Last month Daniel Dennett gave a talk at Amherst College, titled “The Evolution of Evitability: What Is Determined Is Not Inevitable.” I wish that I could tell you all about it, but I got the location of the event wrong. My friend Emily and I sat in some (very occupied) lecture hall for a good ten minutes, making confused faces and asking each other if we had made a mistake. We had. I had, really. Emily, I am sorry.
So now that I have my public apology out of the way, I would like to tell you about just how entirely Dennett charms me, mostly by pointing you to his essay “Could there be a Darwinian Account of Human Creativity?” from Evolution: From Molecules to Ecosystems, edited by Andr??s Moya and Enrique Font. In it, Dennett explores the tension between Darwinian explanations of creativity, exemplified by Thomas Edison’s famous calculation, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” and anti-Darwinian ones, represented here by Picasso’s boast, “Je ne cherche pas; je trouve.”
In other words, can human creativity be a product of evolution–the result of the brain doing its complicated mechanical work–or must there be, in the end, some sort of divine spark?
Certainly, when writing, one can feel that divine spark. Spicer linked up with his Martians, Yeats dealt with his spirits, and Blake had his Milton. (He flew into Blake’s foot in the form of a comet.) Sometimes there is the poem that comes, it seems, from nowhere. It is not made; it happens.
Richard Hugo does a nice job of bringing the discussion back to earth in “The Triggering Town,” reminding us:
Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don’t work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing wild comes.
I love to hear how the wild comes to other people. Dennett’s essay gathers together some fantastic declarations from artists on their creative process. In addition to Picasso’s quip, Dennett gives us these gems:
Mozart (in an oft-quoted but possibly spurious passage–see Dennett 1995, p346-7) is reputed to have said of his best musical ideas: ???Whence and how do they come? I don’t know and I have nothing to do with it.’ The painter Philip Guston is equally unperturbed by this evaporation of visible self when the creative juices start flowing:
When I first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my contemporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I’m lucky, every one of them will disappear. If I’m really lucky, I will too.
I cannot help but think of Spicer again, who advises writers to “get out of the way of the poem.” There is something tremendously appealing in giving up one’s self to the more important matter of making.
Dennett knows that people sometimes resist letting go of “the magic of consciousness.” But what could be more thrilling than the thought that a “mere” brain–a real, physical thing–could produce Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or House? This is amazing! And those brains are everywhere! You have one of your own! How could this not be enough?