August 9, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
Typically, I write a blog about my intended summer reading. Though I did not get around to writing that blog this year, I would like to share some of the great findings from the books on my summer reading list.
As a child, fiction wholly captured me. I remember feeling frustration at having to put down books like Anne of Green Gables or King of the Wind, even after I had read them a number of times. As I aged, I began to devour poetry too. In college I discovered a love of philosophy and history. My summer reading list reflects my eclectic nature. It included theory, philosophy, poetry, translations, and historical retelling of the fastest ride down the Grand Canyon.
Today’s blog is a compilation of highlights from the first book on my summer reading list. It seems appropriate to begin with Rollo May’s The Courage to Create because it might also act like a foundation which will weave all of the other summer readings into a makeshift tapestry. Over the next few weeks, I’ll add details about other books that I discovered over summer break.
Rollo May published The Courage to Create in 1975. As a result, the book begins with a note about the fear of political and social movements. This book emerges from the communal fear of war, injustice, rebellion, and instability. May defines courage not as physical strength, but as a developed awareness, a sensitivity to the world. He writes, “We need a new kind of physical courage that will neither run rampant in violence nor require our assertion of egocentric power over other people. I propose a new form of courage of the body: the use of the body not for the development of musclemen, but for the cultivation of sensitivity. This will mean the development of the capacity to listen with the body…. It will be a valuing of the body as a means of empathy with others, as expression of the self as a thing of beauty and as a rich source of pleasure.” In other words, May encourages the super powers of deep listening and open minds.
He then goes on to explain that artists often have courage to move from the facts of present situations into the unknowns presented by the future. May claims that “Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the ‘divine madness,’ to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.” May’s point is that part of the artist’s toolkit is to creatively express the future. They combine current-day thinking and reality with future possibilities.
In seeing the future, artists have to understand the present. May likens the present to a type of form. Cultures, borders, laws, etc. all function as restrictions on our day-to-day lives, perhaps in the way that a sonnet restricts a poem to fourteen lines, for example. He says, “In our day the concept of form is often attacked because of its relation to ‘formality’ and ‘formalism,’ both of which – so we’re told – are to be avoided like the plague. … But when these movements try to throw form or limits out entirely, they become self-destructive and noncreative. Never is form itself superseded so long as creativity endures. If form were to vanish, spontaneity would vanish with it.” Though form is a problematic term which has been in usage since Plato, I like May’s focus on it. I was pleasantly surprised by the way he explained society as a series of forms, particularly because it makes all of us creators. Our interactions with daily forms require that we fashion the future out of our present knowns. This may look like cooking, cleaning, driving, eating, decision-making, etc.
The point being that we take our present situation, inclusive of its restrictions, and use it to fashion our future. This is reminiscent of Alfred North Whitehead’s theory about feeling. Whitehead describes a scenario in which the present is restricted by multiple entities and that the human (or any organism) necessarily utilizes that information to make a decision about the future. May makes this point as well when he analyzes dreams in order to demonstrate that humans have a passion for form. Because forms allow us to make meaning out of senselessness, even our dreams, he says, use symbol to piece together a dramatic representation of reality.
Furthermore, he claims that emotion is the foundation for reason, or at the very least they complement each other equally. He writes, “The passion for form is a way of trying to find and constitute meaning in life. And this is what genuine creativity is. Imagination, broadly defined, seems to me to be a principle in human life underlying even reason, for the rational functions, according to our definitions, can lead to understanding – can participate in the constituting of reality – only as they are creative.” I was pleased to see the elevation and discussion of emotion in terms of decision-making. Most often, Western culture prioritizes logic. However, May considers the ways in which emotion effects logic and vice versa.
As with so many other authors, May concludes that artists do often help us understand our world. Their work addresses current anxieties and perspectives. He remarks that “Artists are the ones who have the capacity to see original visions. They typically have powerful imaginations and, at the same time, a sufficiently developed sense of form to avoid being led into the catastrophic situation. They are the frontier scouts who go out ahead of the rest of us to explore the future. We can surely tolerate their special dependencies and harmless idiosyncrasies. For we will be better prepared for the future if we can listen seriously to them.”
A few years ago, a student suggested that I read Rollo May’s work, and I’m really glad that I finally did! May’s focus on art, emotion, and culture inspired me to examine present-day life in a positive way. His humanist approach to life and learning felt reassuring in a time in which many of us may harbor fears about the future.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ MrEasyDesign
