The creative approach to language, the expressive urge, the impact of a whim to let the unseen meaning come to be seen, come into the light: to write creatively, one must know how to think without the limiting slant of convention, and this means to recognize, to fashion, to come upon new forms and counterweights, new allowances, and to effect bold innovations in the way words and sounds and currents of meaning are matched and provided for…
To think about achieving new cosmologies, to think outside the geometry of the known (or presumed) universe, we must first come to the understanding that rule-based thinking is designed to leave us with thoughts that re-affirm the underlying preconceptions, the rules…
The artist, the poet, learns to sketch free-hand, trusting that there is more life, more truth, more expressive capacity, in the traces left by a free hand than in the paint-by-numbers standard copy we might be tempted to produce (as if to show that we can or to demonstrate reverence for the conventions that elevate their proponents); the scope of the free hand is broader, so its ability to find its way is more evolved…
Dialogue works best this way as well: when two parties get beyond the vices of convention and expand outward into another sort of interpretive momentum, where the quality of the leap between one phrase and another is enhanced, and more of the previously unseen can be revealed…
A new utterance, or better, a new mode of utterance, is a de-structuring (or a deconstruction) of already standing structures through which utterance once has been known, and in that, it is a critique, an undermining and also a contribution…
In invention, there is a judgment about the frail and fluid nature of what is real, what is final, and as Joseph G. Kronick writes, in Derrida and the Future of Literature:
Such a judgment fails, however, to the extent that it obeys a law and does not reinstitute or reinvent the law in a new judgment. IT is a matter of doing justice to what is to come, the other, to singularity, to the singularity of the coming of the other, an impossible but necessary task, for the “other” is a name for what can bear no name, not even (and least of all) “Being.” It is to come precisely because is does not have the status of a present being, nor is it an object of knowledge. The other is what calls for a response.
To write is to engage the world in new terms. To create is to find shapes and voices new enough to seem a new world or a new standard, beyond the known. And to think toward the future is, of necessity, to engage something that we do not yet know: it requires invention, openness to shifting of sands, monuments, bodies of law and manners of parsing every x into its y and z, every memory into its offspring…
We find ourselves renovated by engaging an imagined future. Wisdom resides in the other as it resides deep within, not showing signs unless we embody the poise and patience to feel how it flows. Creating must be a work committed to being against the ravages of entropy, against disintegration, so we venture out into the de-structuring of the known, in order to write the next, and find synthesis, connection, coming together…