a directed topic. This week's prompt: "What is creativity?" There are a few other questions attached to the main query which I will be addressing as well.

>>To read others' posts, see the table at the bottom of the post (will automatically update throughout the day as entries are posted).

sidebar: (Yes, there's a sidebar before I've even gotten started) The Let's Blog Off topic is rather fitting for today as it is the first day of classes at my university for spring semester 2011, and I'm really looking forward to my poetry class later this evening! Moving right along:

One of the first questions creative writing and art instructors like to ask is some variant of:

"What is creativity?"

Often, they'll adjust the query to something like:

"What does creativity mean to you?"

The personalization of response from each student demonstrates the subjectivity of the matter. Every artist approaches their canvas differently. Every writer considers their words differently. Every composer plays their instrument differently. Yet, we consider all of their efforts to be "creative." There is no apparent common denominator other than the fact that these individuals put their souls into their hands in order to create something. The key, here, is that the creator is utilizing their soul - their very life essence.

To try to define creativity is to attempt an extraction of a person's soul, laying it in a cardboard box and expecting it to remain functional. Creativity doesn't work "inside the box."

While science and technology have made it possible to perform physical heart transplants, it is still absolutely impossible to transfer a person's soul into another's body. (We'll just ignore the whole exorcism tangent here.) Therefore, the ability to create is found in a person's ability to express their soul. If we can accept that everyone has a soul - that there are no empty husks walking around out there - then we can also accept that everyone has the potential for creativity.

Now that we've established that everyone can create, we'll answer another section of today's prompt. Is creativity a balance of imagination and talent? This begs the question:

What is talent?

Yes, there are those that appear to be natural-born athletes and there are those more proficient in the culinary arts...but how does one really measure talent when it comes to one's ability to create something? Either a person creates something or they don't. If we believe that it is a person's soul that fuels creativity - and each person has their own unique, individual soul - how can we compare the handiwork of one soul to another? Their products would be on such vastly different levels - it would be like trying to compare a pomegranate to a blue bird. They are neither the same color nor species nor genus nor kingdom. There is no scale with which we can measure the talent of one creator over that of another. And if we can not measure talent, is there even a point in considering its relativity to creativity?

Imagination: the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses [source]

Imagination is the process by which we interpret the messages of our souls. Our five physical senses are incapable of understanding the commands of our souls without imagination stepping in. With this tool, we can then attempt to express that which is vacillating deep beneath our skin.

Every person has the potential to be creative. All they need to do is access their imaginations and listen closely, letting their soul direct their hands. The result will be a manifestation of that which makes an individual utterly and undeniably unique.