• PAGE ONE
• INDEX
• HOME

The creative gene

G. S. Balakrishnan

CREATIVE is synonymous with imaginative and innovative. It implies experimenting with something new and subjecting the conclusions to critical scrutiny. Though everyone is gifted with the creative instinct, only a few are capable of producing anything ne w and interesting. With them, it becomes a compulsive urge seeking suitable outlets.

How the creative instinct arises in poets, scientists, and others is inexplicable. Even genetics cannot provide a conclusive answer. Professor Crick speaks of the existence of a religious gene that is predisposed towards God and matters spiritual. Howeve r, no creative gene has been isolated. According to Somerset Maugham, the phenomenon is a sport of nature, and he thus concurs with the Sanskrit rhetorician who called it the leela of the infinite!

Is inspiration or calculation at the root of the creative art? Perhaps both. Not everyone is prone to experiencing epiphany or `the Eureka moment'. Only those who have allowed ideas to incubate in their subconscious mind are favoured by chance. The Germa n chemist, Kekule, had the conscious intention of discovering the structure of benzene. An intuitive flash helped him make his epoch-making discovery.

Does the creative instinct, combined with personal idiosyncrasies, produce works of merit? A semi-sleep state into which Salvador Dali often lapsed helped him create bizarre images. The odour of rotten apples stirred Schiller's imagination. Mark Twain an d Proust got inspiration only in bed. Drink and jazz evoked the creative process in Hart Crane. Rest and solitude helped Charlie Chaplin's, while a monk's robe did wonders for Balzac. Housman found his muse during solitary walks. The inventor of the ZX s eries of personal computers got his flash while running. The best music of a Tamil composer was inspired by the memory of his dead mother.

Physical disability, disease and dissipation have been listed by some as the determining source of the creative instinct. This brings to mind Housman's remark that the poem, like a pearl, is a morbid secretion. To what extent Byron's club foot, Sir Walte r Scott's limp, Strindberg's brain malady, Eugene O'Neill's addiction to drink, Edgar Allan Poe's weakness for drugs, Collins' and Christopher Smart's bouts of insanity, Somerset Maugham's stammer and Walt Whitman and Wilde's unnatural proclivities contr ibuted to their creative urges is a moot point.

Harriet Beecher Stowe alone is sure about the source of her inspiration for Uncle Tom's Cabin: ``I did not write it; God wrote it. I merely did His dictation!''