Freeing the figure trapped in the marble
The creative process is central to our humanness.. and our divinity
8 min. read
PREFACE TO THE INAUGURAL POST: I fancied writing about this topic because it serendipitously came up in my life. But I realize I owe the reader a short intro on what this journal is to be about and why I’ve decided to launch it. We live in a world that (while deeply beautiful, natural, spiritual, miraculous underneath the surface) can seem insipid and dystopian at first blush (at least to the truly awake). It’s full of largely digitized systems of stealth control which seek to make us feel like we’re the ones making choices in our lives, when in fact we’re not. It’s a world of increasing surveillance tech, and the push towards automating and outsourcing some of our favorite activities and the things that make us feel human. As the famous social media post goes (paraphrasing): I want AI to do my laundry and dishes, not my writing [or insert creative joy-filled activity]. This fast and furious campaign to get us to fully embrace AI and exponentially increasing tech enhancement is largely coming from the likes of greedy corporates with an advanced case of FOMO(OMM) - fear of missing out on making money - gained through efficiencies and robbing us of valuable creative IP and personal data. It’s championed by elitist organizations of unelected stakeholders who may convince themselves they’re ‘making the world a better place’ and think that they know best for everyone, so everyone should fall in line and give up free will, free speech, free thought and creativity in the name of efficiency. In short, it’s a power grab. We’re at a critical juncture in human history - in peak Technocapitalism when we need to make the choice: do we want efficiency at all costs (and I mean ALL costs - stripping us of our purpose and humanity) or do we want some creature comforts and efficiencies - in balance - but would be willing to ‘give others up’ in the name of preserving and scaling up the best of being human? That, my friends, is what I seek to explore here - with a sometimes cynical perspective but always an optimistic solution and call to action. As the variation of the old Timothy Leary catchphrase goes, I invite you to: Turn on. Tune in. Opt Out.
And without further ado, I give you the first Human Scalers post…
A slab of marble. Its content: calcium carbonate. But ‘content’ is crass… especially in the eyes of the creator. To create, the artist has to transcend form and go beyond what’s right in front of them - in a sense, existing outside of space and time in the realm of the gods.
Michelangelo famously said of his sculptural process that he would see the figure or form in the marble and then set it free. This piece of poetry speaks to the magic of being human, having an imagination, being guided by it and in the process, liberating something inside oneself.
I was recently reminded of this High Renaissance era factoid when I repurchased a copy of one of my old university text books, The History of Art by H.W. Janson. I’ve taken up painting as a hobby and I remembered the significance and weight of this beast of a tome (figuratively and literally - it actually happens to weigh a ton!)
It’s at both an indispensable reference volume for aesthetic details - a Discobolus posture or the odd Ionic column adornment - and at times an inspiring reminder that creative expression is like a magical portal into the unknown with the power to scale up humans. Notice I said humans and not that loaded word, artists. Many of us hesitate to call ourselves artists. But all humans are creative - even if we express this creativity in different ways (cooking, clothing, being handy around the house or casting a proverbial spell and knowing ‘the right words to say’ to get a friend out of a funk).
Before the reader has a chance to prejudge ‘Janson’ as a dry academic discourse from frescoes to futurism, the author takes us in a completely different direction - a mystical one. Mind you, The History of Art was originally written by an NYU professor in 1962 - the Madmen era (a few years before Carlos Castaneda’s first psycho-spiritual Don Juan book was published):
Who were the first artists? In all likelihood, they were shamans. Like the legendary Orpheus, they were believed to have divine powers of inspiration and to be able to enter the underworld of the subconscious in a deathlike trance, but, unlike ordinary mortals, they were then able to return to the realm of the living… In a larger sense art, like science and religion, fulfills our innate urge to comprehend ourselves and the universe. This function makes art especially significant and, hence, worthy of our attention. Art has the power to penetrate to the core of our being, which recognizes itself in the creative act.
And this is the time to remember that the spark of creativity is white magic. All the while, a seemingly more convenient black magic beckons: the lure of outsourcing creativity to generative AI. It’s being presented as the logical next wave of Photoshop, digital art.. Midjourney - just another tool for the artist’s toolkit. But that it is not. In the same way that Google search has become a crutch that we’re now dependent on for our precious memories (uh, what was I saying?) GenAI presents a Faustian bargain that can transform ‘use it or lose it’ from an ironic t-shirt saying to a dire warning on a bottle of poison.
Art is not the finished product. Creative expression is a process of riding a wave, crashing towards another wave, and all the while being in flow and balance in the present moment - where the power is (and from which tech overreach seeks to distract us by offering up many optional futures and scattering our attention - something I will get to in other posts about this valuable commodity of consciousness).
Sure, there’s satisfaction in stepping back at the culmination of a project to marvel at how you managed to get your shit together and actually skillfully (here’s hoping) complete the work. But there’s also, at least for me, a bittersweet feeling when I finish a painting - akin to the end of summer of vacation when I was a kid. Something of the journey lingers but part of that conflicted joy is that you feel it dissipating just as you engage in recall, and recognize that you can’t go back.
Janson describes it perfectly in the intro to History of Art:
Ordinary artists do not work with ready-made parts but with materials that have little or no shape of their own; the creative process consists of a long series of leaps of the imagination and the artist’s attempts to give them form by shaping the material accordingly. The hand tries to carry out the commands of the imagination and hopefully puts down a brushstroke, but the results may not be quite what had been expected, partly because all matter resists the human will, partly because the image in the artist’s mind is constantly shifting and changing, so that the commands of the imagination cannot be very precise. In fact, the mental image begins to come into focus only as the artist ‘draws the line somewhere.’
Seeing into the marble, so to speak, sounds exciting. But what about that stage in the process when you’re about to move from vision to action and ‘jump’ off the proverbial cliff? The reference to a narrative in one of Castaneda’s books here is intentional. Throughout those works of fact/fiction/faction the tuned in writer repeated the assertion that to be a sorcerer (to live from source) you had to face death without fear. Again, a reference not to outsourcing but to in-sourcing.
Many a terrified creator has faced a fear that felt like a mini-death (and not the sexy French kind) when approaching a blank page or canvas or whatever medium they choose. Hell, I faced it before writing this first entry for Human Scalers. It’s a step into the darkness, into the unknown. Try as I might to plot my words or paintings with outlines or studies, the process never quite goes to plan. I suppose that’s the difference between creativity-as-commodity and creativity-as-the-ultimate-human-act.
‘The making of a work of art has little in common with what we ordinarily mean by ‘making.’ It is a strange and risky business in which the maker never quite knows what he is making until he has actually made it; or, to put it another way, it is a game of find-and-seek in which the seeker is not sure what he is looking for until he has found it.’
-H.W. Janson
You can, for example, peddle words for a living and be proud of how organized, cogent, efficient and effective you are in your messaging. And GenAI might even be able to assist you in crafting your branded content or corporate comms. It’s perfect for scrubbing all of that raw, clumsy, unique humanness and originality out of a few artful turns of phrase and transforming them into anodyne aphorisms for the LinkedIN humble-brag crowd.
But when it comes to the artistic hero’s journey - to discover new territory, rescue the marble slaves and save the kingdom - as long as you know where you’re going, you’re not going to get anywhere.
-SC