George Nelson wrote beautifully on architecture, design and creativity. Sadly, his books are now out of print. But you can get a flavour of his writing from Stanley Abercrombie’s excellent biography. Looking at it yesterday I found a quote I seemed to have missed before:
“What the creative act really means is the unfolding of the human psyche in the sudden realization that one has taken a lot of disconnected pieces and found, not done, a way of putting them together.”
Month: June 2004
The Art of Asking Questions
I have recently been working with a bunch of students helping them with their dissertation work. They are a very bright, lively, creative group who have done some very interesting stuff. But working with them reminded me of something that has puzzled me for years. They didn’t seem to know how to ask powerful questions. They asked plenty of questions about the task they had been given, including the potentially powerful question of why they had to do a dissertation at all. But the idea that questions were a way of exploring the world and opening new possibilities was something they hadn’t come across in their previous education. Questioning seemed to be confined to confirming the world.
My question is how can this be?
Fishing at night
I’ve just been reading a lecture by Philip Pullman. If you care about the education of our children I suggest you read it. It is filled with much I agree with in his critique of current practice. There is a particularly good description of what it feels like to write creatively and the difference from what children are being now asked to do:
“Writing a story feels to me like fishing in a boat at night. The sea is much bigger than you are, and the light of your little lamp doesn’t show you very much of it. You hope it’ll attract some curious fish, but perhaps you’ll sit here all night long and not get a bite.”
And he goes on to elaborate the metaphor, describing some of the perils and rewards of creative work. All this in contrast to what children are now being asked to do by the people who devised the system, which, as he says, misses the point:
“They miss it because they don’t know how anyone writes a story. They think that the way to write a story is to spend fifteen minutes planning, and, by the way, fill in the planning format to show that you’ve planned it properly; and then spend forty-five minutes writing the story according to your plan; and then you’ve done it.”
But despite the fact that much of what he had to say resonated with me very strongly, after my first reading I felt a sense of unease. On my second reading that unease hardened. The problem is that I think he is missing the point.
Unwinding the tapestry
Feeling the need for a little moral sustenance, I went on a trawl for Zygmunt Bauman. In a short essay of his “Does Reading Have a Future?” I found this lovely quote from Milan Kundera:
“The art inspired by God’s laughter does not by nature serve ideological certitudes, it contradicts them,” Kundera notes in The Art of the Novel. “Like Penelope, it undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before.”
Bauman continues:
“Artistic fiction defends hard-won human freedom and redeems human imagination and daring; in a world waging a war of attrition against contingency, ambivalence and mystery, the novel is a perpetual training in the difficult but badly needed art of living under conditions of uncertainty, in the company of polyvalence and among a variety of life forms.”
And concludes his essay with the sombre warning:
“When we worry about the future of books and book readership, let us take a closer look at society and its trends. To make books fit for the society we inhabit, let us try to prevent it from becoming unfit for books.”