The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind | E. David Peat

The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind | E. David Peat | Trite, bewildering, only slightly illuminating

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The Blackwinged Ni...

	The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind E. David Peat Basic Books, 2001 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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"David Peat is exceptionally well qualified to write about creativity, because he combines being a physicist with a wide knowledge of the arts. The book is packed with illuminating insights."-Anthony Storr, author of The Dynamics of Creation, Churchhill's Black Dog, and Music of the MindWhat does the creation of matter in the universe have to do with humanity's creative spirit? What is the connection between, art, literature, and music, and mathematical formulae and scientific theories? Taking an overarching scientific view of the universe and our place in it, scientist-philosopher F. David Peat explores the profound similarities and connections between the Universe's "creativity," which reveals itself in the laws of nature, and the creativity of human consciousness.Brilliant and wide-ranging in its scientific and humanistic sweep, The Blackwinged Night explores the very essence of the creative spirit and the way it animates the physical world, giving us the power to experience beauty-whether gazing into the night sky, listening to Bach's B-minor Mass, or creating ourselves something extraordinary and new.

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Deeper than Dreams...

This is an excellent book, one of those very few that manage to be both disarmingly simple yet profound at once. Peat is a past-master at grasping the most arcane and difficult theories. He has studied and written on chaos theory, the science of complexity, fractals, quantum mysteries, David Bohm's implicate order, and subjects of special interest in the art world. Simultanously, he has translated these ideas into digestible portions for the intelligent layman reader. He is the best of the bunch when it comes to science writing and he is also very knowledgeable about the higher echelons of the current art world.

In this book, however, I got the impression he wrote just for himself. He does not bother to explicate complex theories or even to give references for many of the facts and phrases which well up in him. Instead, he just uses his background in science and the arts to make this beautiful pure statement on the varied expressions of creativity, from the human to the universal. Indeed, his book edges into the metaphysical by implying that the Supreme Ultimate behind all things is in fact creativity itself -- the first creative act being the creation of form out of the infinite creative potential of the void. (If anyone wants more excruciating detail about how such creativity could manifest itself, they may need to read A. N. Whitehead.) Peat notes that creative chaos, the Dionysian, begins the furor of all creative inspiration, but also that this phase must be followed by the long period of laborious, ordered endeavour to find appropriate form for this initial inspiration, that is, the Apollonian. He compares this pattern among many of his current favorite art forms as well as in the creative dynamics of Nature as revealed through science.

The result is, well, beautiful and moving and, yes, inspiring. I truly appreciated the idea that a sort of blind creativity is the "Prime Mover" beyond the forms of reality. To deny creativity it is to become unconscious and moribund. But creativity is not novelty; it often means seeking new depths in the old or reexperiencing current patterns as though for the first time, as in, for example, human relations.

The book is a short, easy read, but one that demands full--creative--attention if one is to comprehend its implied depth. Highly recommended.

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Trite, bewildering, only slightly illuminating

Throughout the 230 pages of Peat's musings I often came to the questions, "Who is he writing this for?" and "why am I continuing on with this?". Often, it seemed just as I was once again considering putting the book down for good, I'd come to some gem of insight or information that would keep me going for another 20 or so pages. Still, the insights were seldom original, but instead reminders of something I'd read before -- "Ah yes, maybe I should go read THAT again." And seldom were these gems enough for me to leave the day's reading inspired or my thinking altered. (Not even "a millionth of an inch" to quote Peat's quoting of Beat writer Gary Snyder.) You want to read about creativity as the meeting of Dionysus and Apollo? Go to Nietzche's Birth of Tragedy, or even its Cliff Notes. You want to find the connection between quantum physics and Eastern Mysticism there are many New Age pop books that will explain it if not much better, at least leaving you with that buzz of sustained inspiration. The entire sections on the Big Bang and Science and the Void, I nearly skipped from bewilderment and impatience. (Why did he need to pepper us with algebraic formula's about angular momentum and evidence for "neutrinos?") The section on Language, however, was by far the most insightful and thought-provoking section of the book, perhaps followed by Creativity and the Body. For those two sections, it was possibly worth the time trudging through to get there. If you buy the book and get bogged down, I'd recommend just skipping to those two chapters.

I began the book already wondering if we've chewed the word "creativity" into an overworked and overused piece of triteness. Between the first sentence, "We are all creative," to the moment on page 212 where he writes the anthropomorphic, "The universe is freely giving out energy because it wants to sing for joy," I became convinced of it. And even then, if you are one to be inspired by such sentiments, you, too, may possibly leave the book disappointed.

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