246
Creative writingidentifying 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 academy247
creative writing as a discipline speaking across disciplines could be tremendous.
Since that interdisciplinary genie is out, we can seed a few wishes.
Share with your friends: