Creativity

The purpose of any human activity is to make something that could never appear in Nature without the intervention of a conscious being.

This could be an expression of the common task of both art and science, as well as any other form of spirituality.

The most trustable sign of a creative person (an artist, a scientist etc.) is that the personal and the universal become inseparable in their work. There is no cold-hearted science, and certainly no cold hearts in the arts.

Art, and science, likes wide horizons, but too much erudition may even be a hindrance to creativity. More acquaintance with somebody's work may help understanding --- but it may also spoil the clarity of impression from a single masterpiece. To feel a work of art one has to live with it, rather than merely visit, like a tourist on the run. The same holds for a mathematical theorem, for a physical model etc.

Similarly, in any creative process, one has to be fully immersed into something for a significant amount of time to become able to discover a new level of integrity. However, the forms may differ: conscious study of the available material differs from hidden, unconscious processing. For example, The Incarnations grew (like a crystal grows) out of technical manipulations --- while one of my poems came in a dream as if I were reciting it in public, and I only had to wake up and write it down in the middle of the night, perfectly completed. This adds to the idea that any creativity comes from some objective necessity, and a creative personality is an "incarnation" of that necessity, one of its manifestations --- so that he/she cannot act differently.