Creativity and Madness (Week Seven)

    For this week, we did "automatic writing" which to put it simply is the activity of writing without thinking, in hopes of writing from within your unconscious. The idea of writing from your unconscious is sort of mad within itself. This leads to the topic of this week's class, creativity and madness. The reading from this week describes the idea of going into our most mad and manic state of being as a way of tapping into our non-rational minds and thus in a sense taking away all logic. Art and creativity are in a sense- the act of ignoring what seems logical and avoiding rational thinking. In the reading, the author explained this phenomenon: "In order for far-flung or chaotic thoughts to be transformed into works of art, original and meaningful connections (linkings, in the Aristotelian sense of 'dissimilarity with similarity') must be made." (Jamison, 1993). 

    For my example, I am using the automatic writing we did in our last class of the year, as I missed the in-person class for this week. It was rather fun, to "not think" and just blurt out words onto a page (based off of a prompt). The prompt for this was in short, why each of us has been given the gift of creativity. For this activity, we started by: writing as quickly as we could for seven minutes about our answer to the prompt. Then after the seven minutes were up we highlighted any phrases that we found interesting. Lastly, we used those highlighted phrases to create a poem, that poem will be a message from our unconscious to ourselves. 

    When starting this activity I had no idea what to expect, I assumed it would make no sense, especially as someone who is a self-proclaimed terrible poet. But, I actually thoroughly enjoyed the activity and felt inspired afterward. This activity truly helped me learn more about myself, reminded me of some things that I had forgotten about my creativity, and helped me figure out some things relating to our final project! To end this post, I want to share my poem. It does not rhyme- and I am not even sure if it is actually a poem. But it inspired me, so I want to share it.

                        Creativity is protecting and comforting

                                new worlds, away from it all

                                        for learning

                            it's more than one way of doing

                          making things less overwhelming

                                        it's grounding

                                visions of a brighter future

                                making boring things fun

                               knowing when to be serious

                                    daydreaming in class

                           it's dreaming of stories, new stories

                                        a better world

                                       inspiring others

                                    embracing opposites

                                   creating new from old

                Creativity is for finding yourself in the little things