FORM AS A LIMITATION IN CREATIVITY

The significance of limits in art is seen most clearly when we consider the question of form.

Form provides the essential boundaries and strue-ture for the creative act It is no accident that the art critic Clive Bell, in his books about Cezanne, cites "significant forra" as the key to understand-ing the great painter's work.

Let us say I draw a rabbit on a blackboard. You say, "There's a rabbit." In reality there is nothing at all on the blackboard except the simple line I ha ve made: no protrusion, nothing three dimensional, no indentation. It is the same blackboard as it was, and there can be no rabbit "on" it. You see only my chalk line, which may be infinitesimally narrow. This line limits the content. It says what space is within the picture and what is outside—it is a pure limiting to that particular form. The rabbit appears because you have accepted my communication that this space within the line is that which I wish to demárcate.

There is in this limiting a nonmaterial char-acter, a spiritual

character if you will, that is necessary in all creativity. Henee, form and, similarly, design, plan, and pattern all refer to a non-material meaning present in the limits.

Our discussion of form demonstrates some-thing else—that the object you see is a product both of your subjectivity and extemal reality.

The form is born out of a dialectical relation between my brain (which is subjective, in me) and the object that I see external to me (which is objective). As Immanuel Kant insisted, we not only know the world, but the world at the same time conforms to oür ways of knowing.

Incidentally, note the word conform—the world forms itself "with," it takes on our forms.

The trouble begins whenever anyone dogmati-cally sets himself or herself up to defend either extreme. On the one hand, when an

individual insists on his or her own subjectivity and follows exclusively his or her own imagination, we have a person whose flights of fancy may be interesting but who never really relates to the objective world. When, on the other hand, an individual insists that there is nothing "there" except em-pirical reality, we have a technologically minded person who would impoverish and oversimplify his or her and our lives. Our

perception is deter-mined by our imagination as well as by the empirical facts of the outside world.

Speaking of poetry, Coleridge distinguished between two kinds of form. One is external to the poet—the mechanical form, let us say, of the sonnet. This consists of an arbitrary agreement that the sonnet will

consist of fourteen lines in a certain pattern. The other kind of form is organic. This is inner form. It comes from the poet, and consists of the passion he or she puts into the poem. The organic aspect of form causes it to grow on its own; it speaks to us down through the ages revealing new meaning to each generatiort. Centuries later we may find meaning in it that even the author did not know was there.

When you write a poem, you discover that the very necessity of fitting your meaning into such and such a form requires you to search in your imagination for new meanings. You reject cer-tain ways of saying it; you select others, always trying to form the poem again. In your forming, you arrive at new and more profound meanings rhan you had even

dreamed of. Form is not a mere lopping off of meaning that you don't have room to put into your poem; it is an aid to finding new meaning, a stimulus to condensing your meaning, to simplifying and purifying it, and to discovering on a more universal dimension the essence you wish to express. How much meaning Shakespeare could put into his plays because they were written in blank verse rather than prose, or his sonnets because they were fourteen linesl

In our day the concept of form is often attacked because of its relation to "formality" and "formalism," both of which—so we are told— are to be avoided like the plague. I agree that in transitional times like our own, when honesty of style is diffi-cult to come by, formalism and formality should be required to demonstrate their authenticity. But in the

attack on these often bastardized kinds of formalism, it is not form itself that is being accused, but special kinds of form—generally the

conformist, dead kinds, which actually do lack an inner, organic vitality. We should remember, moreover, that all spontaneity carries with it its own form. Anything expressed in language, for example, carries the forms given to it by that language. How different a poem originally

written in English sounds when translated into the exquisite music of the French language or into the profound and powerful sentiments of the Germán language! Another example is the rebellion in the ñame of spontaneity against picture frames, as shown in those paintings that reach out over their frarnes, dramatically breaking the latter's too limiting boundaries. This act borrows its spontaneous power from the assumption of a frame to start with.

The juxtaposition of spontaneity and form are, of course, present all through human history. It is the ancient but ever-modern struggle of the Dionysian versus the Apollonian. In transitional periods this

dichotomy comes completely out in the open since oid forms do have to be transcended. I can, therefore, understand the rebellion in our day against form and limits as expressed in the cry "We have unlimited potentialities." But when these movements try to throw form or limits out entirely, they become self-destructive and noncreative. Never is form itself superseded so long as creativity endures. If form were to vanish, spontaneity would vanish with it.