Connections

In 1953, American James Watson and Englishman Francis Crick published a short article in the scientific journal Nature in which they proposed a structure for DNA, the complex organic molecule recognized as the essential component for the propagation of life. The proposed model of a double helix was produced in Cambridge University by trial and error; they used mazes of straight wire segments (symbolizing molecular bonds) supported by test-tube clamps. Their principal constraints were chemical principles and X-ray images produced by Brits Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. As part of their model Crick and Watson inferred that the double helix structure provided a means by which human genetic characteristics…


Just a few years later, American Alan Lerner and Austrian immigrant Frederick Loewe’s My Fair Lady opened on Broadway. Remarkably, the leading male character does not sing to the music, but, rather, recites. And, the ending of the play does not correspond with that of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, from which the musical was derived. But My Fair Lady does … and Pygmalion does not … parallel the ending of the Greek myth of a sculptor (Pygmalion; thus Shaw’s play’s title) who falls in love with the feminine form he has carved out of stone – a sculpture which subsequently comes to life.


In 1963 Brits Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews (and, independently, in 1964, Canadian L. D. Morley) published a hypothesis for the origin of anomalous magnetic measurements acquired over the world oceans. This hypothesis was based on two ideas: The first, advanced by American Harry Hess, suggested that the crust beneath the oceans originated as a consequence of continental drift, with material from the Earth’s mantle rising to fill the gap. Second, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, American and Australian researchers progressively acquired observation’s which demonstrated that the magnetic field of the Earth periodically reversed itself. The hypothesis of continental drift had its earlier Twentieth Century advocates, including American Wallace and especially German Alfred Wegener, while reversed magnetism of rocks (the principal evidence for the history of the Earth’s magnetic field) had been recognized by Japanese workers prior to World War II.


Also in the mid Sixties, three Americans, Dale Wasserman, Mitch Leigh, and Joe Darion, presented a musical Play, Man of La Mancha, based on the characters of the paradigmatic novel, Don Quixote and, curiously enough, its author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The anachronistic adventures of Don Quixote represented, in turn, Cervantes’ satire on the knightly romances of his time; the romances centered on notions of chivalry already more than two centuries dead.


In 1948 the United Nations, itself only a few years old, recognized the creation of two “new” nations in the Middle East: Israel and Jordan, from the previous British Protectorate, Palestine. Israel partly coincided with the ancient kingdom of Israel which was last united during reigns of Kings David and Solomon. Following the Seven Days War in 1969, with the occupied territories, particularly the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza Strip (but not Sinai) modern Israel even more closely corresponded with David’s Israel. Oddly enough, the name “Palestine” was inherited from David and Israel’s ancient enemies, the Philistines.


Earlier in the 1940’s in the midst of World War II, Americans Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II presented a revolutionary musical play on Broadway, Oklahoma, which represented the nearly complete integration of music, lyrics, dance, and plot. The process of integration had begun nearly two decades earlier with Hammerstein and Jerome Kern’s Show Boat.


These diverse human events — political, scientific, technological, and artistic – can each be described as creative. In every decade any number of such events can be recognized in virtually every field of human endeavor as something new. Something novel has emerged and is readily (at least after a few years) recognized as such. Such creativity seems to be an essential element of human history. But, is it uniquely human? To the Christian, Jew, or Muslim, it is God who is the ultimate creator from nothing: “In the beginning...” Commonly, natural processes are referred to as creative: new oceanic crust is created from rising partially molten mantle at mid-oceanic spreading centers as lithospheric plates move away from one another. New living cells are created by the division of preexistent cells. Helium is created from hydrogen in the interior of stars such as our own sun. The Earth’s magnetic field originates from convective and electrical currents in the Earth’s outer core. Stars are produced from nebulae.


Is it absurd to consider science, art, and human history together? Each endeavor is intrinsically human, and, to the individual scientist, artist, and historian, there is a great hope for creative progress. But, is creativity in science equivalent to artistic progress or historical understanding? Particularly for the scientist, there may well be a kind of instinctive repugnance towards the idea that the research process is somehow more than analogous to the artistic effort; no matter how much the individual scientist may admire the artistic product. And, for there to be a commonality between the events of political history and scientific progress (beyond the extent to which one facilitates or affects the other) is probably most distasteful: Science, you see, operates in a very particular, rational way it has method… testing hypotheses, modifying and retesting, accepting and rejecting ideas, constructing and reshaping models to fit carefully made observations and painstakingly designed experiments. Is there truly progress in art? Perhaps there is. Is ther in human history? Some, including scientists, may have grave doubts, or if not, they might ascribe progress as occurring to the extent that scientific method more completely permeates human culture, Somehow the “subjectivity” of art and the apparent chaos of politics seems other-worldly to the ideal of normal science.


As a scientist myself, I could try to guess what attitudes of artists and political scientists (or politicians themselves) might be towards the world of science and scientists, but I am unwilling to formalize such hypotheses right now. I prefer to leave them to the artists and politicians themselves to develop, apply, and test.


This book is an effort by a scientist to explore exposed little corners of the worlds of the performing and literary arts, political history, and science (including some of my own), in hopes of finding some basic commonality in the creative process… As much as I might hope that something new may emerge from this endeavor, it is more likely that older insights may be recast in only slightly reshaped molds.


I believe those who know the work of Carl Jung, in particular, will find something familiar here. In fact, I am attempting to be more Jungian, in some respects, than was Jung himself, and less in other ways. In Jung’s very personal Answer to Job, I suspect the great psychologist went outside the perimeter of his own psychological theories. In his anger against Yahweh, he seems to tangle with not merely the inner Yahweh-image (implicit in much of his other works), but with the Deity himself. Now one might argue that the work of active imagination which Jung popularized (although one can find analogous techniques in Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises) requires just the kind of personification which Answer uses. But, the analysis which is presumed to follow the active imagination process would have made such distinctions clear – something which Jung, to my knowledge, did not do. From a religious perspective, it might be suggested that Jung’s encounter with Yahweh was really an encounter with the numinous and other-worldly. The Psalmist could argue with God. Abraham, in Genesis, certainly did. Nevertheless, it is my intention herein to make an attempt to preserve classical Jungian distinctions. The contrasting pairs of conscious / unconscious, ego / shadow, anima / animus, extraversion / introversion, judging / perceiving, feeling / thinking, and sensing / intuiting provide powerful tools for the exploration of human intelligence and creativity. Recognition of the shadow and the anima or animus can be one of the more frustrating and self-revealing components of maturation of the human person. I strongly believe that the principal mode of expression of the inner, hidden parts of the human person, is in projection of these types on others (for example: infatuation or prejudice) or, perhaps more healthily, by expression of a creative process. Fundamental to the application of the Jungian model to understanding the creative effort is Recognition, reshaping, and formalizing the process of projection. In other words a kind of inverted anthropic principle is developed here, in which we can acquire a “new” and potentially revealing insight into what it means to be a living, breathing, creative creature. “New?” Perhaps not, as we shall see.


What follows is certainly subjective and, in a very traditional sense, unscientific. The laboratory for the ideas discussed is the mind of the individual. Jung found it necessary for himself to engage in extreme introspection, dream-work, and even reliving his life through primitive ritual. He began this effort in earnest shortly after breaking with Sigmund Freud, convinced that in order to understand his patients, it would be necessary for him to understand himself. So it is that it may be necessary for the individual reader to test the ideas presented here against his or her own personal experience. The uniqueness of individual human experience is non-reproducible; but I believe there is a commonality in the experience of creativity. The source of human creativity is within the individual human mind and its remembered experience. Interaction with others -- with the world -- is essential, yes, but the individual is the ultimate seed-bed, testing ground, and laboratory from which new fruits, inventions, and products emerge. The American petroleum geologist, Wallace Pratt, summed-up a long career by observing: “Oil is found in the minds of men.”


If we can wrestle with the nature of human creativity, then with our own creativity, ultimately these experiences may lead to Bethel. Like Jacob, the creative individual finds himself or herself wrestling with a divine being. So much the better; so much more profound can be the creative experience.


Next: Plot