The Ailment of the Creative

Magic as the symbol of creation and creativity.

What is a Creative?

Our sociological standard today is that we are all creatives capable of creation. Of course, this depends on the definition of “creation” and its application. It also has much to do with merit, value, effort, emotional investment, and, of course, you may not be creative if you don’t have one diagnosis in today’s overtly medicalized psychology departments. Yes, that was said tongue-in-cheek as a shot against the general over-medicalization that results in over-treatment. Who is in the worse position? The one who needs treatment but doesn’t get it, or the one who doesn’t need treatment but gets it anyway?

            We are not all creatives; however, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to tell the difference externally since the toils, fracturing, reconstituting, worry, desire, pain, anger, and misguided bitterness are all locked inside without any real articulable linguistics to utilize in the expression of said toil. From my understanding, it measures the entropic gap between one’s current state and the optimal state of artistic-creative expression. Why is it so potent? It is potent enough to affect life in some of the worst ways. I contend that a creative has been chosen by external environmental and sociological queues for exploration and creation as an infant.

            An infant is new yet ancient; their relative existence is some days or months old. At the same time, our infants are especially perceptive. The fundamental idea behind the existence of an infant is that the two parents had a system of survival strong enough to create the infant. If they did not, they would’ve died, and the infant not created. However, could an internal contingency exist? For example, if the parent's perception is lower than the infant's, the perceptual apparatus (self-consciousness) will be forced to activate as soon as possible. It isn’t outside the realm of reason to call the lack of parental perception an anomaly to an ancient creature's budding personality and latent protection instincts.

            That begs the question, how can an infant tell? That question implies that an infant tells, and they do not. Their best chance is the parent's in-depth understanding of micro expressions that would invariably tilt into a non-verbal conversation. If “body language” is an actual language, then our bodies communicate under the surface of linguistics and articulation. They can’t tell as an agent of consciousness, but their body can tell as a vessel of protection for the future. Their bodies can tell because it is more than sensitive to contingent, quid pro quo, reciprocity, necessity, and limitation. I contend that if the body suffers during infancy, that will invariably create the precondition to the creative. Since the information flowing into their bodies from the external world is relatively insufficient, the ancient brain of the infant has the cure: creativity. This theory does not dispense with the idea that we are born violent with dark desires. It encapsulates the concept. There has not been one successful creative that did not have violent and dark fantasies or tendencies: it’s a resource pool of creative endeavor, a very, very necessary one. Imagine if Cinderella didn’t have elements of child abuse: Hansel and Gretel found a friendly witch in the woods where they lived happily ever after and didn’t have to put her into a furnace to survive. The story of the rattle ghost, or that of Rumplestiltskin, is one of the darkest tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.

            Where did these stories come from? The sliver of time when humans were transitioning from inarticulable feeling, desire, and action to a more organized (symbolic/archetypal) way of imagination. The echoes exist within the mind as the fairy tale writer observes humans and their reactions and can exist statically in situations. Meaning they’d willingly walk into a tense situation (or the depths) to extract information (the treasure found in the depths) to bring back to his pen and paper and show his society his creation with the information from the depths (the reconstitution of culture and society predicated upon the necessary changes delineated by its tragic failure). That is the precondition to the journalist archetype: the willingness to travel to places and situations that are otherwise unfavorable to extract the necessary information for delivery to our society. Such is why the media is critical, highly judged, and blamed for many problems; the media and its constituents are a close corollary to the hero. Like many, many things have to do with human (read: creative) endeavor. There are other, more uni-dimensional versions of the Hero. However, journalists and the media are the essence of the symbol of the hero itself. Media provides the information that serves as a social cartography.

Spells (Magic) in High Fantasy Narratives

Magic is the prompt, direct, material, physical expression of creativity itself—the manifestation of psychic energy to close the entropic gap between desire and action in that very moment. So, what is a spell? What is magic? Depending on the type of magical fantasy, the narrative characters would be required to use some parchment with a symbol or word to cast the spell. Sometimes, a catalyst is necessary along with verbal components, like a wand/staff and a phrase: this is an abstraction of the spell on parchment; it’s technically a show of power. This specific wizard does not need to use archaic methods such as parchment and symbols; they can manifest creation directly from an object with imbued magic. Needing a catalyst to cast spells symbolizes human partiality: I must focus my energy on this catalyst so that it does not explode and harm everyone around me. Creating magic directly from the hands without parchment, catalyst, or a phrase is the pinnacle of general magic usage. To be in a position where one does not need anything to create is the corollary to enlightenment.

            A spell is a narrative, depending on the definition of “spell.” In times of yore, a “spell” was not a quick “Aquio” or “Repairo.” It had an element of time inside of it: an example of this is the wicked queen's attempt to kill Snow White by imbuing an apple with powerful magic that seemingly put her into a coma. The idea is the analogy of death; one cannot kill another with willpower alone, but one could make them sleep forever. The creation of a spell is the creation of a narrative, the imbuement of magic into an object is the animation this narrative has, and the animation sets the spell forward into the world to manifest itself in expressive forms. In which case, the expressions are then confined to the physical/social realm which means they need some physical representation, like an apple, or a ball of fire.

            To be fair, magic, spells, and their manifestations vary wildly throughout time, tale, and representation; yet one constant remains: they are a narrative within a container. One element of magic seems to be a cultural constant and a fictional one: the curse. In Henri Ellenberger’s The Discovery of the Unconscious, he details instances of medicine men or shamans cursing an individual for some slight or shortcoming. It would be nothing more than an angry shaman pointing a crooked bone at a member of the tribe and cursing him, and the member of the tribe would believe the curse so much that he would convulse in his hut until death. Was there an actual transfer? It’s debatable. The answer to that question is directly related to the answer to the question, “Is a conversation like tennis? Or volleyball?” Where one person throws out an idea received by another, adorned with their opinion and thought, and sent back. In the case of a curse, there is no object of voluntary discussion; there is the sudden and abrupt disruption, distortion, or warping of the immediate social and physical peripheral environment. The entropic gap between desire and productive action has been shut. Desire: The shaman wishes to punish either the tribe or the individual. Productive Action: The actual punishment. (Punishment is defined as the restriction of otherwise necessary stimuli). Punishment can be doled out immediately with the back of a hand or the front of a stick. Why does the medicine man have to go through such great lengths to punish someone with a curse? The shaman must stay within the confines of their social order.

Implicit within the idea is that there is something worse than physical pain—worse than death. The categorical social separation from the group is still used today in our prison systems, termed “isolation,” amongst other terms that all mean relatively the same thing as “being isolated.” Being cursed is being isolated—the shamanic and spiritual removal of all magical and protection boons. The soul is left out to be chewed on by whatever malevolence stirs within the body. To be cursed is to be fundamentally isolated. Implicit within the location itself, a temporal curse latches onto the soul in pleasure island; after some time of following a narrow hedonic path one is turned into a braying jackass. (It’s almost as if one can visit Pleasure Island safely, so long as the trip doesn’t last too long). The Little Mermaid features a comparatively creative curse: Ursula takes Ariel’s voice in the bargain to make her human so that she may follow her bi-pedal lover to the ends of the earth. The twist on this curse is that it serves a multi-layered purpose: Ursula uses Airel’s voice to trick Prince Eric into marrying her.

A curse is a spell. A spell is magic. Magic is the symbolic interplay between ultimate and unique perspectives shared and grown within groups and/or between two individuals. Love is consistently the level of magic unattainable by normal ‘magical’ means: why? Because Love is nearly pure energy, it is the quintessence of entropy, the chaos between desire and fruitful effects based on the activation of this shared perspective. There is no entropic gap between Un-Loved and Loved; it is a webbed field of nye endless strands and tendrils. To feel unloved is to know what love is; therefore, you cannot have one without the other. One cannot be unloved whilst being loved, but the threat remains ever-present; there are very many reasons relationships degrade, and that list of reasons is only increasing in modern times.

What is Love, then? It’s the grown, shared, unique, one-of-a-kind perspective two (or more) people share. (Plutonic or not). I mean unique in all its most important elements and aspects, individually separate from the whole. If one person starts a conversation about something, a concept has been given from one to the other. The deliverance of this concept, depending on how dear it is to the heart, in discussion form will leave the initiator vulnerable. That is sharing a piece of themselves in confidence; whether the other agrees or not, it is their responsibility to remove their own biases and assume the perspective of the other. This requires trust, too; assuming a false position would not bode well for any party. Consistently sharing perspectives back and forth in confidence with trust builds love. One can argue that love is a prerequisite for sharing perspectives, but I'm not entirely convinced. The trust built between sharing sensitive topics and being vulnerable to them opens them up to the idea of being physically vulnerable. Physical vulnerability is typically only given to those trusted and held in high regard; some examples would be trusting someone with your car or lending large sums of money, and the list can go on. Each unit of love created is as unique as the formed bonds between two unique individuals; it is the most unique, unable to be recreated by any other two parties in any other manner. That is the in-depth context of the mutual bonds themselves. They are more unique than the fingerprints on one's hand simply because a fingerprint is identifiable by its contours, grooves, curves, and so on; a concept like love is unidentifiable in any material or physical sense. Keeping it fully, completely, and usually wholeheartedly out of the realm of magic. It is the antithesis of magic, as Aurora’s curse was broken by true love’s kiss. Love is magical in its own right; therefore, it does not need costly cheats across entropic canyons.

If magic is the symbol of creativity and creation, then the wizard, warlock, witch, seer, or an endless list of names given to an individual with magic titles usually delineate what type of magic. For example, Druids are Magicians. Magicians are Soothsayers. Soothsayers are Priests. Priests are Shamans. Shamans are Psychologists. What do all of these terms have in common? They are healers of the human spirit. Something that will take magic. Or, in some instances, destroyers of the spirit itself are the malevolent side of magic, the curse facilitated by folks like The Evil Queen, Dr. Facilier, The Essence of Pleasure Island, Ursula, and countless others. The wizard archetype: Dumbledore, Gandalph is highly perceptive, eccentric, usually surrounded by tomes, and lives in an isolated tower away from society. Like the magical writer who absconds to his log cabin near the lake for inspiration, quiet time, and meditation. Or the divine child with the shaman hidden inside, Harry Potter.

Nothing is more magical than love and devotion to something good and proper.