When the first lockdown of COVID-19 happened in March 2020, I was alone in Montreal. My roommates had decided to leave and go back to their homes so as not to get stuck in Montreal. What I had not seen coming was the pausing of all classes for a little while. All of a sudden, my daily life shifted from studying all day every day to … well, I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do, to be honest. So I did what I always did to relax during study breaks: I grabbed my skateboard, put on a playlist and started to ride through the city. 

Yet something felt quite different. The city had changed. The atmosphere was peculiar. The long corridors of tall concrete buildings, which were so crowded just a few days before, were now deserted. It felt as though I was in an apocalyptic movie cruising through the empty streets, whilst listening to Pink Floyd as it seemed to fit the times. Weird times. During my exploration of the city, I decided to stop by the bookstore before it closed down. 

That day, I bought two books. The first one was a collection of Robert Frost's poems, and the second was The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I had read R.W.E.'s essay on Nature when I was in cégep and had greatly appreciated his spiritual ideology. He thought that God, or what he called Nature, was not a person or any kind of personified being as we often imagine but instead the collection of everything that exists in itself. The golden book appeared to be waiting on the shelf for a while. There were cracks on the binding of the book, and small bits had been chipped away. It did not seem like an attractive book if you are someone who likes to judge a book by its cover, but for some reason, I felt it was calling to me. There were three aspects that compelled me about Emerson's writings.

The first reason why I think Emerson should be known as a champion of creatives is because he laid out a quite simple and elegant metaphysic which fleshed out the nature of creativity, from the very fundamentals of thinking to the reason why man has a responsibility to put his creativity to the test. And he did so in a very creative way. Indeed, Emerson believed that the basis of everything, in reality, was connected through what he called "Nature." This Nature, according to him, lacks any kind of subjectivity as opposed to our Western idea of God, a paternal archetype judging everything from the golden clouds. Thus, the miracle of life would be that everything works through interwoven elements interacting with one another and that the true beauty of spirituality is realizing, as humans, that we are all part of this one deeply beautiful thing with an endless number of facets to observe and experience. By the same token, he believed that since nothing could be born outside this Nature, everything man created was inspired by something that was already in Nature. Therefore, if you are attentive, that is to say; you are able to contemplate Nature deeply enough, then you can extract deeper truths that only your brain could pick up with its very uniquely tuned configuration. 

This leads us to Emerson's second great line of ideology as it pertains to creatives. The importance of being oneself. That part of his philosophy is more commonly tied to transcendentalism, a school of thought he was known for being the father of in North America. Emerson, like other transcendentalists, believed that every individual was blessed with its own way of seeing the world. In his essay titled Self-reliance, he writes: "Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession.". Even more interesting is how he tied back his philosophy to his concept of Nature. Indeed, according to him, by being connected to Nature, we can tap into a rich source of inspiration that is accessible to everyone. He writes, "We first share the life by which things exist and afterwards see them as appearances in nature and forget that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought.". Simply put, Nature should be seen as a deep well of pure reality. The fact that every single detail, every single way of existing, every single cell and every single atom in the world somehow exists within a greater everything allows you if you are attentive enough, to sometimes perceive things at their very core. This deep well of inspiration was important for Emerson as a poet, but more importantly, because he wanted to see the blossoming of others' capacity to develop their own unique way of seeing life through a creative lens.

Thirdly, Emerson is probably one of my favourite poets, not only because of his philosophical approach to the craft but also because he was truly talented in that field. He understood from experience how to channel the creative force. In his essay titled The Poet, he writes: "And this hidden truth, that the fountains whence all this river of Time and its creatures floweth are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty; to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the present time." He goes on to explain that the poet is the man in whom the powers of cause, operations and effect are in balance. What is interesting is that he says that the poet is someone who has that strong connection to these three core parts of reality. Basically, they have a greater capacity to tap into what he calls the fountain but also have a greater capability to show to the rest of the world what they saw at that moment of clarity, a pure glimpse of beauty, a specific configuration of core parts of the universe. This breaking down of the powers of cause, operations, and effect is Emerson's theory of creativity, in a sense, how we come to create original things. (Note: This topic was addressed in the very first essay I wrote for this blog.) However, Emerson addresses the topic as usual in a beautifully romantic and nuanced fashion. He presents this process with the concept that humans are like channels for core parts of reality. Some of us have more capacity to accurately channel them from the source and then digest and reorganize them into an expression that may be shared with others who will, in turn, experience the core parts of reality that shine through the expression. More importantly, as Emerson writes about the importance of exposing one's very own point of view to the world (or creations), one must consider how this practice has a positive effect on the world and how this reinforces the case for creatives to be less concerned with whether someone else has done something similar or better in the past and to simply go about creating.  

Another more modern creative hero, who I am certain would have gotten along beautifully with Emerson if he had been born 160 years later, is Rick Rubin. In a podcast with neurologist Andrew Huberman, he says that what makes a great artist is someone who makes stuff for their own taste. Essentially, when artists make things for themselves, the result for others will also be better. This is yet another great example that reminds us to always prioritize one's own point of view. When an idea emerges from your mind, it is shaped through the lens of a very curated psychology that is your very own. Your mindset was built and will continue to be built from all your experiences and all your inclinations to different sensibilities. Perhaps you're more sensible to colours than others, and that allows you to have a curated way of assembling colours together, making you possibly an interesting visual artist. Yet, it can be scary to put your pure view of life out for the rest of the world to see because if someone doesn't like it, it might mean that the most real things about you are rejected. However, if you do have the courage to take this leap of faith, the pure, genuine part of you that can come out of it represents perhaps the most valuable thing that humans have. There is no point in debating that the best pieces of work happen out of genuine moments, but unfortunately, in school, we get taught to refer to and quote people on everything we produce. I'm not saying that this is the wrong thing to do. As I write this essay, I use Emerson's perspective to communicate my point effectively. The core of the message is that the people you would be quoting or referring to, as opposed to doing your own thing, had the exact same fear, or at least most of them had. The reason why these things happened to be great was because they were so different that they added value by an additional order of magnitude, so much so that they became almost canonical in their respective fields.

Trusting creativity is following your pure, curated view of life. Ideas can sometimes make you feel good and inspired and yet give you this feeling of vertigo. It is as if the incongruence between your inner ideas and the perceived outside world is a symbol of danger. On that feeling, R.W.E. writes on the importance of following your intuitions nevertheless: "No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which nature had taken to heart."

Cheers,

E.F.

P.S. I’ll always try to leave my readers by sharing something that inspired me. 

The Rhodora

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,


I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,


Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,


To please the desert and the sluggish brook.


The purple petals fallen in the pool


Made the black water with their beauty gay;


Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,


And court the flower that cheapens his array.


Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why


This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,


Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,


Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;


Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!


I never thought to ask; I never knew;


But in my simple ignorance suppose


The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Source of quotes: The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson pages 150, 141, 288 & 373