The Beautiful Mess of Art and Writing

Creativity, regardless of the medium, will always be messy. There is no simple, clean way to create. In the process of creating, though different for each individual, tends to follow the second law of thermodynamics: the entropy of the universe increases during any spontaneous process. That is, systems tend toward disorder during times of transitioning. Creativity spontaneously creates dissonance in every system. With that said, it does not mean a system must remain in dissonance. "The next step in creativity is making something that is a sloppy thought into something that makes sense" (Moore 3). It is the responsibility of the creator to polish his creation. If left unpolished, a creation simply disappears into obscurity.

However, the spontaneity of creativity and of the imagination can be fickle. It seems the entropy of the system is not limited to the actual creation of the product, but to the process as well. As Gerard noted: "Simple imagination is observable in a pure and untrammeled state in dreams, in the hallucinations of drugs and other agents, in those hypnagogic states which interpose between wake and sleep or in the slightly-fettered daydreaming while awake, in the free fancies of the child and the less free fancies of the amateur" (Gerard 238). With dreams being such random synaptic firings as they are, it would seem that their randomness parallels the random firings of imagination, when a creator is attempting to determine just what s/he is attempting to create.

However, creativity is not just simple a mess, as some would term. It is a rush of different ideas and images flooding through a sieve of information and experience to combine into a pattern that settles into a beautiful piece of art. Yes, it can be messy in the inner machinations of the mind, weaving together overtly into a tapestry that can be held by every person. Yes, the process can be messy, but there is madness within the literary mess.

"Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematics form, from every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories and sensations of the body" (Yeats 107). The entire process, from initial thought to actual result, is a pattern of spontaneous firings and misfirings, resulting in a beautiful mess on paper.

Gerard, R.W . The biological basis for imagination. The Creative Process. Brewster Ghiselin, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985

Moore, V. "Creativity: In Defense of Sloppy Thinking and What Ifs" Tiffin University, 2007.

Yeats, William Butler. Preface to the King of the Great Clock Tower. The Creative Process. Brewster Ghiselin, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985