Spontaneity and Creativity (and the 'cultural conserve')

I've been far too busy to bore anyone with blogging my activities. I like to be busy. I fixed, and cleaned, and painted, sanded, filled, hung curtains, shopped, painted some more, learned the trickeries of wood-filler and sensed a rejuvenation in my spirit and life. Perhaps for me all of these unusual activities were just some needed recreation.

It's made me think of the value of creativity within us human beings. The image of God I expect is most closely expressed in this side of our beings. I've been reading some things by J Mareno, the psychosocial psychiatrist and father of 'psychodrama', an action method that distinguishes itself from the traditional 'talk' therapies. Something that he said captures my attention quite sharply. Let's see if I learned anything...

Dayton's (2005) The Living Stage, is a really accessible introduction to the field of social drama and the triad that Moreno was fond of using: psychodrama, sociometry and group psychotherapy. Anyway, Dayton has a chapter, which relies extensively on Mareno's writing entitled: "Spontaneity and Creativity versus the Cultural Conserve". A cultural conserve is a kind of fixed form - a film for example, or the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven. Beethoven's creativity and spontaneity is captured in this music, forever. As such it becomes part of the property of the public domain, in which everyone can share. It almost assumes a sacred quality to it. Mareno recognises the value of cultural conserves in maintaining stability and continuity. He urges that 'the category of the moment' the here and now, not be allowed to over-shaddowed by the cultural conserve. The moment, he taught is the doorway to our own spontaneity and creativity. Dayton makes this observation:

Prophetically, Moreno foresaw a time in which cultural conserves might become so common that we would spend our own energy not as the creator but as the imitator; our personal lives would lose some of their spontaneity because we would spend our precious hours trying to get our lives to mirror cultural conserve or a thing already created and reproduced thousands of times... (Dayton 2005:66)

Moreno was afraid that such imitation deadens our personal creativity, and that when the conserve rules we feel like failures by not being able to be something that actually doesn't exist. I guess Christians would related to this as the dangers of idolatry. Moreno then goes onto describing the personal conserve, an equally conserved set of thinking, feeling and doing that drives our individual lives. The value of this is in understanding our personal conserve can help us to know how to work with ourselves more intelligently. Exploring the personal conserve might mean that we (Ibid : 67)

(1) look into where and when this pattern began
(2) understand the relational context in which it got set up in the first place,
(3) look at the present day to understand what parallel circumstance triggered the conserve response, (why we act as we do); and
(4) look at other possible ways of being or doing in response to any given stimuli.

This model allows us to refrain from pathologising behaviour by providing a picture of behaviour whilst still providing directions for change. For me that's the kind of roadmap I need.