The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
Download 2.89 Mb. View original pdf
|
Harry G. Broadman - Africa\'s Silk Road China and India\'s New Economic Frontier (2007, World Bank Publications) - libgen.li
| Writing in the community and academy 245 of creative writers on teaching poetry and fiction, but on focusing their skills of clear language and argument. The presence and work of these novelists, dramatists and poets were utilised as much by students from science, medicine and social science as they were by students of humanities. The discipline crossed over quite harmoniously into other forms of knowledge, for it helped to tell the story of those forms of knowledge. It is arguable that creative writing began finding some new, unusual, maybe historical, rooms of its own (some of which we explored in Chapter One ). However, although the uses of creative language and creative reading are important for these new open spaces, sometimes we reach a space where language runs out. Creative recognitions I offer only two examples from personal experience as an environmental scientist working on freshwater insects in the Lake District of England. My research focused on a family of lake midges whose species number in their thousands, and new subspecies and variants evolve regularly like minute but dynamic elements of a lake’s language. You identify these species by a carapace deposited on a lake surface on emergence as winged adults, and use a key, a book that explores and relates what you see under a powerful microscope to what has been seen by others in your field. This key represents current knowledge. Occasionally, you reach a zone where the current knowledge simply tapers to nothing, for the variant is completely new, unrecognisable. You stare at it, or part of it, not seen before by the human eye, and not described or drawn by the human mind. With the key, you reach the point where its lake runs dry. When scientists reach this point, this moving edge of knowledge, they surf forwards by a combination of previous knowledge, guesswork and intuition. With a species, you describe and classify it according to its likeness to something already described you use simile to compare it, and you use metaphor to name it. The Latin names of insects area spectrum of metaphoric and descriptive acuity. They are little, related images which represent an entire life form, a species, however temporary its moment of evolved presence. Its unseen worlds are metaphorised into recognition its invisibility released by simile. I always regarded science at this level as a form of creative and collaborative writing. The physicist Niels Bohr observed, When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.’ My second example echoes Les Murray’s painless headache metaphor described in Chapter Four . The concentration of attention required for 246 Creative writing identifying species is heightened even further when the numerical presence of these species is factored alongside other data, such as oxygen level, acidity, and thirty or more other physico-chemical variants, all of which makeup the natural, but invisible, world of that species. The final piece of data would be time itself – the measure of a season, say. To make any kind of testable judgement about these creatures required these data to be crunched by powerful multivariate statistical programmes. Depictions of correlation would unfold; thousands of permutations of relatable factors would be played against each other and the significance of any connectivity (for example, the surface area of a lake and the diversity of species) might feed out. You begin to seethe world is wider than your thought. The creative magic of numbers, not words, is the language of the natural world. This is why I made so much of this natural magic earlier in this book. When such data are swung across time, they seem to swarm like bees in a moving rope of migration. You hypothesise there must be a common purpose somewhere, but you would have to be a bee to understand the language of the movement, in this case the dance, noise and destination of the data. What you have to do is think yourself inside a natural ballroom of numbers, its walls and ceilings made up of moving and sliding micro-elements. Max Perutz names imagination as the first element of scientific creation. In understanding the multivariate nature of an invisible world, an intuition, strongly informed by practice, played apart that sometimes seemed as strong as the role given to statistical significance. I have never felt closer to that balance of perception and imagination than when I am writing creatively, or watching students in a creative writing class making discoveries for themselves among the swarm, noise and dance of language. When I claimed earlier that in the discipline of creative writing we are all beginners, some of that tone of mind informs the natural process of scientific discovery the design and making of pattern the neural ravelling of understanding and perception. As the immunologist and poet Miroslav Holub wrote, The emotional, aesthetic and existential value is the same . . . when looking into a microscope . . and when looking into the nascent organism of the poem ( 1990 : 143). Reading that quotation, you can see that scientists can play the scientiste just as much as artists can play the artiste. In Chapter One , we discussed how the pleasure of creativity might illuminate aspects of knowledge that are apparently nonliterary, and the findings of neuroscientists that ‘Story is a basic principle of mind, that parable is the root of the human mind – of thinking, knowing, acting, creating, and plausibly of speaking (Turner 1). The literary mind may prove to be the fundamental mind. The repercussions for the role of Writing in the community and academy 247 creative writing as a discipline speaking across disciplines could be tremendous. Since that interdisciplinary genie is out, we can seed a few wishes. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
|