The Makers Rage

Introductory episode endeavoring to answer what I mean by 'the makers rage' and its relation to creativity.


1. The Maker’s Rage

• Introduction to the concept of "The Maker’s Rage."
• Exploring the driving force behind creativity and the intense passion that fuels the creative process.

2. What’s In a Name

• Delving into the significance of names and how they can influence the creative process.
• Understanding the power of language and its impact on the artistic expression.

3. Creativity Today

• Examining the current landscape of creativity and how it has evolved over time.
• Discussing the various forms of creative expression in contemporary society.

4. Creativity as Evolutionary Advantage

• Exploring the idea of creativity as a fundamental aspect of human evolution.
• Discussing how the ability to create has provided an advantage in adapting to changing environments.

5. Need for Leisure Time

• Highlighting the importance of leisure time in fostering creativity.
• Discussing the role of relaxation and contemplation in the creative process.

6. Beethoven’s Rage

• Examining the life and work of Beethoven as a case study in the intensity of creative passion.
• Exploring how personal struggles can fuel artistic expression.

7. “The Maker’s Rage” – Wallace Stevens, Whitman, Dylan

• Analyzing the works of Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, and Bob Dylan in the context of "The Maker’s Rage."
• Drawing connections between their expressions of creativity and the overarching theme.

8. Know your Song Well

• Emphasizing the importance of self-awareness and understanding one's creative identity.
• Discussing how knowing oneself enhances the authenticity of creative output.

9. Astronomy and Maths

• Investigating the intersection of creativity with astronomy and mathematics.
• Discussing how these disciplines inspire and inform creative pursuits.

10. Art of Science

• Exploring the connection between art and science.
• Discussing how scientific discoveries can serve as a wellspring for creative expression.

11. Creativity as Divine Injunction

• Considering the idea of creativity as a divine calling or obligation.
• Discussing how artists throughout history have viewed their creative pursuits in a spiritual context.

12. The Heart Has its Reasons

• Examining the emotional and intuitive aspects of creativity.
• Discussing how the heart and emotions contribute to the creative process.

13. The Book of Nature

• Reflecting on the idea of nature as a source of inspiration.
• Discussing how the natural world influences creative minds.

14. Begin it Now!

• Encouraging listeners to take the first step in their creative journey.
• Emphasizing the accessibility of creative resources and the importance of starting the creative process.

15. Pascal's Limits

• Acknowledging the limits of reason, as noted by Pascal.
• Discussing how an excessive reliance on reason can lead to dehumanization and the potential dangers of scientific progress.

16. Conclusion

• Summing up the episode by reiterating the diverse facets of creativity discussed.
• Encouraging listeners to embrace their creative instincts and begin their cre

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Music by LiteSaturation from Pixabay

Chapters

• 0:45 What's In A Name?
• 2:05 Creativity Today
• 5:18 Creativity as Evolutionary Advantage
• 7:12 Need for Leisure Time
• 8:30 Beethoven's Rage
• 9:31 “The Maker’s Rage” – Wallace Stevens, Whitman, Dylan
• 12:17 Know your Song Well
• 13:52 Astronomy and Maths
• 15:53 Art of Science
• 18:33 Creativity as Divine Injunction
• 20:07 The Heart Has its Reasons
• 22:31 The Book of Nature
• 24:56 Begin it Now!

Transcript

01.The Maker’s Rage

What’s In a Name

Hello, my name is Darren, and welcome to the makers rage podcast, a podcast about, well, in a word, creativity: in both the general sense, and the many ways it is exhibited through notable examples - historical ones, contemporary and speculative. And I won't be restricting myself to the arts and sciences either, or to fields traditionally associated with creative output. Not all of us are philosophers or poets or mathematicians. And although we teach our kids about the accomplishments of the more notable artists and scientists throughout history, and political figures, and we like to quote them; in this day and age, creativity is manifested in ways these luminaries couldn't have even imagined. Especially in the wake of the information revolution, and the dawn of the internet. Imagine if James Watt had the internet, how quickly the industrial revolution would have spread if he had social media to tout his steam engine. Although you can argue there couldn't be an internet without the Industrial Revolution first. Well, that's what I meant by speculative earlier. And consider John Lennon's remark about Beethoven, saying if he was alive today, "he'd have an electric piano when a deaf aid". Would Shakespeare therefore have been an anonymous screenwriter, taking a backseat to the Hollywood Botox brigade, or Frida Kahlo a Twitch streamer? 

Creativity Today

Well, although I am interested in speculating about these things, I think it's important to judge the accomplishments of creatives in their historical contexts. I'm not one of those people who believes that we live in an age when creative genius isn't possible. This is a time when there are more people with access to information, more people who are literate, who have even basic education than there have ever been in the whole history of the world. So why shouldn't it be possible that there be Shakespeares or Newton's, or even Buddhas, busying themselves over some 21st century conception of what it all means? I suppose with greater access to information, and greater ability to have one's ideas disseminated, comes a different kind of challenge than that of just getting published. Since social media has made it so easy to transmit our thoughts, there's greater competition to be heard amid the din of innumerable competing voices, competing noises and images and faces, yearning to be acknowledged, to be rewarded for what they presume to offer. The concept of virality, with respect to the spread of an idea, didn't exist before the information age, an idea or concept or image that spreads around the world like a cold and disappears without ever taking hold. And should resurface at some later point, the effect is never the same, for we've already been inoculated. Of course, not all ideas that go viral are ephemeral. Some do stick. And that's something else I want to explore. What makes some ideas, images, songs, beliefs linger long after first being introduced into the zeitgeist, long after the originator kick the proverbial bucket. And what makes others rise look a bubble and pop into oblivion. With such a rapid exchange of ideas, what we call custom, tradition, convention, is constantly being challenged. And the more traditional and conventional among us perhaps feel beleaguered, beset upon by fluctuating forces we scarcely have time to register, let alone evaluate. The temptation to close one's eyes and ears and just rely on the good old days, on received wisdom, must be stronger than ever: custom, the Founding Fathers, grandma's recipe. After all, tradition tends to stick longer than a viral meme. We value it because it was valued by our parents, and their parents, and generations before them with little alteration, because there's usually a foundational text or sacred document or creed, simple enough to recite from memory, to teach the young and pass along to succeeding generations. What was valued by the young and old of previous generations, going back centuries, is a more reliable gauge of what is true than what the young of a single generation wishes to replace it with. 

Creativity as Evolutionary Advantage

That said, it is a very human trait to question received wisdom, to innovate and improve upon existing models. And this is why I want to explore any and every way in which creativity is manifested in our world. And we've yet to see examples of it outside of our world. And yes, I won't be restricted myself to the human species. Although one can argue that human beings are unique in their tendency to create things for their own sake - not just to court the opposite sex, or to survive in their environment - but just to admire for the sake of it, to listen to, look at, to touch. Even little kids exhibit it when they mold dinosaur figures out of clay. They don't do so because they must, but just to delight in the works of their hands, and perhaps show off to their parents and friends. And yet, there must have been a time when the creative impulse conferred an evolutionary advantage. When the most creative, the most innovative were needed for the survival of the tribe, or the kinship group. After the Industrial Revolution, this is no longer the case, really. The most creative people aren't necessarily having the most kids. And that's assuming creativity is even inherited. But despite there being today barely a patch of land on which human feet have yet to tread, there was a time when our species survival was touch-and-go. Nature being red in tooth and claw, demanded we adapt or perish. And so, necessity bred invention. And although most of us no longer fear being carried off by wild animals, and in the West, it is the opposite of starvation we have to worry about, every now and again, nature taps us on the shoulder to remind us how fragile this thing called civilization is. And the recent race to develop a COVID vaccine was a case in point of necessity breeding invention. 

Need for Leisure Time

In other words, although we are unique on our planet, at least in our tendency to create things to admire for their own sake, the rage to create isn't just to produce artefacts to exhibit in a museum. Some of us have jobs that require us to create things every day. Though certainly not the kinds of things that will set the world ablaze. For some, creativity is just a means of paying the bills. For others, it's a means of becoming rich and famous. Others still, will put aside all thought of profit and Lucre just so they have the opportunity to create something. Or for the latter, perhaps it's more a luxury. Those who could put aside all money concerns tend to already have enough for it not to be a concern. And although the prospect of financial ruin can concentrate the faculties wonderfully, poverty has a way of enervating the creative spirit. That said, limitless wealth, luxury, leisure dampens it. The boxer Marvin Hagler famously commented “It's hard to get out of bed in the morning to go for a run when you're sleeping in silk sheets”. So, some kind of balance is perhaps ideal. A job that gives us a routine, pays the bills, but which doesn't consume our every waking moment; that affords us enough leisure time to develop as human beings and not just as employees. And part of that may be to indulge a creative whim or hobby. If that's all it is. But if it happens to be more than a whim, a rage say, I have a feeling you'll move mountains for the sake of it. 

Beethoven’s Rage

As Beethoven, who kept performing and composing, despite learning in his late twenties he was going deaf. And in the midst of a crisis, wrote, "how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which aught to be more perfect in me than in others? What humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard a shepherd singing and again, I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair. Yet it was impossible for me to say to people speak louder, shout, for I am deaf. A little more of that and I would have ended my life. It was only my art that held me back. For it seemed impossible to me to leave this world before I had produced all that I felt capable of producing." If that's not a maker’s rage, I don't know what is. 

“The Maker’s Rage” – Wallace Stevens, Whitman, Dylan

And that's how I came up with the name of the podcast. The Makers Rage, those words you heard, recited by Wallace Stevens in the introduction, the rage to make, to create. As I said, it's not a rage in everyone. In some it's just a velleity, a propensity or whim. But each of us possesses it to some degree. It's a trait I think, as human as conversation, or making plans for something far in the future. And the greatest creative acts require some form of planning. They aren't wholly improvised. There is some talent, some training, some foregrounding required. Even Jimi Hendrix with his improvisational brilliance, needed to learn how to play the guitar before he could set it on fire: "O blessed rage for order pale Ramon, the maker's rage to order the words of the sea, word's of the fragrant portals dimly stirred, and of ourselves and of our origins, in ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds." So ends Wallace Stevens's oracular poem, 'An Idea of Order Key West.' Is oracular the right word? I suppose it's what comes to mind when I read the first line: "She sang beyond the genius of the sea." It certainly grabs your attention. The sea. "I will go back to the great sweet mother", said Swinburne, "and lover of men, the sea." But it's best to be prepared for the encounter, as Whitman observes, in 'As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life', or nature itself will reprimand you: "I perceive I have not really understood anything, not a single object, and that no man ever can. Nature here in sight of the sea, taking advantage of me, the dart upon me and sting me. Because I have dared to open my mouth to sing it all." Dylan too, whether he knew it instinctively, or got it from Whitman, affirmed the same belief that he must come prepare before presuming to open his mouth and sing: "And I'll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it, and reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it. Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinking. But I'll know my song well, before I start singing." I'll stand on the ocean. The makers rage to order the words of the sea. There's a suggestion of futility. that sinking is an inevitability, because none of us can stand on water, let alone walk or dance, or sing. Which is why it's important to know your song well, I guess, before you start singing. 

Know your Song Well

When we encounter it as an audience, we take for granted that the time for preparation has ended. And the unstinting delivery, the effortless outpouring, belie the hours of practice, the long foregrounding, the many doubts and frustrations and stumbling blocks that all creatives must encounter before they get a moment to stand upon the watery verge, momentarily. And, hopefully, reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it. Is this not the goal, ultimately? The recorded version of Dylan's 'A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall' is just under seven minutes long. So if he was to stand on the ocean, it's a fast rendition indeed he'd have to sing. But I suppose it's an injunction to take one's opportunities as they come, to take advantage of the short term we have to make our pitch before the ocean or the earth reclaims us and the makers rage whoever those makers are, in whatever capacity or discipline or art, to order Ward's of the sea can seem idiotic, hubristic. But so seem many enterprises at the outset, like casting a fishing net into the cosmos, which is what our physics and our astronomy and our mathematics really is. The presumption that all of it is comprehensible to us mere hominids, languishing in a pale blue dot, suspended in a sunbeam. 

Astronomy and Maths

Even Pythagoras and his followers thought it miraculous that the properties of number can be used to understand the music of the Kitara, the ancient Greek form of the guitar, and the celestial spheres. More recently, Newton's breakthrough came when he realised the same mathematics that describes the trajectory of a cannonball, or the fall of an apple explains the orbits of the planets. To quote Byron, "When Newton saw an apple fall, he found in that slight startle from his contemplation, a mode of proving that the Earth turned around in the most natural whirl called gravitation. And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, since Adam, with a fall, or will an apple." Of course, there were many otheres in Newton's time who could very well grapple with his ideas. And as he said, there were many 'giants' who came before him, and on whose shoulders he stood, like Kepler, Galileo, and yes, even his frenemy Robert Hooke. among his peers who reviewed and championed his work was Edmund Halley, who explained the periodicity of the comet that bears his name, and who urged Newton to write the great work, Principia Mathematica, or to give its full title in English, 'the mathematical principles of natural philosophy', setting down in the most audacious and thoroughgoing fashion yet seen how number, mathematics, geometry enables us not only to describe the natural world, but as with the case of Halley's Comet, to predict what it will do next. This may not be Sergeant Pepper, or the Mona Lisa. But it's certainly art in the literal sense. Something skillfully made or put together from existing materials, using whatever tools are at hand. 

Art of Science

"To develop a complete mindset", Da Vinci said, study the science of art and the art of science." And having a background in both, I intend to devote equal time to science and the arts, and indeed, everything in between. And in a time when science skepticism is once again on the rise, it's a shame that 400 years after the scientific revolution, after Galileo was sentenced to house arrest for maintaining that the Earth goes around the sun, it is a shame, an embarrassment, a tragedy that it is once again necessary to defend it. Science may be a human activity, but the universe resonates to it. "It works" to quote Richard Dawkins, "planes fly, cars drive, computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base the design of rockets on science, you reach the moon. To put it bluntly, "it works, bitches!" The inventor of the meme becoming a meme in one of my favorite moments of his: brusque, pugnacious, unapologetic. And we need champions like this, especially at a time when bad faith actors will take advantage of the general public's gaps in knowledge to politicize well established facts of nature. Established by whom? you may ask. Well, by centuries of peer review, of repeated challenges, attempted refutations, alternative hypotheses, until a tentative consensus was reached, tentative because science is always ready for a better explanation. But it is understood by all involved that the burden of proof is with the challenger. The more conservative among us may perhaps sympathize with the notion of those who presume to challenge the consensus that the earth is roughly spherical, who insist it's flat and rests on the backs of turtles all the way down, flouting the great weight of evidence against this proposition, have an enormous burden of proof. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all the evidence including that of our eyes, and instruments and modes of measurement better than our eyes, points to the earth being round. Or oblate, to be precise. 

Creativity as Divine Injunction

We can only speculate about what Homo erectus believed, the first hominid to have reputedly tamed fire, or any of our Homo sapiens ancestors who never wrote things down. What we can safely presume is that they like us mused about the so-called ultimate questions. It's certainly what all the major world religions try to answer today. And none of them, as far as I can tell, exhort us to hate the natural world. "The world is green and beautiful", says Muhammad, "and God has appointed you his stewards over it." And as stewards, we must therefore learn everything about it. For he moreover, says, "the search for knowledge is a sacred duty." Something that Judeo Christian texts are in agreement with "How long have simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing, and fools hate knowledge?" says Solomon. The search for knowledge, therefore, is not just a behavioral tick, peculiar to our species, but a divine injunction. And these are just the monotheistic religions. You can circle the globe and look at the Hindus, Jains, the Buddhist, the Native Americans, and you'll see a reverence for the natural world that is far from the ignorant scoffing Solomon alludes to. 

The Heart Has its Reasons

And yet, not everything in our experience is discoverable by the scientific method. "The heart has its reasons which reason cannot fathom,” said Blaise Pascal. I could know you all my life. But I'll never know what it's like to be you. We are constrained by our senses, our biology, or neurodiversity, to experience the world in a limited way. The Germans have a word for this Umwelt. It is the world as it is experienced by a particular organism. I would go further in saying by any individual organism. You may know that bees see in the ultraviolet wavelength. But however much you've studied the organism, you will never know what it is to exist as a bee. And yet, by simply observing them and their behavior, we can learn enough about them to make them serviceable to us, to create hybrids that produce the best honey, to bring them back from the brink of extinction. Even if we were the ones who brought them to the brink. No other being that we know about in the universe is capable of this. And yet, we could go around the world even today asking people where they think the bee comes from and discover why wars have been started over less. Are we related to them somehow, since we come from the same place, the same world, or were they created separately from us, but in the same primordial garden? Some believe we can be reincarnated into bees. Others believe bees are aspects of a god or goddess. And people tend to cluster geographically and culturally, even linguistically, around a common conceit on the origins of things like bees, or of ourselves. It is a Versicolored and creatively rich map of the world that reflects this. But it also reflects that the position you may hold, or I, is largely determined by where we were born, or educated. Interestingly, the map becomes less colorful if you ask people around the world, does the Earth travel around the sun? Or is it flat? Or do babies come from storks? There tends to be more of a consensus on such questions, whatever the level of education. 

The Book of Nature

This wasn't always the case, of course. Copernicus left the publication of his great work 'On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres' until after his death, because he knew it would get him in trouble. And afterwards, Galileo did get in trouble for teaching it. He made the mistake of presuming that simply by presenting the evidence he could persuade the church and the Pope, who speaks for God himself, that they have been wrong all this time. That the truth wasn't finally revealed to the Pope by God, but by Galileo. He was also arrogant, which didn't help. The compromise he came to was to suggest that God reveals himself in two books, The Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature. And subsequently, this gave the church some leeway for accepting the science that seemingly contradicted what Scripture suggested about the creation of the Sun and Moon, the origin of species and the position of the earth in the cosmos. But once the church began giving up ground, it was seen by those educated in the sciences as an admission of error by a supposedly infallible source. It therefore abdicated its authority to make further inerrant pronouncements on the book of nature, and it will be the natural philosophers - those we would eventually call biologists physicists, chemists, cosmologists, incidentally, in the early modern period, many of them were churchmen. It will be these who'll take on the mantle of unearthing the secrets of this book, and become prophets heralding a new age of reason, whose standard isn't a fashion or a trend that changes with the seasons, takes hold and vanishes like a meme. It isn't decided on a personal whim, or by taste as a song or hairstyle. It isn't accepted purely on faith, "the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen" according to the book of James. It is a standard that demands evidence of things very much seen, very much detectable. It isn't a magician that points to the sky and says on such and such a day and time, a comet will fly by. It is a scientist. 

Begin it Now!

But reason has its limits, as Pascal noted, and taken to the extreme, science can become inhuman. Once we harnessed fire and split the atom, for example, an insatiable itch impelled us to explore all the implications of these discoveries, for good or ill. And when we abdicate our humanity, in the service of science, it becomes totalitarian. We are not gods, we live and die like the Mayfly. And nothing we create is created out of nothing. Which is why I suppose many scientists like to compare themselves to explorers, and describe what they do as acts of discovery, rather than invention. And even those who call themselves inventors know they are constrained by the laws of nature. That energy cannot be created or destroyed. And however ingenious their imaginations, they'll never make anything that moves by perpetual motion. Michelangelo may have already seen the figure in the marble before setting it free. Once he found the right block, a hammer, chisel, and his imagination did the rest. And some writers seem able to create characters more vidid and rounded than people we know in real life, but "Every life is in many days, day after day", to quote Joyce. "We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves." And it's the same for you and me. However it is we satisfy our rage to create, what we need is there at our disposal. All we have to do is begin.