When adversity is the spark necessary for creativity

What is the spark that lights the creative spirit? The question has assumed an enigma with the origins of creativity shrouded in the mists of mystery. Yet American author Julie Burstein (Spark: How Creativity Works) also produced a very successful radio show in New York (Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen) for nine years, talking to creative talents from filmmaker Ang Lee, actor Kevin Bacon, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, to others like painter Chuck Close, novelist Richard Ford and artist Richard Serra about the sources for their inspirations. In the course of interviewing hundreds of creative minds Burstein's radio anchor Andersen found that while creativity was as individual as the various minds it sprang from, the sources of creative inspiration, based on numerous case studies, could generally be discerned as certain patterns.

One very important discovery and one that should give hope to millions of people is that physical disabilities in the individual need not hamper the creative spirit; on the contrary in several cases they can actually promote creativity. As a learning disability did with New York based artist Chuck Close, famous for his huge grid portraits of people. Close suffers from a disorder called prosopagnosia, or face blindness which makes him unable to remember faces in three dimensions. If he met you today, then it's unlikely he would recognise you again tomorrow. Yet once he paints a face, flattening it into just two dimensions it becomes recognisable to him. His professional approach is similar to the 'construction' of a canvas. When he found that he was flabbergasted by the whole he found it helpful to isolate a small piece that he could work on while forgetting about the rest of the painting. In his earlier days, he would erase the pencilled grid, but in his later portraits he lets the grid show, making us a part of his process and of his unique way of seeing.

Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Richard Ford, had a severe case of childhood dyslexia that prevented him from reading for pleasure till he was almost 20 years old. To this day, he cannot read much faster silently than he can aloud. Yet according to his own admission, "There were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me, because when I finally did reconcile myself to how slow I was going to have to do it, then I think I came into an appreciation of all those qualities of language and of sentences that are not just the cognitive aspects. The syncopations, the sounds of words, what words look like, where paragraphs break, where lines break, all the poetical aspects of language. I wasn't so badly disabled from reading; I just had to do it really slowly. And as I did — lingering on those sentences, as I had to linger — I fell heir to language's other qualities which I think has helped me write sentences."

There are a number of other people who have achieved career success despite and often because of physical disabilities, sometimes crippling. Physicist Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time is a case in point. His life threatening condition that resulted in him being a quadriplegic and also led to a number of brushes with death, has, in fact, promoted his single-minded obsession with crossing the boundaries of the universe —in his mind. "If you are physically disabled, one cannot afford to be psychologically disabled as well. In my opinion, one should concentrate on activities in which one's physical disability will not present a serious handicap," said Hawking.

One of the greatest music composers of all time, Ludwig Van Beethoven started going deaf in his twenties yet wrote one of his finest musical pieces — the Ninth Symphony — when he was completely deaf. That, by some critics, is considered one of the finest pieces of music ever written. Speaking in general it would seem that adversity of any sort, specifically of the severe sort, can often stir up the strong creative aspects in an individual —provided the individual is never defeated by his/her suffering. That perhaps is the most important factor of all.

The author is a spiritual writer with dna