All 19 entries tagged Inspiration

D.H. Lawrence on poetry and chaos

Follow-up to Radically distinct and inter–dependent modes of thinking–acting from Inspires Learning - Robert O'Toole

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari refer to a description of poetry as an encounter with chaos. It is from D.H. Lawrence's introduction to Harry Crosby's Chariots of the Sun (Crosby, the publisher who founded the Black Sun Press).

The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and ‘discovers' a new world within the known world. Man, and the animals, and the flower, all live within a strange and forever surging chaos. The chaos which we have got used to, we call a cosmos. The unspeakable inner chaos of which we are composed we call consciousness, and mind, and even civilization. But it is, ultimately, chaos, lit up by visions. Just as the rainbow may or may not light up the storm. And, like the rainbow, the vision perisheth.

But man cannot live in chaos. The animals can. To the animal, all is chaos, only there are a few recurring motions and aspects within the surge. And the animal is content. But man is not. Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos, he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting chaos. Then he paints the underside of his umbrella like a firmament. Then he parades around, lives, and dies under his umbrella. Bequeathed to his descendants, the umbrella becomes a dome, a vault, and men at last begin to feel that something is wrong.

The suffused fragments are the best, those that are only comprehensible with the senses, with vision passing into touch and to sound, then again touch, and the bursting of the bubble of an image. There is always sun, but there is also water, most palpably water. Even some of the suns are wetly so, wet pools that wet us with their touch. Then loose suns like lions, soft gold lions and white lions half-visible. Then again the elusive gleam of the sun of livingness, soft as gold and strange as the lion's eyes, the livingness that never ceases and never will cease. In this there is faith, soft intangible suffused faith that is the breath of all poetry, part of the breathing of the myriad sun in chaos. Such sun breathes its way into words, and the words become poetry, by suffusion. On the part of the poet it is an act of faith, pure attention and purified receptiveness. And without such faith there is no poetry. There is even no life. The poetry of sunless chaos is already a bore, the poetry of a regulated cosmos is nothing but a wire birdcage. Because in all living poetry the living chaos stirs, sun-suffused and sun-impulsive, and most subtly chaotic. All true poetry is most subtly and sensitively chaotic, outlawed. But it is the impulse of the sun in chaos, not conceit.

The full text is available here.

Robert O'Toole : 28 Nov 2009 08:20 |  Tags: Inspiration |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Radically distinct and inter–dependent modes of thinking–acting

Follow-up to Research pitch slides from Inspires Learning - Robert O'Toole

I'm re-visitng Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy? so as to get a better understanding of the "radically distinct modes of thinking-acting" described in my first conjecture. WiP? explores how the three disciplines of art, science and philosophy are constituted as radically distinct responses to the chaotic and disruptive reality of time and events. For example, on poetry:

In a violently poetic text, Lawrence describes what produces poetry: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent - Wordsworth's spring or Cezanne's apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 203-204)

This often violent injection of chaos into sense, in the case of poetry, translates into practices of creative thinking-acting that work with words, meaning, rhythm etc as their materials so as to intensify sense through a kind of tension. Painting, as descibed in Deleuze's Logic of Sensation, similarly belongs to art, but operates in chaos with different materials and methods. Philosophy and science, however, have a different relation to chaos - but always one founded in an empricism.

The three disciplines advance by crises or shocks in different ways, and in each case it is their succession that makes it possible to speak of "progress." It is as if the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy, because another struggle develops and takes on more importance - the struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 203)

So each discipline must in some way expose itself to chaos, to disruption: a necessity for risk encountered by each student when faced with the cognitive shift necessary in mastering a dicipline's "threshold" concepts. The modes of thinking-acting performed within a discipline work to open and close the gash in the umbrella of certainty, and to propel the individual and the collective forwards.

Does art provide the means for disrupting science and philosophy? Does science disrupt art? Philosophy science? For example, the Open Space Learning pedagogy introduces modes of thinking-acting from the theatre to scientists.

So the first conjecture becomes:

Intellectual activity consists of a set of radically distinct and interdependent modes of thinking-acting (implemented through varying disciplinary or private practices).

Robert O'Toole : 19 Nov 2009 07:19 |  Tags: Inspiration |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Facilitating creativity in higher education: a brief account of NTFs' views, Marilyn Fryer

Published in the book Developing Creativity in Higher Education¹. A report on a survey of 94 recipients of the Higher Education Academy National Teaching Fellowship (90 email questionnaires and 24 in-depth interviews)².

The chapter begins with a survey of research into attitudes towards and perceptions of creativity amongst teachers in schools and (much less commonly) in higher education. The results of such studies seem to confirm the intuitively obvious: for example, that the valuing of creativity varied with preferred teaching styles.

The NTF survey is impressive in its sample size - Fellows from across the broad spectrum seemed to be quite keen to respond. The details of the response are equally impressive. The NTFs were asked to describe aspects of creativity. Their answers were compiled into a useful table (p.78), with "imagination" at the top (90%) and several other somewhat general notions proving to be popular, including "innovation" (76.6%) and "invention" (66.7%). However, it's interesting to see that several more tangible behaviours are rated highly, for example "seeing unusual connections" (86.7%), "combining ideas" (80%) and "generative thinking" (53.3%), suggesting a more pragmatic engagement with creative actions - indeed 92.2% of respondents believe that "creativity can be developed" p.79. Also of interest is the fact that there were no strong disciplinary biases expressed. Fryer suggests that these attitudes may be the result of the widening debate concerning creative education (p.79), with active teachers readily accepting its importance for all students.

The NTFs, however, seem less optimistic concerning the ability of HE to adopt creativity more consistently:

Most NTFs [National Teaching Fellows] are highly motivated and keen to develop students’ creativity.  …  Even though most of the NTFs see themselves as having more autonomy, flexibility … many struggle with challenging working conditions… responses highlight the fact that, despite some really innovative teaching, much HE provision is still geared to the previous century (in some instances, the century before that). p.82

This could be blamed upon an entrenched legacy HE culture, defining assessment goals and practices, that is biased towards bahaviours that are not creative.

Whilst 75% of the NTFs believe that the capacity to be creative enhances academic performance, few (13.5%) believe that the most academically successful students are also the most creative. p.80

Fryer concludes that "questions need to asked about the criteria for academic success." (p.87) - a significant, if not revolutionary question to pose. Assessment was especially singled-out as a blocker to a revaluation of creativity. (p.86)

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¹ Developing Creativity in Higher Education: An Imaginative Curriculum, Norman Jackson, Martin Oliver, Malcolm Shaw and James Wisdom, Routledge 2006
² Facilitating creativity in higher education: a brief account of National Teaching Fellows' views, Marilyn Fryer in Jackson et al 2006.

Robert O'Toole : 27 Oct 2009 00:27 |  Tags: Creativity Inspiration National Teaching Fellows |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem