Order, Disorder, and Creativity

I crave order, simplicity, cleanliness, solitude.

My desk looks like smattering of notes about ideas. My desktop takes on a similar hue, reflecting half-baked and overdone ideas on a number of topics.

Somewhere in between this craving for order and its Hyde-impulse to conjure and arrange messy initial thoughts comes a semblance of creativity.

What is it for me? Sharp contrast is my most prominent motif for exploring and expressing creativity. In a course I took my first senior semester a student remarked at the juxtaposition of opposites in my writing. He noted something that I do but had not consciously registered as a go-to way of broaching a topic. Juxtapositions can be provocative. Juxtapositions help to delimit and define the categories in juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is simply another expression of the way I was taught to and taught myself to build my brain, my thinking, my modes of expression. I delve into sanctity and sacrilege. I revel in grotesquery and paragons of all things normative. I call protective parenting rape and protagonize rapist-murders. And everywhere I find these extremes far in the center is a dividing line. I suspect that many allow their ideas and consciousness to loiter about that line and to stray not much further. I prefer the deep end of thinking, evil to saintly, and in either expression I find the extremity of it an obscenity in itself.

If I were utterly orderly in my day, my routine, my habits, my personality, my thinking I may perhaps fall into a stultifying routine of thinking. And with that goes my creativity, so I think. I cannot peg creativity to any sullen impulse or to a sinewy self-discipline. No, creativity is the shards of thought that break off when two poles of thought collide.