{CHAPTER 7}

SHOWERING WITH
EINSTEIN AND
PICASSO: WORKING
WITH THE CREATIVE
BREAKTHROUGH

This chapter concerns how we can encourage the so-called creative breakthrough at home and at work. One point this chapter makes is that too much self-consciousness can constrain creativity. We need to be able to forget ourselves occasionally, conquer our anxiousness to be creative, and let the body and its slow thought processes do their work. As the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa formulates it in The Thinking Hand:

Significant ideas or responses in the world of architecture are not expressions of individuals inventing things out of the blue. They are embedded in the task and in the craft. It is the body’s fundamental, unconscious, situational, silent understanding that is at work, yet this is something to which today’s personally over-estimated, quasi-rational, and arrogant self-consciousness has difficulty relating.

We need, like Einstein and Picasso, to let the good ideas come to us in the bathroom or wherever we happen to be. This is because when are in, for instance, the bathroom, we go from being actively engaged to a more passive mode. In his book Serious Creativity, Edward de Bono describes this as a creative pause in which one stops thinking to achieve the best results. A kind of conscious interruption of one’s work can encourage creativity. And the bathtub may be as good a place as any, for here there is only a minimal likelihood of being interrupted by social interaction or other intrusions – if you are having a bath alone that is! The task of washing oneself is itself quite routine, which leaves space for thinking. And if you have got into a rut in your work, affecting a change of scene by going out of your office and into the bath can itself contribute to generating new ideas.

IN THE BATH WITH KENNETH BAGER

All of our interviews for this book have touched upon the notion of the creative breakthrough. But there are two of our interview subjects who can quite specifically locate creative breakthroughs in the bathtub. One of these is Søren Rasted, whose story we have just told. The other is Kenneth Bager, the Danish DJ, party organizer, artist, producer, and record label CEO.

Kenneth had already made his presence known in the 1980s, when his Coma parties and acid-house music introduced modern DJ and club culture to Scandinavia. Those who were not yet sufficiently advanced to participate in hedonistic acid-house parties in those heady days most likely better remember him for the Dr Baker hits Kaos and Turn Up the Music from the early 1990s. Kenneth Bager has been a fixture in Danish music life for three decades and still has a finger on its pulse with his record label Music For Dreams, which has released the work of such bands as Fagget Fairys, Aura, Hess Is More, and Lulu Rouge. Kenneth recently published a book on the Coma parties and put together a Music For Dreams Home Collection with his sister.

Kenneth explains that he occasionally takes up to three baths a day to cleanse his thoughts. He also enjoys outdoor swimming during the winter. The habit of taking baths presumably makes its mark on the water bill, and he feels that outdoor swimming is excellent at reducing stress: “Winter swimming makes me well equipped when it comes to stress. There can be thousands of problems, and I just go in the water. ‘We’ll just have to work it out,’ I think. Swimming helps me sort things through.”

Kenneth himself says that his strength lies in his not feeling stressed even though, objectively speaking, he is stressed: “I’m like a captain on a boat, and if the ship is sinking, then I just keep on going.”

FORGETTING ONESELF

Creative breakthroughs can represent a specific technique, such as having a bath when you need a breakthrough that can provide new perspectives on a problem. For Kenneth, however, having a bath is anything but strategic: “I don’t think about it. I just do it. When you’re in it, you’re creative. You don’t think it over. You just do it.” It is interesting to consider whether one can consciously promote creativity through creative breakthroughs or whether such an effort has the opposite result of that intended – like how someone will never find her one true love as long as she is focused on finding him. The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Kenneth quite specifically describes how he can completely shut himself in and forget the world around him while he is in the bath. This is precisely what Juhani Pallasmaa stressed at the start of this chapter. Too much self-consciousness can constrain slow thinking, and the art of creativity is being able to forget oneself occasionally. As far as Kenneth Bager is concerned, there is nothing fancy about this process: he just takes a bath every once in a while.

The creative process may require a break, one that closes off space and creates silence, but Kenneth is completely convinced that it is not enough just to exist in your personal “now”. When, for instance, he knows he has got his hands on a hit, he often finds that his environment is a different “now” and that the radio hosts who should ideally be playing the music do not see the same potential in it as he does. As Kenneth says, “When you get visionary ideas, it’s often hard to convince others.” But resistance from others can function as an important driving force: “The more resistance I encounter, the more I know I’ve got something.”

THREE LESSONS

Kenneth’s story also somewhat parallels that of Peter Stenbæk. Whereas Peter escaped the island of Fyn, Kenneth fled from the town of Hobro in Jutland to make a life for himself in Copenhagen. He was aware from a young age that he wanted to work with music. Kenneth explains that he had the idea of becoming a DJ one day when he was walking across a strawberry field at his uncle’s house. His cousin Inger asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, and the answer came immediately: Elvis Presley. That was the music that was pumping out of the boombox in the field.

As a child, Kenneth listened to all sorts of music on vinyl and cassette, and he attended drama and dance classes. When he was a teenager, in fact, he came in third place at a freestyle disco competition in Aarhus. Musician Anders Bircow and actor Søren Pilmark were the judges. They felt that Kenneth should have won and recommended that he take acting classes with Jens Okking. It was at this time, however, that Kenneth started playing in earnest, and the music took over: “Then it just crept up ever so slowly. I lived at night and slept at school.”

As a 17-year-old, Kenneth visited various discos across Denmark in an attempt to glean tricks from experienced DJs. He learned, he says, three things:

1. Don’t go to bed with the local girls. When you’re next in town, there’ll be broken-hearted girls. You need to be friends with everyone because girls in the club equal income.

2. Don’t drink or take drugs. You get sluggish, and a good DJ needs to be five songs ahead of the audience.

3. It has to be about the music. You need to arrange your music correctly so you can get people to dance to whatever. You need to have people eating out of your hand from the first record you play.

There is a degree of analytic work behind every creative process. As Kenneth says, “It’s almost a bit professorial with those guys who tour around the country. I had my little notebook with me, and then I noted down everything I learned.”

We will return to Kenneth Bager’s story again later in the book and will learn about how he uses resistance as an active ingredient in his creative processes. First, however, we will hear a bit more about the creative breakthrough.

ON THE NORTH COAST OF HAITI

Many of our interview subjects recognize the breakthrough metaphor without necessarily spontaneously saying that they take baths. One of these is Jørgen Leth – multitalented artist, author, journalist, and filmmaker. We met him in Aarhus the day after he held a lecture on his latest film, The Erotic Human, which was attended by more than 400 people. Jørgen says he is happy to have so much support but that he has never really thought in terms of target markets.

Under the parasol in the cool, pretty courtyard of Hotel Provence in Aarhus one April morning, Jørgen explains that he always starts the day with a walk when he is writing and really needs to be creative. He has recently been staying at a hotel with some good friends in the north of Haiti, and the coastal cliffs provide him with a vigorous walk each morning – as he puts it, “Just hard enough for a man my age.”

The walk functions as a break and an introduction to the difficult and at times anxious writing process. Jørgen is very much engaged with seeking out the conditions and circumstances that promote creative processes.

“I feel really comfortable on the north coast, and strangely enough, I always get down to writing. It’s like magic. Since the last earthquake in Haiti, in which my archive and my workplace were ruined, it’s been hard for me. I thought that maybe I could live in the Dominican Republic. I’m trying to accommodate myself in order to support the creative process. That’s been the main aim of living in Haiti. But I couldn’t get settled in the Dominican Republic. I tried, but I missed Haiti too much. I was with a friend, Frank Esmann, in Haiti in order to do some radio, and I realized that I just had to go back.”

So, on February 1 2011, Jørgen took the bus from Santo Domingo to the north coast. A week later, he was well on his way, having created the outlines for two books. He maintains that the actual creative process is a mystery to him but that he has, over the years, built up a kind of experience of which conditions support the creative process.

“You’re often there feeling stupid and like it’s over. But with experience, you know it isn’t entirely true. That’s why I accommodate a number of disciplines: I focus on the writing and know it’s not true that I can’t get started. If I meticulously approach the instant of writing, then it will come. There are things I do to evoke the situation in which I can write. I’m aware that I need to move my body in order to get energy to the brain. A walk – before breakfast, very early. So I execute this regimen, I go out from the town gates by seven o’clock, and I walk for one hour up a steep and stony mountain path. It’s important to overcome oneself, and it’s this same overcoming of oneself when I write something. The victory in the morning lightens me. It’s a trick in that sense. If I’d just slept, then I’d have been tired in the afternoon. It’s extremely difficult to walk, and it’s absolutely a victory. If there are thoughts, then I try to keep hold of them. Another trick is one I learned from Hemingway: you don’t write for eight hours straight. I might write for a few hours in the morning, rest a while, then lunch, and maybe write more in the afternoon, but not in the evening. It’s very rare.”

The creative process itself is perhaps intangible, difficult to determine, tough to control, and almost a sort of narcotic, yet the conditions surrounding the process are quite essential. Creative breaks and breakthroughs – walks, baths, rests – can encourage creativity in various ways, either in the form of instigators or as pauses. Taking a walk is perhaps one of the best catalysts around. Artists and philosophers through the ages have used walks either to gain inspiration or to work through ideas. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard would take serious strolls through Copenhagen for the sake of inspiration. Kierkegaard actually felt that all the people and noise of the city provided a necessary distraction that allowed him to become more inspired. Kierkegaard also described how he thoroughly revised the book Either/Or twice, to which he added that, besides these revisions, one must, of course, count all the times he thought his way through the book while walking! Philosophers other than Kierkegaard – including Hegel, Kant, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Rousseau – have described using walks as an important tool.

Rousseau wrote that he could only meditate – which for him was another word for philosophizing and thinking – while he walked. He further stated that as soon as he stopped walking, he also stopped thinking. “My mind only works together with my legs,” he said. He walked a lot in Bois de Boulogne in Paris, often after dinner, and had a very neat system in place in which he would use these evening walks to think through coming writings and works. It was a set routine that worked for him.

But Jørgen Leth has more habits in his toolbox than walks alone. He stops sentences just where it feels best:

“A good trick is to start something in the evening and then to leave it until the next morning. Then the paper isn’t blank the next morning. Then you’ve progressed with it. A blank computer screen is like the beginning. I use that a lot, actually. It’s probably only these past years that I’ve become aware of it as a trick. If you know it, then you can just use it. Just a few lines of a poem in the evening.”

“Does the subconscious keep working?” we ask.

“No, I don’t think so. But when I can see some lines I have to continue with, then it’s just about doing it.”

Jørgen says he spends a lot of time getting started and that this is decisive for his artistic production. He believes more in the process than in the result, and a film like The Erotic Human is itself about the process. The film’s action consists of: how do you make a film about the erotic? For Jørgen, the draft is more energy-intensive than its completion, and he has a lot of faith in the outline as a form and holds onto it as long as possible. Some of his works even have titles that underline this fascination with the outline, such as Notes about Love and Notebook from China. Jørgen explains that Notebook from China is not an exhaustive account of China. “That’s for the BBC,” as he laconically puts it. It consists, to the contrary, of the notes and impressions that Jørgen feels represent the poetic. “The great lines can be interesting, but I leave them to other people. I’m interested in what’s beneath the surface – not in the depths but in the cracks.”

One specific trick and creative breakthrough is to allow sentences to remain unfinished. Just as Andreas Golder sometimes starts his work with a brushstroke across the canvas, Jørgen begins with a word or a few sentences. That way, he has somewhere to start. A slightly more abstract trick is that involving his interest in the outline and the use of notes as a form. When Jørgen is in “a stream of poetry”, as he puts it, he takes out a specific notebook. The inspiration he derives from anthropology is obvious: the fieldworker always has his notebook with him. For Jørgen, it concerns an entire ontology, a particular understanding of reality and the role of art. He does not, in his words, seek to “determine how people will live” in the manner of the modernists and the Danish author Klaus Rifbjerg. Instead, he wishes to work in the draft and allow the draft to enter into a dialogue with its recipient.

He is less interested in the depth than in the cracks. Jørgen talks about what he can see. He does not seek explanations in the inner psyche but instead seeks those concrete conditions for life that encourage creativity and the forms in which reality manifests itself. In Jørgen Leth’s world, there is no inner reality that is in need of anatomization. In contrast, he knows all about moving along the edge and in between a range of genres.

JØRGEN ON THE EDGE

Jørgen Leth began his career as a jazz writer and critic and was an active culture worker at the Danish newspapers Aktuelt and then Politiken in the late 1960s and the 1970s. After the publication of his first two poetry collections, he came into contact with a circle of artists who inspired him, including Per Kirkeby, Hans Jørgen Nielsen, and Peter Juhl Jensen. “We rejected the modernists,” he says. They did this by constantly seeking to transgress the boundaries between the various arts. They appeared in one another’s works and happenings in the years around 1970. The painters of the “Ex-School” on Store Kongensgade in Copenhagen were interested in making films, and Jørgen, as a poet, was interested in being part of their work without being a painter himself. Jørgen describes this as a fruitful period and says that sampling in this manner has not caused him to lose his personal expression and that which makes him distinctive. He retains a language of his own. He is also in agreement with the notion of building upon that which already exists.

“I use other works as direct inspiration,” he says. “Sometimes, I do remakes of other works and insert poorly disguised quotes. It’s obvious in the film Good and Evil. There’s a scene with a woman who’s lying naked on a sofa. There’s a woman and two men behind her. You can’t completely see their heads. They’re dressed in coats and are a bit obscure. In the back, there’s a man who’s putting on a record and smoking a cigarette. It’s a direct quote from Magritte’s The Menaced Assassin. I love the painting, which is why I used it directly as a source without citing it. But I’ll stand by that. I feel it’s directly humorous to mix up art forms and genres and borrow. I take only pleasure in the fact that those who study my work are only realizing it now. I think it’s part of the work that there are multiple levels of references in it. I use that a lot.”

The film The Erotic Human contains a scene in which a woman recites a poem entitled La Femme. The poem also appears in Jørgen’s first Haiti film from 1990. “I recycle. I really like recycling. I create readymades. I’m one of the first to have used that in poems – texts that just repeat, taken out of their context. In Happiness in No-Man’s Land from 1967, I have a text about flying that’s been transferred directly from an instruction manual and into an edited collection.”

Jørgen explains that he constantly seeks to create original works that have never been created before. For instance, he says, his film The Perfect Human from 1967 represented a break from everything because the team behind the film was tired of documentary film’s perpetual search in the nooks and crannies of society to find where real life takes place. “That’s why we did the opposite. We did the filming in an empty room with white walls, the people, their clothes, and just precisely those items that needed to be used. It’s entirely blank, and the idea was to study the superficiality and illusion of happiness. The film still works; it’s still totally fresh. And yes, it’s assessed relative to something else. On the basis of something. It’s the dialogue you’re engaged with, the dialogue with history and the future.”

Jørgen thus describes a successful basis in and break from tradition. Whereas documentarians use film to describe reality, The Perfect Human concerns the film’s own reality. Jørgen also describes how he has gradually begun standing on his own shoulders and renewing himself relative to his own earlier works. The most recent inspiration for him has been the poet Inger Christensen, whose words and voice he is now reconsidering.

We will now leave Jørgen Leth for a while, but we will meet him again in Chapter 13, which concerns limits and obstructions in the creative process. For now, we will briefly summarize the importance of the creative breakthrough and the forgetting of oneself that make it possible for us to be creative. Jørgen’s accounts of moving along the edge of and between genres are themselves startlingly similar to those of Peter Stenbæk, Andreas Golder, Søren Rasted, and Alexander Kølpin. We will thus allow these to add emphasis and weight to the book’s points thus far.

Creativity cannot be forced, but we can encourage creativity by creating space and accommodating the discipline and lifestyles that make it possible. This can, for example, involve going for a run, taking breaks, and becoming better at making associations – or at actually suspending our attention on the idea of “Now it’s time to be creative”.

THE CORPOREAL THOUGHT

The Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa similarly asserts that forgetting oneself is the way toward greater creativity – or perhaps the commingling of self and work, which may be that which occurs when we are in .

Pallasmaa writes that creative work involves a strong identification with the object of the work itself, thereby causing us to insert ourselves or write ourselves into the work. Pallasmaa is inspired by Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophical work as a kind of work on and about oneself, the point being that thought is corporeal and that the body thinks for us (in part through the brain). The point is also that we – in our self-fixated culture – are relatively poor at being embodied and forgetting ourselves. Perhaps this is why so many people need to actively seek self-forgetting via mindfulness techniques, not to mention all of these baths and long walks. Perhaps we have overlooked the value of forgetting ourselves in favour of elevating knowledge as rational insight. Pallasmaas writes:

The poet, the sculptor, and the architect do not work merely through intellect, theory, or purely professional qualifications. In fact, much of that which they have learned needs to be unlearned before it can be useful.

The body does its work outside of conscious thought. Maybe we are most creative when we are not aware that we need to be creative but when we nevertheless involve ourselves in work with a given material. Pallasmaa feels that Western culture is preoccupied with the self and too aware of the conscious reflection that limits work. A poet can get stuck if he needs to think at the same time as he is writing, just as a cyclist can lose control over her bicycle if she begins reflecting over the act of pushing the pedals. We work best when we engage with the material and when the moment, the tradition, the self, and the material combine in specific places. That is why we need to act forward and understand backward – get stuck in, as Bjarke Ingels said earlier in this book.

CREATIVE BREAKTHROUGH
AND MODERN WORK LIFE

The observant reader may now ask: does a modern work life really allow for flow if you are not someone like Jørgen Leth, Bjarke Ingels, or Kenneth Bager? Can the typical secretary, engineer, or GP really get the chance to make a creative breakthrough, and do businesses have sufficient confidence in their employees to allow this to happen? These are good questions.

As we mentioned earlier, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity, Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention includes an interview with a professor of philosophy. The professor warns young people who wish to study philosophy at university that university is no longer a place where it is possible to be creative. To have the necessary peace and quiet for working, even the professor himself spends as little time as possible in his office because there he is constantly interrupted and never has the chance to flow. The professor’s point is no doubt an important one, but it may have something to do with the creative process seeming mysterious and difficult to control. One can, however, implement a number of regimens in one’s life that can promote creativity. Options include calming and quiet baths, walks that serve as catalysts, and rest periods that give an energy boost. An organization that seriously wishes to invest in creativity among its employees should perhaps invest in being bold enough to provide space for options like these in their work processes.

In keeping with Jørgen Leth’s argument, this chapter has primarily involved peeking into the cracks in the creative process itself. There is no need for us to make it more mysterious than it actually is. We can learn from creative individuals because they do not just wait passively for inspiration but instead accommodate themselves so that creativity moves closer to them.

In the next chapter, we will grapple with some of the devices that are commonly assumed to take up a lot of room within creativity – that is, drugs, alcohol, sex, and other external aids. Do they actually help us become more creative, or is this just a tenacious myth?