Chapter 7

It seems I jumped the gun a bit in class discussion last week, thinking I'd assigned chapter 7 for that discussion. But some of the things we were talking about might become clearer now ( or not). Hughes begins the chapter with this definition of creativity: "...the creative product is something consensually determined to have both newness and positive value" (89). We left out the positive value aspect, and I'm still not sure that I agree with him on this point. Thoughts? Anyway, he enlarges on this by saying that the creative product is the "gift of a mind seeking to communicate something [we're back to those vague words again] hitherto unknown" (89). Nice quote, I think, and delving into some of that slippery stuff we were trying grasp in considering where the "unknown" resides. Hughes touches on this idea again on page 94 in the blurb about "Usurping the Gods", explaining that only the gods should be able to make make something from nothing - the very essence of creativity. It's interesting that this chapter doesn't really address altered states, and that Hughes sidesteps the whole issue of how we can make something of nothing. If it's nothing to start with, then where does the something come from?
Hughes does address the topic we talked about in class, of multiple inventors / theorists discovering the same things simutaneously. And while he does mention the team of Watson and Crick as the discovers of the DNA structure, he doesn't mention that a 2004 article in a British newspaper cites Crick as saying that he perceived the double-helix while he was under the influence of LSD. Interesting, huh?

Here's the link to the article on LexisNexus
http://www.lexisnexis.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?risb=21_T2107433966&format=GNBFI&sort=BOOLEAN&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T2107433969&cisb=22_T2107433968&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=138794&docNo=14

It's obvious, too, that Hughes wouldn't think the tree could hear itself fall, since he says that
"[t]o be complete, the creative act needs the approval of others" (91). I wonder how Crick's discovery fits into that notion -- DNA has certainly been approved, but not the method of discovering it.