THE CRISIS IN HUMAN CREATIVITY
EXPLORING HOW WE COPE IN THE ERA OF CORONAVIRUS AND LOCKDOWNS AROUND THE WORLD The most creative journey one makes is inward: what has our country, culture, society, education, training, relationships, values and visions, given to us from our childhood to
The catastrophic coronavirus has challenged human creativity as nothing else. COVID-19 is the lethal warning for the 21st century.
Its calamitous effects will scar our world and may restructure our daily realities more dramatically than any revolution.
The question is whether the healing fountains will start in our hearts in this drastic exposure of inequality and suffering that we’ve witnessed from the streets of Brazil to Bombay. And America, the exceptional state, has an exceptional story to tell: will the people accept the mess made in the richest super power while China bullies the freedom fighters of Hong Kong.
Surviving the coronavirus era
But the history of the modern world is shaped more by geography and the dawning of a planetary consciousness. The earth keeps rolling on like the Ol’ Man River.
The fact is that in science and arts, poetry and philosophy, dictatorships and democracies, all men and women have been subjected to the deadly, daily carnage of a dreadful invasion, from within our world, not by some aliens.
Questions and quests have been raised from the most mundane to the metaphysical. So sudden, so surreal. Even Donald Trump’s tweets have no answer, nor Narendra Modi’s mantras, or Vladmir Putin’s punditry, or Boris Johnson’s sheer boredom.
The effects have been brutal and visceral. The grave diggers are bulldozing the dead.
Yet, so far, no vaccine or a united front to combat this unforeseen disruption to life itself. There’s a deep rupture in the fractured human condition.
This invisible virus has made us see our limitations as human beings. The talk of national borders, race and religion, terror and terrorism, seems to have suspiciously and surreptitiously disappeared from the radar.
There are forces beyond our control: the climatic climate changes seem to point to a more disastrous era ahead. But what of the ordinary mortals?
Light in the darkness
When a whole forest is burning who worries about the daffodils?
Yet in this tragedy there are a few lights glimmering in the circles of darkness.
People still care for one another. The heroic acts of kindness, of charity, caring and compassion, have been numerous and, in places, beyond belief. For me the most important thing is how individuals cope with this disaster with courage and hope, resistance and resilience without losing their humanity in the community.
Individuals and communities derive their strength and energy from innumerable sources, natural and supernatural.
The most creative journey one makes is inward: what has our country, culture, society, education, training, relationships, values and visions, given to us from our childhood to our last breath when it all becomes air in the dusty deserts of death.
Last week, I received an email from my doctor brother from Lautoka: he said he was re-reading William Wordsworth’s ‘The Immortal Ode’ in these days and nights of mortality. He has been a doctor for over forty years: he should know a bit about life and death. How deeply we’re dependent on our medics: from nurses to neurosurgeons, and the managers of health systems. But there’s a deeper layer within ourselves: we explore it in the darkness of our souls and see fitfully an illumination.
On receiving his note, I went back to Wordsworth’s greatest poem written a few years after he wrote his famous poem ‘Tintern Abbey’, which I was taught in Natabua High school.
I still remember some sublime lines: And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
The blue sky, and the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things.
It’s this spirit that we need to discover around us. Call it what you will but it does make us humanly heroic in our most vulnerable times.
This year is the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth. He was born in 1770 and died in 1850.
No poet before him had made his SELF the centre of his poetry; some of it magnificent and unrivalled, some quite rustic in bucolic landscapes. He wrote about the ordinary life of common people and gave them voice and life exalted by his poetic imagination.
In 1798, he and his friend ST Coleridge published a book of their compositions: ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ are the two great gems of that collection titled Lyrical Ballads. They changed the direction of English poetry.
Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is set somewhere in the Southern Pacific. Its moral dimensions echo today in climactic climate emergency and the killing of birds and animals in our environment. It should be taught in every school in the Pacific.
Wordsworth’s world
William Wordsworth went through a great crisis in his life: when a young orphan, he went and supported the Republican Movement in France, but was compelled to return to England when the Revolution turned nasty and bloody.
In that upheaval he lost his first love and a child, Caroline.
The guillotine became the symbol of death on the streets of Paris. A great revolution degenerated into a terrible terror.
All revolutions finally eat their own children. Think of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong and much lesser tyrants and monsters of so many revolutions. Wordsworth captures his sorrows in this great poem: ‘The Immortal Ode’; he’s haunted by his own declining powers of creativity but he uses poetry to rescue himself from total despair and annihilation of his moral being:
Though nothing can bring back that hour
Of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In the years that bring the philosophic mind.
We go to the poetry of life and death to survive the deepest tragedies – the Bible, the Koran, the Gita, etc, – all deal with man’s mortal being. There are no definite answers but the void has to be filled and human destiny fulfilled.
Adapting
This global pestilence is a good time to think how we’ve coped so far in our lockdown condition the like of which most of us have never experienced or never imagined it would strike our world with such venom and vengeance.
The answers are as many as there are human beings: some find strength and solace in their loving homes with their children and grandchildren; in their relationships for what can be more daring than human contact with our neighbours or people living in the next village or street or down the valley or up the hill on farms and seashores.
We learn to hoe our own gardens of the mind.
What has been most remarkable is how we’ve discovered, invented, explored new ways of creativity sitting in our lonely rooms through the gifts of technology.
People have created songs and music of both faith and feeling of friendships across the streets, around the world, in a gentle Namaste or a brightening Bula vinaka!
And its possibilities are infinite in the human heart.
But perhaps the most important art is to live with yourself: this requires immense strength of mind and body, heart and soul, character and commitment.
And this requires a journey into yourself and the pieces that make up your life, visible and invisible Wordsworth ends his poem with these soaring lines:
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
It’s today the most important challenge of our times: we can manage with so little as the lockdown has shown us.
The skies are clearer, the roads are empty, the rivers are clean ,the seas are brightly blue and the birds seem happier as koalas clamber up a tree and kangaroos skimp across the burnt landscape of human inhabitation.
The cities are free from fumes and noises.
The destruction seems less now than a year ago. There are lessons to be learnt: COVID-19 may be seen as a teacher in the time of our mysterious torturer.
But if we lost the humanity of our human spirit, then the vicious virus would have a victory unparalleled in human history.