Creative Writing

Creative writing.  I believe I was introduced to creative writing in college, some fifty-five years ago.  Just now—as I started writing this piece—I looked up the definition for the first time.  By “looked up,” I mean I Googled it. I found it reassuring to discover it means what I always thought it meant, writing.  In the definitions, it is distinguished as a particular kind writing, namely writing from the mind or emotions or feelings.  Although this seems to incorporate what I think of creativity, I find the definition misleading in that it suggests there are kinds of writing that are not somehow affected by mental or emotional state or feelings.  For example, the kind of purely objective writing (and, of course the purely objective analysis associated with it) that goes into Fox news or CNN.  The kind of writing that went into President Obama’s press conferences and now goes into President Trump’s.

Many of us, after giving it some thought, might concede there are elements of creative writing in news reporting and press conferences. That said, many of us still hope there is such a thing as objective truth and people write about it—they even tell it.  And—not only that—they do a good job of writing about it and consequently other people are led to an understanding of the truth by reading such reports.  This explains why we are so encouraged by the reporting of Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher. It explains why the world is such a better place in the light of the truth revealed on talk radio and TV.

We long for the truth so much, and we are so jealous of it when we find it, we may be rather vigorous in our defense of it when belief is threatened by creative writing masquerading as another so called truth.  As a man of peace, I find the potential for conflict in the clash of truth and masquerade disquieting to say the least.  To be honest, I find it frightening. I know that, in earlier times, these clashes were marked by the most offensive insults.  Those on opposing sides in defense of their truth labeled each other as stupid, filthy, fat, ugly, dumb, ignorant, failures, and losers.  To be sure this was in an era when civilization was much more of a concept than a reality.  It was when I was in the fifth grade disputing a call over a ball outside the line in a game of foursquare.  But what really convinced me of the alarming way pride of possession of the truth could lead to the most shocking indulgence of unbridled insults was learning of the dispute between Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein over the nature of gravity.

The insults were traded by proxies since the two men never met, but that did not make the exchange any less rancorous.  As you may know, Newton proved gravity was a force of attraction between two masses.  He proved this by accident one afternoon when, seated near an apple tree, an apple—attracted to the earth by the force of gravity—fell on his head.  It wasn’t a logical proof, but it was reported widely in both the liberal and conservative press. Though the experiment was an accident, it was appealing and entertaining and–as the serpent told Eve—good to eat. And this established the truth of the theory. No one dared to dispute it until Einstein—with his flimsy and dull “thought experiments”—made the ridiculous claim gravity is more accurately theorized as a force resulting from the acceleration of a lesser mass towards a greater mass over the curvature of space; curvature proportional to the masses. Curved space? Really? One might just as well suggest climate change is man-made.

But the dispute soon became acrimonious and personal. Newton had long hair so Einstein’s adherents branded him a “Hippie” and wondered what he might have been smoking when hit by the apple. But the Newtonians were just as quick to label Einstein as the real Hippie. Einstein spent a lot of time in Switzerland. The Newtonians were convinced he suffered from high-altitude oxygen deprivation and his thought experiments were hallucinations. Furthermore, Sigmund Freud, a self-proclaimed drug user, was Swiss or Austrian or German or Czechoslovakian—like Einstein—and they both, like a lot of simple-minded beauty contestants, wanted world peace.  They even wrote each other about it.  So it seemed likely Einstein was himself a peace-loving, drug-warped Hippie even though he invented the atom bomb. Curved space? It does make sense if you’re on drugs. Einstein’s defenders fired back Newton had—despite his Hippie inclinations—taken Holy Orders in the Church of England and believed the world couldn’t be more than six thousand years old. Was this the weed or the concussion talking?

But the real issue for the Newtonians was the fact the improvements Einstein claimed he made were irrelevant.  The most useful thing Einstein could explain was—get this—the “precession of the perihelion of Mercury.” If ever there was a term born of the drug culture, this was it. Precession? Perihelion? Give me a break. Why didn’t they just say Mercury’s orbit wobbled? But more to the point, who cares?  It’s like asking if anyone cares the CIA has access to my internet searches or Monsanto—with their seed patents—controls the crops on almost half our arable land or the president’s advisors can be subpoenaed.  Who cares?  What difference does it make?  The government will take care of us like it always has and we do not need to bother with the details. We put a man on the moon with Newton’s theory. What more do you want, black holes?

As a matter of fact, I do want black holes, I care about black holes. My daughter wrote a song about black holes. I’m glad Einstein predicted them and gave us the information we needed to find them.  I’m glad we are finding truths about our universe and ourselves.  More to the point, I care even more—a lot more—about my privacy, about mature debate and about the transparency of government in our democracy.