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A tinder spark ignites in our body, the flame turns into life, and the torrent of blood that runs through us in just 23 seconds, letting the heartbeat flow, marks the beginning of everything.

That is where the capacity to make the world progress is born, the movement that may seem so minuscule, while the infinite universe of knowledge stands astonished.

Sometimes it is only a vapor, like the one that spirals toward the kitchen ceiling in the form of a seashell when we calmly watch water reach its boiling point. Other times, it is like an explosion that unleashes the vast compendium inherently contained in the word emotion, dispersing across everything around us, into the rest of that multi-universe we belong to, and it becomes magic—magic that each person, from their perspective, transforms into color, sadness, love, hatred, satire, pain, and imprints onto their creation.

They say that good and evil do not exist, that everything depends—not hangs—from the way imperfect humans act when facing a given situation.

Creativity embraces it all. By the way, did you know it is a feminine word, whose meaning is the art of producing something that awakens a mind, that breathes life into a body, that allows joy to be part of the very moment of creation?

To create is the art of progress, it is culture in motion that shows us life.

Could a thought itself be called creativity? Perhaps not. But the consequences, the actions, the discoveries, the hypotheses that may arise from it—those, yes.

When I am reading a book and a phrase or even a single word makes me stop and reflect—that too is culture, that too is creation. Culture is restless, it is creation, it is art; we often encounter it in the street without recognizing it.

The society we live in labels everything in such a way that a sketch in the middle of the street cannot be considered culture. And yet, it is one of the most beautiful things we can encounter.

People stop to listen as those hands, correctly placed on an instrument, seem to tear through the very air we breathe, and the melody finds its place among the honking of cars and the murmur of passersby who are unaware of what is happening.

Young men perform acrobatics, many of them self-taught. They are the true creatives, letting that spark that lights the tinder flow freely.

Teenage girls move their bodies to the rhythm of music—sometimes choreography and music created by themselves.

That too is culture, artistic creation. It is courage; they show the world what they carry within, what distinguishes them from the rest, who spend their lives going from office to sofa and on weekends take their kids to the mall, where they will spend the wages they worked for.

Creativity is not capacity, but rather dis-capacity: knowing how to create, how to let it flow and emerge into the light, how to wander like springs bubbling from Mother Earth toward the sea.

It is a scattered walk, not always easy. It is the daily uncertainty of whether you will create anything at all. It is moments when the trash can fills with crumpled papers, when mind-drawings turn into canvases full of scribbles, when musical chords do not quite match the steps or fail to harmonize enough; when a palette of colors you wanted to use ends up being nothing like what you had envisioned at the start; when the immortalized moment doesn’t appear as beautiful or as tragic as your eyes captured it; when your hands cannot shape the clay or chisel as intended, and the result displeases you.

It doesn’t matter. That is the dis-capacity within the capacity to create. Imperfect humans do not always create rightly. But rightly—for whom? For the creator or for the spectator?

Undoubtedly, it is the creator who must be satisfied with their art, whatever it may be. And if it also pleases the spectator, if it succeeds in transmitting and provoking that disturbance in the being we mentioned at the beginning, then the artist will be called great.

Yet an artist can also be one whose work is disliked—labeled a rebel, an ignorant, a miserable one who neither understands nor knows the meaning of the word “creativity.” And perhaps, as so often happens, their art will be recognized only after their death—when, who knows, from another universe, they may look back and feel their ego whisper that all was well, that they never needed the recognition of a consumer society, only of those who understood the word create.

Those who understood the incapacity or dis-capacity within the capacity for creativity in which the society we inhabit entangles us.

The dictionary defines it as “the faculty of creating”—but as we’ve seen, it encompasses much more.

If we go back in time, in 1952, Thurstone said that “to create” is a process of forming ideas, hypotheses, testing them, and communicating results. For me, these would be the purest creatives: those who presented projects, who sold ideas to companies, and yes, why not—researchers, in medicine, philosophy, mathematics, physics…

We all know that most discoveries were circumstantial, moments without a real reason that nonetheless led to the greatest, most unexpected breakthroughs.

In 1976, Arieti wrote that “to create is one of the main means humans have to free themselves from shackles—not only from conditioned responses, but also from habitual decisions.”

In 1984, Halpern defined it as “the ability to form new combinations of ideas to fill a need.”

An idea glimpsed, walked forward until it finds its intended outcome—innovation. Guilford spoke of the ability to produce, of nonconformists, open minds, or exploratory behaviors (to explore, probe, and wonder), seeking to grow by expanding knowledge through divergent thinking.

Ancient civilizations like Greece or India saw art as discovery. The Greek word poein means “to make” and was applied to poetry and the poet who composed it. Yet Plato firmly declared that “art” was skill, never to be considered creativity.

In those possible origins of ours, art was simply knowing how to do something according to established rules—the artist’s inventiveness was null. Respect was owed to the proper use of a chisel to carve a female statue, the specific details permitted or not, the number of verses or figures in a poem.

A Monet painting could not have been created in that time, despite the fact that it was the cradle of much of today’s knowledge. One could endlessly debate not only the concept of creativity itself but also the brain, the tasks divided between the hemispheres, how one excels in certain abilities, and how their connection enables originality—whether the goal is recognition or simply the pursuit of perfection.

So many theories, even more realities. Hypotheses—how many! Absolute truths that we all think we have, but perhaps, together, they were not so far-fetched—maybe even close to the creator’s feeling.

We could fill many pages and converse endlessly about this concept. Each person should weigh it against their own experience and point of view. For me, Creativity is to give life and form—real or unreal—with complete freedom, without limits to imagination, starting from an idea or spark that some person, circumstance, scent, color, feeling, or memory ignites, setting my neurons into motion, so that with my sensitivity and senses, I may transmit something to another human being.

It comes very close to what a great and controversial artist, Lucio Fontana, once said: “The artist is not at the service of society or culture, he creates to recreate, to feed human feeling.”

And where do we find creativity? In life itself, all around us, at every instant—art at our full disposal and enjoyment: Music, Mathematics, Literature, Science, Painting, Sculpture, and even in our way of living and being ourselves, in our work, in our ability to resolve problems or circumstances.

There too is creativity. Innovation in every sense. Often, all it takes is knowing how to look.

And I want to close with three quotes I love:

Piaget: “Creativity is the final form of symbolic play in children, when it is assimilated into their thinking.”

De la Torre: “If defining is to fence in a field of ideas with words, creativity would be like an ocean of ideas overflowing a continent of words.”

Matisse: “To create is to express what one has within oneself.”

Creativity

It is the spark, it is love

it is doubt, it is shadow

in our mind

that quickens heartbeats

and scatters through our fingers,

magic.

It is the muse, the scent

the concept, the illusion.

Creator of creators,

odes to life

that explode emotions,

that generate movement,

progressing the world

in which we live.

One of his phrases:

“A hole is the start of a sculpture in space. My works are not pictures, but art concepts.”

His works and his concepts—that will be another story.

Soon.

Notes.-

• Louis León Thurstone was an American mechanical engineer and psychologist, a pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics. He wrote Primary Mental Abilities, The Nature of Intelligence, and more. His main interest focused on factor analysis and the intelligence quotient.
• Silvano Arieti was an intuitive, humble, generous, creative, and sensitive man. In his work, he stated that there are two premises for the creative process: the spiritual life of the person and the external conditions, which he called “contingencies.” If you can, read his book Creativity: The Magic Synthesis.
• Lucio Fontana, an Argentine painter, ceramist, and sculptor. In 2016, he received an award in the contest of the Consulate General of Italy in Buenos Aires. The winners could stay in Italy for two months, in order to develop in contact with the Italian cultural and artistic environment and, in particular, with the realities of contemporary art.

@María José Luque Fernández