connecting*the*dots

While listening to KQED (out of Northern California) this afternoon (I love the Rabbit Radio widget), I came across this interview with Eric Maisel. Maisel is a "Creative Coach," spending his time helping creative people (primarily, artists and writers) understand their own temperment, so that they can better apply themselves to their craft.

Maisel argues that creative people are stubborn by design, beginning at an early age. He uses examples of how specific social conditioning exercises, such as the direction to color within the lines of a coloring book, creates children who are more apt to conform in society and not follow their creative tendencies. I found that one example very interesting, as I vividly remember as a child pointing out the devisive nature of the lines in my coloring book by always lining the edges of the images with strong, thick strokes, while lightly "coloring-in" the interior of the object with the same crayon.

If I were to apply Maisel’s position to my actions as a child, it’s as if I were emphasising the borders of expectation, illustrating the very nature of their confining strokes, while simultaneously remaining safe within their domain. Well, if that were true, at least it would explain my choices to join Beta Theta Pi in college and a few conservative corporations over the short course of my career.

Maisel also discusses creative temperment in context to bipolar disorder; how in order to be creative, one has to be viscerally ready and able to fail, as creativity relates to the cycles of life and death, success and failure, planning and stumbling, etc. His understanding of cyclical conceptualization, with abstract formation and pragmatic execution is pretty spot on. Kay Redfield Jamison, an accredited psychologist suffering from manic depression, has written about the same connections to the artistic temperment for years.

The thing about our culture is that people aren’t considered “creative” unless they do something different from the normality of society. Contributing expressive, innovative or valuable output within the productive cycle of culture is a clear way to be recognized as different (Van Gogh), yet so is the temperment to the approach of creating differentiating output (Van Gogh).

Maisel and Jamison’s observations are very telling of the temperament of society itself.