The Courage to Create, by Rollo May

After reading Dillard’s, The Writing Life, I rushed out to buy Rolly May’s, The Courage to Create. I felt I needed a boost of courage to deal with the lingering angst I was burdened with after reading Dillard’s accurate and penetrating work.

May discusses a disparity of life: how can we love something, anything, when we know someday we’re going to die. He arrives at a similar solution as Proust did: the creative act allows us to reach out beyond our own death. May describes the creative process as an expression of normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. He describes it, as well, as doing battle with gods. And he says that creativity is making silence answer the writer’s knock.

He also describes it as emergent from the world the writer lives in. He quotes James Joyce, who wrote, at the end of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race.”

The creative process is described as an encounter of intense engagement. The intensity makes the act creative and a commitment to the encounter activates a deeper awareness in oneself that brings forth the uncreated consciousness of one’s race. He uses the term ecstasy to describe the experience of being in this state where form and passion are united with order and vitality.

May also describes the a-ha experience of insight, where the unconscious emerges to the surface for an instant, as one constituted by guilt (the unconscious is a danger notion, it destroys a conscious thought in order to emerge), sight (vision becomes more clear and even intense), commitment (insight emerges after a period of voluntary, hard work on a topic), and relaxation (the insight comes at the moment one shifts between work and play).

He challenges the writer to consider what the “external pole” of the encounter is. What is playing against the conscious and unconscious mind of the writer. He stresses waiting for the “birthing process” of writing. An artist must have this sense of timing to wait for period of receptivity. Creative people, he says, live with anxiety and pay the price through insecurity, sensitivity and defenselessness. He argues that we have an innate “passion for form.” That this struggle with limits is a source of creativity.

After reading May’s book, I came across a quote from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to haven,

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Shakespeare and May both agree that the writer calls forth something out of nothing, using an awareness of the world around him or her. This something comes alive through the creative process, when the writer gives it “a local habitation and a name.” Finishing Rollo’s work, I have a better understanding of the psychology of the creative act and a revived appreciation of the role of the subconscious. And I feel courageous (somewhat).