CREATIVITY

The evolving system of the creative person is multicausal and unpredictable. The investment theory of creativity suggests that creative people are able to “buy low and sell high” in the realm of ideas. Buying low means pursuing ideas that are unknown or out of favour, but that have growth potential. The creative person viewed in the perspective of this theory can persist in the face of resistance. It is useful, if not essential, though, that such a person loves his ideas and focuses on his work and not on the rewards. Obviously, though, the creative person finds it encouraging that he has an environment that is supportive and rewarding of creative ideas.1

By means of a studied hindsight, an analysis of my life and society over more than sixty years, 1944 to 2007, I can hypothesize some factors that have led to all this creative writing and to the study of creativity itself.1 The modern impulse to study creativity first gathered momentum in the late 1940s early 1950s and it has continued into this new millennium. –Ron Price with thanks to Robert J. Sternberg, editor, Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge UP, 1999, pp.10-11 and 1ibid., p.108.

Some underlying matrix of
belief, attitude, values, ideas
has been carried about now
for decades; it never really
deserts me, rises, grows over,
under, beside me, in the gut,
aortic-blood flow to the brain,
over and over, trying to make it
compatible, relevant, somewhere,
sometime, closing the gap, modifying,
schematizing, a network of enterprizes
in my notebook years, new connections,
categories emerging from stabilization
and differentiation, freedom from
constrictions, from a whole system
of propositions, assumptions, emotions,
some would call it faith: this extremely
complex, truly life-span scope, cortical
arousal, bi-polar relation, lack of inhibition
and other degenerative stigmata, shifts,
tantalizing constellation, developmental,
childhood trauma, expansive, optimal fields,
beyond my control in a fragmenting world,
staggering diversity and perhaps constructed
after my death1 by generations of pioneers
who will succeed me in this contingent world.

1 This was the case with Rembrandt whose creativity was constructed by art historians after his death.-ibid., p.178.

Ron Price
21/2/06(revised 26/12/07)