The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  This is true even on the elementary levels of perception. We are more susceptible to musical tones than to noises, because the former consist of periodical, the latter of a-periodical air-waves. Similar considerations apply to pure colours; or to the symmetry and balance which lend a design its 'unity in diversity'. Plato decreed that all heavenly motions must take place in perfect circles at uniform speed, because only such regular periodicity could assure the steady, eternal pulsations of the universe. Perhaps the compulsive pattern-walking ritual of certain neurotics, who must always step into the centre of pavement-stones, is motivated by the same unconscious craving for order and regularity as a protection against the anxiety-arousing threat of change.

  Measure and Meaning

  'The superimposition of two systems: thought and metre,' wrote Proust, 'is a primary element of ordered complexity, that is to say, of beauty.' [2] But this superimposition -- in our jargon, the bisociation of rhythm and meaning -- is again trivalent: it can be put to poetic, scientific, or comic use. When rhythm assumes a rigidly repetitive form, it no longer recalls the pulsation of life, but the motions of an automaton; its superimposition on human behaviour is degrading, and yields Bergson's formula of the comic: the mechanical encrusted on the living. But here again, all depends on one's emotional attitude: prewar films of German soldiers marching the goose-step -- or if it comes to that, the changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace -- will strike one spectator as comic, and appeal to the tribal, or romantic, emotions of another. Once one is in a marching column, it is extremely difficult to keep out of step; one has become patterned by the rhythmic motion in which one participates. But the comedian as an army recruit falling chronically out of step is comic, for obvious reasons.

  In the natural sciences, the analysis of rhythmic periodicities -- the numerical patterns underlying the phenomena of naïve experience -- play a dominant part. The Pythagoreans regarded the universe as a large musical box, the organism as a well-tempered instrument, and all material phenomena as a dance of numbers. The metre of the poet, the metronome of the musician, the centimetre of the mathematician, are all derived from the same root, "metron": measure, measurement. Yet the quantitative patterns in themselves would be meaningless to us if they were not accompanied by the sensory qualities of colour, sound, heat, taste, texture, and so on; and the rhythms of our brain-waves on the electro-encephalogram would be meaningless if we were not conscious of thinking. The scientist takes a 'bi-focal' view of life; and so does the reader whose attention is focussed simultaneously both on the measure and the message of the poem.

  Without the message, the rhythm is of course meaningless, in poetry as in science. A monotonous rhythm, for instance, can be either sleepy-making or exciting, according to the message which it carries. Rhythmic stroking of the skin may be soothing or sexually exciting -- it depends on the message. The rhythmic rattle of the wheels on a train journey will lull one to sleep, as a superior form of counting sheep, if one is in a relaxed mood; but I can remember at least one ghastly journey, when I found myself in a predicament of my own making, and the wheels kept repeating, 'I told you so, I told you so, I told you so' with such haUucinatory clarity and insistence that I found it difficult to convince myself that the other passengers in the compartment did not hear it. Rhythm penetrates so deeply into the unconscious strata that it makes us suggestible even to self-addressed messages -- from the Yogic recitation of mantras to Coué's 'every day in every way . . . '.

  However, unlike the beat of the tom-tom, or the rattle of the carriage wheels, a strophe of verse does not consist in a simple repetitive rhythm, but in complex patterns of short and long, stressed and light syllables, further complicated by super-imposed patterns of assonance or rhyme. As music has evolved a long way from the simple, repetitive figures of monochords and drums, so the various metric forms in poetry contain their substructure of rhythmic pulsation in an implied, and no longer in an explicit form. In free verse, the rhythmic substructure has become so implicit, as to go sometimes unnoticed.

  This development from the explicit to the implicit, from the direct statement to the veiled hint, is a phenomenon which we have already met (pp 84 ff.), and shall meet again in other provinces of art, as a characteristic factor in the evolution of creative techniques in general.

  Repetition and Affinity

  The rhyme is a relatively late offspring of rhythm. Both words are derived from the same Greek root, "rhutmos"; up to the sixteenth century they were treated as practically synonymous. Metric patterns based exclusively on the regular succession of ups and downs of intonation -- the only form of verse in Greek and Latin poetry -- were later combined with patterns based on the repetition of single consonants and vowels; and thus, via alliteration and assonance, the rhyme came into being -- as melody was born out of originally unmodulated, rhythmic beats.

  But although conscious rhyming was only admitted into formal literature in the Middle Ages (at first as the internal rhyme in Leonine verse), it has, like rhythm, its primordial roots in the unconscious. The repetition of syllables is a conspicuous phenomenon at the very origins of language. In the early stages of learning to speak, children seem to have an irresistible impulse to jabber repetitive variations of sound patterns -- from ma-ma and pa-pa to obble-gobble, minky-pinky and so on ad infinitum; gibble-gabble was the Victorian word for it. Similarly, in many primitive languages as far apart as Polynesian and Bantu, words like Kala-Kala or Moku-Moku abound; and why does the name Humpty-Dumpty hold such a charm for child and adult alike?

  Next to repetition, association by sound affinity -- punning -- is one of the notorious games of the underground, manifested in dreams, in the punning mania of children, and in mental disorders. The rhyme is nothing but a glorified pun -- two strings of ideas tied in an accoustic knot. In normal, rationally controlled speech, association by pure sound is prohibited, for, if given free rein, it would destroy coherence and meaning. Thus, on re-reading the previous sentence, it occurs to me that 'des-troy' lends itself to a pun (Helen was fated to destroy Troy); once one 'tunes in' to the matrix of sound-associations, a number of quite idiotic puns and rhymes will invade the mind. No effort is required to produce them; on the contrary, when concentration flags, and the rational controls are relaxed, thinking has a tendency to revert, by its own gravity as it were, to matrices governed by more primitive rules of the game. Among these, association by sound-affinities plays a prominent part; the free associations of the patient on the analyst's couch belong as often as not to this category. Let us also remember (pp. 186 f.) that other games based on sound-affinity have exercised a perennial attraction on the most varied cultures; anagrams, acrostics, and-word-puzzles; incantations and verbal spells; hermeneutics and Cabala, which interpreted the Scriptures as a collection of the Almighty's hidden puns, combining letter-lore with number-lore.

  Thus rhythm and assonance, pun and rhyme are not artificially created ornaments of speech; the whole evidence indicates that their origins go back to primitive -- and infantile -- forms of thought and utterance, in which sound and meaning are magically interwoven, and association by sound -- affinities is as legitimate as association based on other similarities. Rationality demands that these matrices should be relegated underground, but they make their presence felt in sleep and sleeplike states, in mental illness and in the temporary regression -- the reculer-pour-mieux-sauter -- of poetic inspiration. But before we come to that, let me once more quote additional evidence from neurology, more precisely, from brain surgery -- a field rarely bisociated with the poetic faculty.

  Compulsive Punning

  The phenomenon to be described is known as 'Förster's syndrome'. It was first observed by Förster, a German surgeon, in 1929, when he was operating on a patient suffering from a tumour in the third ventricle -- a small cavity deep down in the phylogenetically ancient regions of the mid-brain, adjacent to structures intimately concerned with the arousal of emotions. When the surgeon began to manipulate the tumour, affecting
those sensitive structures, the (conscious) patient burst into a manic flight of speech, 'quoting passages in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He exhibited typical sound associations, and with every word of the operator broke into a flight of ideas. Thus, on hearing the operator ask for a Tupfer [tampon] he burst into Tupfer . . . Tupfer, Hupfer, Hüpfer, hüpfen, Sie mal . . . On hearing the word Messer, he burst into Messer, messer, Metzer, Sie sind ein Metzel, das ist ja ein Gemetzel, metzeln Sie doch nicht so messen Sie doch Sie messen ja nicht Herr Professor, profiteor, professus sum, profiteri. These manic responses were dependent on manipulation of the tumour and could be elicited only from the floor of the third ventricle.' [3]

  Förster's patient opened up a curious insight into the processes in the poet's brain -- in an unexpectedly literal sense of the word. The first flight of ideas, Tupfer, Hupfer, etc. -- 'tampon, jumper, go and jump into the air' -- has a gruesome kind of humour coming from a man tied face down to the operating table with his skull open. The second flight, translated, runs as follows: Messer, Metzer, etc. -- 'Knife, butcher, you are a butcher in a butchery; truly this is a massacre [Gemetzel]; don't go on butchering [metzeln], take measurements [messen]; why don't you measure, Herr Professor, profiteor, professus sum,' and so on.

  Thus the patient's apparently delirious punning and babbling convey a meaningful message to the surgeon -- his fear of being butchered, and his entreaty that the surgeon should proceed by careful measurements, that is, in a more cautious, circumspect way. His train of thought seems to move under dual control. It is controlled by alliteration and assonance -- for he has regressed to the level of sound-association and must abide by its rules. But it is also controlled by his intermittent, rational awareness of his situation on the operating table. Without this, his flight of words would become meaningless (and does so at times). Without the tyranny of the other code, he would address the surgeon in simple, sensible prose. As it is, he must serve both masters at the same time.*

  Let us take a blasphemous short-cut from patient to poet. We have seen that the creative act always involves a regression to earlier, more primitive levels in the mental hierarchy, while other processes continue simultaneously on the rational surface -- a condition that reminds one of a skin-diver with a breathing-tube. (Needless to say, the exercise has its dangers: skin-divers are prone to fall victims to the 'rapture of the deep' and tear their breathing-tubes off -- the reculer sans sauter of William Blake and so many others. A less fatal professional disease is the Bends, a punishment for attempting to live on two different levels at once.)

  Coaxing the Unconscious

  The capacity to regress, more or less at will, to the games of the underground, without losing contact with the surface, seems to be the essence of the poetic, and of any other form of creativity. 'God guard me from those thoughts men think / In the mind alone, / He that sings a lasting song / Thinks in a marrow bone' (Yeats); or, to quote A. E. Housman:

  . . . I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but we both recognize the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us. One of these symptoms was described in connection with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite: 'A spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up.' Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine. . . . I think that the production of poetry, in its first stage, is less an active than a passive and involuntary process; and if I were obliged, not to define poetry, but to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster. I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health, and the experience, though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting. [4]

  The next quotation, in a more academic vein, is from Paul Valéry's A Course in Poetics (the italics are in the original):

  When the mind is in question, everything is in question; all is disorder, and every reaction against that disorder is of the same kind as itself. For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's fertility. . . . . . . The constitution of poetry . . . is rather mysterious. It is strange that one should exert himself to formulate a discourse which must simultaneously obey perfectly incongruous conditions: musical, rational, significant, and suggestive; conditions which require a continuous and repeated connection between rhythm and syntax, between sound and sense. . . . . . . There is a poetic language in which words are no longer the words of free practical usage. They are no longer held together by the same attractions; they are charged with two different values operating simultaneously and of equivalent importance: their sound and their instantaneous psychic effect. They remind us then of those complex numbers in geometry; the coupling of the phonetic variable with the semantic variable creates problems of extension and convergence which poets solve blindfold but they solve them (and that is the essential thing), from time to time. [5]

  The sceptical reader may object that all these metaphors about the blindfold poet thinking in his marrow-bones while secreting pearls like an oyster, reflect a too romantic view of the profession; and that I have put altogether too much emphasis on the role of the unconscious. The answer is partly to be found in the chapter on 'Thinking Aside', which shows that the unconscious is neither a romantic nor a mystic fancy, but a working concept in the absence of which nearly every event of mental life would have to be regarded as a miracle. There is nothing very romantic about the wheels of the railway carriage screaming 'I told you so'; it is simply an observed fact.

  In the second place, though unconscious processes cannot be governed by conscious volition, they can at least be coaxed into activity by certain tricks acquired at the price of a little patience. Friedrich Schiller learned to get himself into a creative frame of mind by smelling rotten apples, Turgenev by keeping his feet in a bucket of hot water, Balzac by drinking poisonous quantities of black coffee; for lesser mortals even a pipe or pacing up and down in the study might do.

  And lastly, there is the long process of conscious elaboration -- of cutting, grinding, polishing the rough stone which inspiration has unearthed. Here the range of variations from one writer to another -- and from one work to another by the same writer -- is as enormous as with the elaboration and formulation of a 'nuclear discovery' in science. An excellent account of this process is to be found in an essay, far too little known, by A. E. Housman from which I have already quoted:

  Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon -- beer is a sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life -- I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were desfined to form part of. Then there would usually be a lull of an hour or so, then perhaps the spring would bubble up again. I say bubble up, because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was an abyss which I have already had occasion to mention, the pit of the stomach. When I got home I wrote them down, leaving gaps, and hoping that further inspiration might be forthcoming another day. Sometimes it was, if I took my walks in a receptive and expectant frame of mind; but sometimes the poem had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain, which was apt to be a matter of trouble and anxiety, involving trial and disappointment, and sometimes ending in failure. I happen to remember distinctly the genesis of the piece which stands last in my first volume. Two of the stanzas, I do not say which, came into my head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing the corner of Hampstead Heath between the Spaniard's Inn and the footpath to Temple Fortune. A third stanza came with a li
ttle coaxing after tea. One more was needed, but it did not come: I had to turn to and compose it myself, and that was a laborious business. I wrote it thirteen times, and it was more than a twelvemonth before I got it right.

  NOTE

  To p. 316. Less dramatic than Förster's syndrome but equally convincing were experiments by Luria and Vinagradova, which demonstrated that subjects who normally associated words by their meaning regressed to association by sound when they were made drowsy by choral hydrate (Br. J. of Psychol., May, 1959).

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