Editor’s Note: Peter Steiner, who taught German at Dickinson in the 1970s, before becoming a cartoonist, was back on campus in May to give four short talks on creativity. Below is the complete text of his presentation, divided into four sections.

LIVING THE CREATIVE LIFE

By Peter Steiner

I. CREATIVITY DOESN’T EXIST

I have thought a lot about creativity and for a long time. I have engaged in a lot of activitieswhich are known as creative. I have therefore finally arrived at the conclusion that I do not know anything about creativity. In fact, I have come to believe that creativity doesn’t exist. And I have come to hate the word creativity itself.

If any word in the English language has been devalued, it is the word creativity. It is used nowadays to describe everything from a clever way to hang curtains to crooked accounting. If the word ever meant anything, it has to do with the fabrication of something entirely original, something which had not existed before. In short, creativity is a god-like act. Creativity is what goes on in the Book of Genesis. The word creativity refers to what remains in us—if there are any such remains in us—of the divine spark.

Originality is an extremely rare commodity. No matter how unique our ideas and impulses may seem to us, and how thoroughly we believe we are doing something new, no matter how compelling giving expression to these ideas may feel, we can be certain we are not actually creating anything entirely new. It is all but impossible for us to do something that has not been done before. There have been too many people around for too long a time, smarter, cleverer, wiser people than we are, for us to think of, or do, something that has not already been done many times over. And often, the newer—the “hotter”—something is, the more often it has been done.

We humans are wired to imitate, not to originate. Our lives are imitations of other lives. That is largely what learning is. That is, we take movements, sounds, gestures, mannerisms, looks, thoughts, ideas and collect them into one whole, which becomes our selves. Learning is generally the appropriation of the ideas and thoughts of others. We may believe we have invented a new idea, but that is something we have learned to tell ourselves, not something that is true. Originality is the most unoriginal idea of all

The idea that we are doing something original, something creative, is energizing. The main appeal and purpose of the notion of creativity is this energy. But our own creativity is generally only a useful lie. We build our lives out of acquired—appropriated, stolen—fragments of other lives, and in so doing we build a society. By standing on the foundations built by those who have gone before us, and by cooperating with those around us, we continue and further our existing society and what we have come to call civilization. Civilization is like a great flowing stream pressing relentlessly and irresistibly forward and leading who knows where.

Creativity has no place in this enterprise. True creativity, were we to encounter it in a human being, would be a hugely disruptive, an extremely antisocial activity. It would be cataclysmic for the enterprise of advancing civilization. Almost by definition, something that has not heretofore existed, when brought into existence, disrupts the flow of society, undermines the ongoing, brings civilization to a shuddering halt.

I should say here: This—bringing civilization to a halt—strikes me as a good thing.

For example: There are noise-canceling devices which produce sound waves that are exactly opposite the sound waves of the noise, and they cancel out the noise. What if someone came up with a device that would produce exactly the opposite reaction that an explosion produced and thus would automatically cancel explosions? If a terrorist exploded a bomb, then the device would produce the opposite effect and the bomb would be cancelled and rendered harmless. But of course, it would also render all legal bombs useless too, and guns. There is no way such a device would be allowed. Civilization needs bombs.

You can see, I think, that civilization is a force that needs opposing, especially as it has become more brutal and uncivilized. Civilization has come to lack civility. Religion and politics, faith and reason, the forces that supposedly civilize us, lead us to do the most horrendous things. Hundreds of millions of people were killed in the 20 th century by means of political violence, and yet we all still reach for violent means to solve our disagreements.

To my way of thinking, creativity is not a presence in our world. Rather, creativity is the absence of some thing, or things. I was referring to this absence when I said creativity doesn’t exist. Creativity occurs when something is missing. It occurs almost in spite of ourselves. Though it does not always do so, this absence which is creativity can lead to something which stands in positive opposition to what I have called civilization, a civilization-canceling device.

One thing that is absent from the creative moment is inhibition. In my case, for instance, during the instant that is crucial to the creation of a work of art, society loses its hold on me. I forget the rules, abandon what has gone before, and do something original. Not original to the world, for I have in the moment of inhibition abandoned all concern for the world, but original to me. I abandon what I have been taught to do and do something I have been taught not to do. This does not mean that what results is a good work of art. I am speaking only of its originality. Let me give you a concrete example from my own experience.

At some point when I was setting out to be a painter, I was taught by another, more experienced painter that one should not use black paint in one’s paintings. It was too stark and antithetical to the painterly effects I was interested in achieving. I took this advice to heart. I used only primary colors to mix a black, that was softer than black right out of the tube. It had overtones of other colors in it, so it was not so jarring in the context of the other colors. This resulted in a more harmonious and finished work of art.

I also mixed complementary colors in equal parts—green and red, say, or blue and orange to make grey. This was particularly wonderful and amusing for me to do. It still strikes me as a not so small miracle that you can do this—mix yellow and purple and you will get the silkiest grey. The two bright colors somehow cancel each other out.

I painted without black for years. And then one day I squeezed out some black paint and used it. It was a jarring, almost violent thing to do. It stopped my painting cold and took it elsewhere than I had meant for it to go. In a small sense this act was revolutionary. It was a violation of the tenets of civilization, at least as they were at work within me. It stopped what had become a system of habits and, in an instant, forced me to re-examine what I was doing. It was good for my painting, it was good for me, and in a minuscule sense it was good for the world.

Another thing that must be disrupted for a creative moment to occur is reason. It must disappear from ones thinking for a brief, even imperceptible instant, and be replaced for that instant by imagination. The mind at work must be caused to fire in an unfamiliar and unaccustomed way. It must make a false analogy or reach a wrong conclusion or follow an illogical course and react as though the analogy were true, the conclusion were correct, the course were completely logical. It must say what if . . . and act as though the what if . . . were fact.

The disappearance of inhibition allows for disruption of reason. We like to think that reason is what separates us from the animals. But that seems to me to be patently untrue. Animals do many things that if humans did them would be considered eminently reasonable. The only way reason separates us from the animals is when we define reason so as to exclude the obviously reasonable behavior of animals. We know that all sorts of animals can learn all sorts of things, some quite abstract things in fact. And they can learn these things from observation and thinking. At the same time we humans do patently unreasonable things and we do them repeatedly. We overlook these failures of reason out of vanity. That is, so that we can maintain our notion of our own superiority over the animals and over one another.

The absence of our sense of superiority—to other people, to animals, to everything else—is one other absence that can lead to a creative moment. When we allow ourselves to abandon our egos, we see things as though we had not seen them before. We imagine things that were not imaginable before. And we can do things that were not possible for us as long as we held on to our place in the various hierarchies that dominate all modern life—best student, most beloved professor, richest man, most popular woman, best father, happiest mother, most successful, best athlete, most fulfilled, Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, and on and on and on.

I am not talking about achievement. I am talking about not achieving. Achieving something is hierarchical thinking. And while it may lead to great success, it will never lead to the liberty to do something different, no matter how great the achievement. I am not talking about abandoning one life for a better one. Rather I am talking about abandoning the notion of a better life and looking around in the one we are wearing right now.

Another thing that is missing when a creative moment occurs is time. If we can slip out of time, or at least out of our awareness of time, then the door is suddenly open for something astonishing and unprecedented to occur in our lives.

Time is a hierarchy, much like our notions of success. It is the hierarchy that makes all the other hierarchies possible. If hierarchies are the prison, time is the government. In time things follow in a linear way, one upon the other. And time is formed and then ruled by death. By the way, animals are not aware of time. And they are not aware of their own deaths. Death, and our knowledge of it, is our enemy and friend. Death is our enemy for obvious reasons—it kills us. Death is our friend . . . because it kills us. And in so doing it makes our lives precious. Each life is unique and severely limited. It will end at a moment not of our knowing or making. It renders notions of success, wealth, happiness even, ridiculous.

II. THE IMPORTANCE OF FAILURE

Success is the enemy of all art, all creativity. Maybe it is the enemy of everything—of love and kindness and things of enduring value. There are mainly two different kinds of success. The first, the most obvious, and the most beloved kind of course is worldly success. By this I mean money and acclaim.

Part of the reason I have been invited to speak to you is that I have been a worldly success in my chosen fields. My cartoons have been widely published in respected publications, my paintings have been exhibited in respected galleries, my novel was published to respectable reviews. I earn a good living as a cartoonist, a rare thing and a sure sign of success.

If I had not gained some recognition in at least some of those endeavors, I would not be standing here. No one knew in advance what I might say or do. But my success was judged a reliable measure of the value of what I might have to say, as well as a reasonable indication that I would not do anything to embarrass those who invited me. Interestingly enough, if I said what I am now saying while wearing raggedy clothes on the corner of High and Hanover streets, I would be seen as a raving lunatic. In fact, if you say anything wearing raggedy clothes on a street corner, you will be seen as a lunatic.

I am, in my own mind as much of a failure as I am a success. Here is a list of my failures: I have written four novels—only one has been published, and it did not sell well. Two others have been repeatedly submitted for publication and have been rejected by so many publishers that my agent is at a loss as to what to do next, with the books, and with me. The fourth was rejected by my agent as unpublishable.

I have had somewhere in the vicinity of 500 cartoons published in The New Yorker magazine over the past 25 years. But I have submitted somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 different cartoons to that magazine, many of them twice. In the last three months I have submitted roughly 100 cartoons and sold one. That means that overall I’m selling less than one out of twenty of the cartoons I submit. If it were baseball, I would be batting .020, lifetime, and .001 this season. If this were any other job, I would be out on my ear.

I have to admit, I would not have wished it that way. I would have liked all my novels to be published and to have become best sellers. I would have liked to publish, say, 50 cartoons a year in The New Yorker as some of the stars do, rather than the meager 20 or so that is my record.

Having said that, I should add that I am in some sense prouder of my failures than I am of my successes. In the first place, I am proud of the tenacity my failures attest to. It has taken fortitude to stick to something the marketplace was telling me I ought to abandon. The successes indicate nothing really, except that what I submitted met somebody’s need for something. A successful cartoon may have been really brilliant or it may have been lame and yet met some other unknown need of the person choosing it. I have had plenty of lame cartoons published, and a few that were brilliant. By the same token, a failed cartoon may have been just as brilliant as one that was bought, but that is not misinformation in the same sense that acceptance is. Rejection is the only cold hard fact in the process. I am left with rejection in one hand and the rejected cartoon in the other.

In the second place, and this is why failure is important, failing as much as I have, has kept my various endeavors open and fresh for me. By open and fresh I mean that they remain possibilities for me and not something I do, my job. Failure keeps your work from being defined. It remains amorphous and free.

When someone rejects your work, it can cause you to give up, or it can cause you to get serious and try to figure out how to make your next effort better. Even if you know it was not necessarily rejected because it was bad, your instinct is to make it better. This requires seeing it in new ways, abandoning the old ways of seeing and doing it, and trying something else. It is this openness that keeps the art alive. I should add, although it is obvious, that these same rules apply to all endeavors from the loftiest to the most banal, and not just to art. If I am repairing a door, and I am unsuccessful, I must try a new way and a new way, until finally the door is repaired.

Interestingly enough, failure leads to more enduring happiness than success does. The happiness that comes of success is an offshoot of vanity and pride—it comes from having been chosen or praised or celebrated or paid. It does not come from the endeavor, but from someone else’s approval of the result of the endeavor. The happiness that comes of failure is subtler. But it is the happiness that comes from the endeavor itself. It is acquired happiness; it is cumulative happiness. It is the happiness of doing the work as well as you can. Repairing the door successfully would not be half so fulfilling if it had gone well the first time.

Of course one can have the same happiness—the happiness that comes from the work itself— if the work is accepted and lavishly praised and paid. But in that case, the happiness of doing the work—the more enduring and the more pure happiness—will be overwhelmed and outshone by the happiness that comes from succeeding—the shallower, less fulfilling happiness.

If you think this is just a rhetorical flourish on my part, consider this. There is no evidence that the hugely successful are any happier than the destitute. A recent study showed that people who start out happy generally stay that way, no matter how their life goes, and that people who start out unhappy stay that way. Our happiness or unhappiness does not depend on our success at all. It depends, I would argue, on how we live our lives, how we do our work. If we regularly allow ourselves to bump up against failure, against our failure, even when smooth sailing presents itself as an option, the friction between our trying and our failing will make us happy. This is because trying is the ultimate success.

What I have called worldly success—money and acclaim—is a false god, and a very powerful one. When you are starting out as an artist you try everything, doing this and that. With the first successes you stop trying the things that “don’t work,” by which I mean the things that don’t sell. This is perfectly normal and healthy.

You would be considered insane if you were to do landscape paintings, say, and a gallery owner, followed by the critics, and then the public found them wonderful, and you were to react to that success by turning away from landscape paintings and doing something entirely different—say making furniture. The usual, in fact, the almost universal reaction would be to figure out what the public likes in those landscape paintings and then to expand on it, to do more. Landscape becomes the framework in which you place your art. You work and develop and grow within that framework.

You grow, but you also atrophy. The public reaction becomes part of the equation and the exploratory instinct is reined in. This is natural and inevitable and destructive to the anarchic creative forces I described earlier. You are now swimming in the stream of civilization. It is possible that your work is strongly critical of the direction civilization is taking, but as long as you are swimming in that stream, you are a part of what you are criticizing.

You would be considered insane to turn away from all of that. But by turning away, you would maintain control of what you are doing and keep the ferment—the failure—alive in your work, and keep it entirely vital and fresh and new. That is not to say that the work would necessarily be good. Certainly by society’s standards the landscapes you might paint would be better than the alternative you chose. And sometimes society’s judgments are right. But the quality of your art by society’s standards is less important to your development than its vitality is. And your art’s vitality is a direct correlative to your own vitality. And your vitality is ultimately more important for society than your art. I am distinguishing here between society and civilization.

Art stands for all human activity, but the artist is freer to fail than most people, because he works only for himself. The freedom to fail is the true attraction of being an artist. And the freedom to fail is why artists are so interesting to everyone else. Everyone wonders what must that be like. If they fail, they are out on their ear.

It is also true that by going against the trend, against the grain, against the general consensus, the artist is rendering valuable service. In other endeavors this is somewhat different, although not as much as we think. Everyone conforms far more than he or she has to. The non-conformists included. They conform to the other non-conformists. I am not advocating self-destructive behavior. If you are in a job and your boss tells you to do x, you don’t do y because x would be pleasing your boss. But you do consider y, you think y, you try y on for size, so that in doing what your boss tells you to do, you also know what the opposite might be, what failure might be like. Failure is a far better teacher than success.

I am surer of my failures than I am of my successes. I know what the failures mean, and once I have gotten past the disappointment and letdown, failures do not confuse me the way successes confuse me. With the failures the work ultimately stands alone. There is no other choice; there is nothing for it to lean on. With the successes everything is clouded by the trappings of success—money, acclaim, attention, and the desire to repeat the success.

Try this out. Make two things, do two things, take two actions. Then see how someone important to you reacts to the two things. They will like one thing better than they other. Then see how you react to their reaction.

There is also another kind of success which could be called inner success. It does not have to do with the trappings or acclaim of society. It has to do with your own sense of what you have set out to do and what you have done. This is a more honest measure perhaps of the value of your work, although it is measuring a much smaller value—the value it has to you. And while it may be a more honest measure, it is also entirely subjective and it is highly seductive. And worst of all it is a measure. Measuring something that doesn’t need measuring is always confining and usually destructive of something—freedom usually.

And even inner success easily becomes a matter of pride and self respect.

I searched for a quote in Bartlett’s and could not find it, or discover who its author is. Someone here might know it. But it is hugely wise, even in my lame paraphrase, and it is this: Treat your successes and your failures with the same indifference.

III. LEAVING REASON BEHIND

If it is reason that separates us from the animals, it is a separation we ought to try to get over. First of all, the animals have more to teach us than we have to teach them. A few obvious things: They kill only to eat and to protect themselves. They do not despoil their own nests. They do not aspire. They do not hope. They live in the moment. And most important—they do not use reason as an excuse or a justification.

Logic, and by extension reason, does not actually exist. It is a construction, the result of our ordering phobia. It is one of the many means we use to try to get things under control. The less reasonable things may appear, the more we appeal to reason. Listen to the arguments of our leaders—political, religious, and otherwise—on all sides of every issue and you will hear reason run amok in the service of falsehood and partial truth. That is because, if something is reasonable (or appears to be), even if only on the surface, it has the Good Housekeeping seal of approval: IT IS REASONABLE, THEREFORE IT IS TRUE AND GOOD.

We have become such slaves to reason that even a work of art, a creative endeavor, does not become available to us until it has been explained. We need to know who made it, when, where, why, and all the details of its meaning. Once we have found out those things and thoroughly demystified it, we can move on. In art museums you will find more people reading the labels than you find looking at the art. But art is about mystification. It is magical and that is where its power lies. So why are we so eager to drain the magic out of it? The next time you are in a museum of gallery, try to go through without reading anything. See how hard that is, and how liberating.

Operas have introduced titles so people can understand the words being sung in Italian and figure out the story. And yet opera is spectacle, and its story is usually entirely trivial. But we want to know the mechanics in so far as we can so that we can figure out what is going on. What we mean by figure out what is going on is very complicated, but it can be summarized as: we want to keep our distance. I do not exempt myself from this impulse. The idea of imminent and unmitigated experience—which is what all art is about—is either frightening or simply beyond comprehension to us human beings.

If this is true in the arts, it is even more true in the more “reasonable” endeavors. Take education as an example. Education as it exists today is seriously serious and reasonable. It has been tried and tested and passed along from one reasonable purveyor to the next. It has been advanced and pursued as though it were the holy grail, something good and true and absolutely necessary for the continued progress of society. That is because—this is the implicit argument, but it always resides within discussions about education—that is because its foundation is REASON. Education will lift man up and make him better than he has been, thanks to reason.

This is a dangerous and wrong notion, and it has been proved wrong again and again. No one has ever been as well educated—in the whole history of humankind—as the Germans were in the early 20 th century. They were thoughtful and thorough about their education and taught their children twice as much and twice as thoroughly as we teach ours. Josef Goebbels had learned Latin and Greek as a child, had studied great literature and great ideas. He knew history and science. He had read and studied the classics and had a doctor of philosophy. And yet he became a vicious Nazi, as did many of his equally brilliantly educated countrymen and—women.

You cannot educate the malignity out of man. Reason may be, and I emphasize may be part of who we are. But it is only part, and a very small and unimportant part at that. Most of the things we cherish and cling to in life, as well as the things we fear, lie outside of reason. And the very cherishing and fear themselves lie outside of reason too.

The world is dark and murderous, it is confusing and confused. Life teems with passion. It—and we—are filled with passions so deep and dark that we are afraid to name them and attribute them to ourselves. They fill us with horror. We generally suppress our erotic yearnings, our murderous impulses, our ecstatic jubilations, because to do otherwise is simply too dangerous to comprehend. When Jimmy Carter was president he was castigated for admitting “lusting in his heart.” Bill Clinton was impeached for surrendering to his lust, and then lying about it. If he had lied about state business, I suspect it would have been otherwise.

So on the one hand, you have education, this sublimely ordered, gorgeously structured institution: There are the liberal arts and the social sciences and the sciences, all of which use reason in different ways, perhaps, but all of which rely on reason. The watchword of educational institutions everywhere is civil discourse, which means reasonable discourse. Being unreasonable means being uncivil, being wild and irresponsible and savage.

On the other hand you have the wild, the savage, the out of control which runs through society, including our educational institutions, but which has no sanctioned place in these institutions. Reason is orderly, but how does education deal with the unreasonable, the disorderly, the passionate, and the creative? It does not. Or rather it tries to do so in a reasonable fashion.

We still use SAT exams to measure the potential success of prospective students when countless studies—not to mention vast experience—have proved they do nothing of the sort. We do it for commercial reasons (it’s big business), for emotional reasons (it’s reassuring to be measured, especially if you are pronounced sufficient), but not for reasonable reasons.

Just as we have reasoning skills and abilities, we have unreasoning skills. We have intuition, perception, imagination, and an entire array of passions that are not only neglected by education, but are treated in much the same way as the church treated Galileo and his telescope. The church fathers—the moral and political figures of his time— refused to look through the telescope for fear of what they might see. Eventually even they could not deny that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way around, which their reason told them had to be true.

It would be good if we could all reason less and think more. They are not the same thing. Thinking involves reason, but it also involves imagination and desire and hope and love. It is complicated and faulty and unreliable. But it is also more consonant with the world we live in. I know people who believe the world is making progress and people who believe the world is descending into hell. Both sets of people use reason to advance their arguments. But our unreason tells us the world is going where it wants to and we are going with it. Our unreason tells us to look it in the eye and laugh and cry as the moment warrants. Our unreason is what makes us one with the animals. It undoes the evils of reason. Unreason is the great power that redeems us. It unlocks our passion. It makes us free.

IV. TOWARD A NEW WORLD ARDOR

Toward a new world ardor. Clever title, don’t you think? Toward a new world ardor. A little too clever maybe.

I don’t like puns. They are always troublesome to me. Yes, they are designed to make a joke. But they also seem meant to demonstrate how clever the punster is. Hair cutters seem to like puns. I don’t think I could ever get my hair cut at a place called “Shear Madness” or “Prime Cuttery.” They might want to get too clever with my hair.

This is the kind of stuff I think about these days. I used to be a professor and now I am an artist. I have moved from the realm of knowing to the realm of imagining. Or rather, I have moved from the realm of pretending to know to the realm of pretending to imagine. Because I see now, having changed realms, that it is all pretending. I think you will all agree that some part of you is often pretending to do what you are doing—whether it is being a student, or a wife, or a husband, or a doctor, or a teacher, or a success, or a trustee, or a failure, you name it.

In fact, naming it is part of the pretending. If you say, “I am a lawyer” you are giving a little recounting of what you have done to get where you are and also saying where you fit into the social hierarchy. By naming what we do, we are placing ourselves in the context of the world we move in. In fact, I believe that people are attracted to their professions in part by the name of the profession. They like the idea of saying “I am a lawyer.” They practice it in their minds before they are lawyers. When people ask me what I do, I am supposed to say, “I am a cartoonist,” because that is how I earn my living. And saying I am a cartoonist makes me seem more interesting than I might actually be. But whenever I say it, I feel that it leaves out most of who I am.

Our pretending extends to more specific parts of our lives as well. We pretend we are bored or interested or paying attention or not paying attention. We act at all these things, because when we act them out, they sort of become true. Shakespeare’s stage—“all the world’s a stage”—is not metaphorical. It is true. Everyday we put on the costume and get on stage and go through the motions because that is the way life works. We are reflective beings, and it could not be otherwise. Because when we reflect on what we do, we stop simply doing it and start acting it. The result of our pretending, or acting, whichever you prefer, is that we live imaginary lives. And we live lives of the imagination. We live in our imaginations and of our imaginations.

Our imaginary lives ride on top of our other lives—the lives others project on us, the lives which are the result of molecular activity, and so on. The imaginary lives may not be real, but they are the most real lives we know.

During these four short talks, I have been going through the motions of knowing what I am talking about. Even though, when I was writing all these sentences that I have been speaking—including this one—and when I am writing the sentences I have yet to write, until I am done writing and then done speaking, I have had—and will have and will have had—no idea what the next sentence might be. The way I am writing is that the last sentence I have written raises a question or opens an issue which causes the next sentence to come into being.

Not only that: The sentence I am speaking now is being spoken in a completely different context than it was written. In most cases, as I speak it, I do not remember what I was thinking as I wrote it. For instance, as I write this, it is 6:30 in the evening on an uncharacteristically warm April 20. Spring has just come to the Berkshires, where I am writing this. The daffodils are in bloom. After I type this sentence, I will save what I have written on the computer and go downstairs to help Jane fix dinner. The sentence I am writing now is being written on a cold and rainy April 23, three days after I wrote the previous sentence. Since writing the April 20 sentence, I helped Jane fix dinner three different times, and other meals too. I have also drawn four cartoons for the newspaper, taken my car in for repair, and had our septic tank pumped out. We have dug two trenches and planted asparagus roots in them. We have also planted six blueberry bushes and some raspberry canes. And I have just gone back and added a sentence before the sentence I wrote on that warm April 20.

All that is to say: the reality in which each of us lives is always more intricate and complex than anything we can say or think about it, no matter how complex we may try to be in our description. Marcel Proust wrote many, many, many pages about going to bed. And he didn’t write enough. He left out almost everything about going to bed. He knew that of course. And to compensate for the left out parts, he used art and poetry and, mainly, imagination. He used words to evoke something larger, something outside words, something beyond and between words. Just as the flavor of that delicious little madeleine evoked an entire life, an entire village, an entire universe. He worked in our imaginations and made his going to bed come alive in our experience and from our memory. He embraced the disorder of language to evoke eating a cookie. He used our own disorder to awaken in us the sensual moment. And his vision exploded in our heads like a wonderful vision-slash-flavor.

Orderliness is necessary, but it is a necessary evil. And utilitarian language is the ultimate orderliness. It means to communicate precisely, and therefore its communication is severely limited. It communicates, but mainly it restricts and inhibits communication. When I say “I am a lawyer,” I am also saying “This is a small fact about me. Most of the interesting things about me are hidden. And you’re not going to find them out. Because, I am a lawyer.”

The same thing is true in every human endeavor—order makes it possible, and order limits it, while disorder gives it life. Even the hardest of the sciences requires disorder, or it is a dead science. There are people who make careers out of debunking false science. They spend their time unmasking charlatans. They pull aside the curtain to reveal how magicians cheat, how seances are scams, how parapsychological phenomena don’t exist. You cannot read minds, they say. You cannot predict the future, you cannot read the stars or tea leaves. They point out how a careful scientific examination of this or that claim proves it to be entirely false. Homeopathy is bunk. Eastern medicine is bunk. This debunking strikes me as a remarkably ungenerous and rigid undertaking, no matter how correct their judgments may turn out to be. The enterprise itself seems to misapprehend the world we, and presumably they, inhabit.

How, for instance, can one explain the most successful medicine that man has ever discovered or invented? The placebo, the sugar pill. It is nothing, and yet it has healed an astonishing number of maladies. More people have gotten well after taking placebos than have gotten well taking any other medication. In test after scientific test of the most sophisticated and elegant medications, no matter what the malady, the sugar pill often wins and always comes in at least a close second. When Pharmaceutical X helps in 28 percent of the cases, the placebo helps in 23 percent. By the time the famous margin of error comes into play, it is a toss up whether you are better off taking X at $50 a pill ($30 if you buy it in Canada) or the sugar pill.

“Wait a minute,” say the debunkers, “you are playing fast and loose with the facts.”

Well, of course I am. That is how knowledge is always conducted. Look at the case of Ignaz Semmelweis. He was an assistant in a Vienna obstetrics clinic in the early 18 th century, when he noticed something remarkable and important. That is: the death rate from infection of women who had just given birth was far lower when the delivery had been performed by a midwife than it was when it came at the hands of doctors and their students, who often arrived on the scene directly from dissecting cadavers. Semmelweis had them wash their hands in chlorinated lime, and mortality in the women whose babies they delivered dropped from 18per cent to 1per cent.

And yet the medical establishment throughout Europe rejected Semmelweis’s findings. It was impossible for them to imagine that they could possibly be responsible for illness, much less be the instruments of death. Semmelweis imagined something to be true and showed it to be true. And yet the prevailing science was more powerful and more compelling than either his imagination or his knowledge. In fact the prevailing science was completely imaginary while Semmelweis’s discover was undeniably true.

If you think our prevailing science is less prevailing and more absolute, then just consider this scientific truth: Milk is a wonderful food. Eggs are bad for you. That advice was issued with the full authority of all science behind it, maybe 20 years ago. Now, according to the same science, milk is bad for you and eggs are good. It will not be at all surprising to hear doctors one day soon recommending an occasional organic cigarette in the evening to clear our lungs.

This back and forth of knowledge is not bad. But the latest knowledge is not inevitably true. It is only the latest thing. It is like a fashion or a discovery which will be superceded by the next fashion and the next discovery. Order and truth are limited and unreliable and impoverished.

It is the disorderly that enriches life, that embellishes our descriptions of things and makes them come alive, and sometime makes them endure beyond the most recent discovery. And most of all the disorderly makes them true. Efforts to establish order—large or small—often go awry. The famous unintended consequences always come into play for two reasons. The first is that the world is inherently disorderly. The second is hubris. Pride not only goeth before a fall, it leadeth inevitably to a fall. We can imagine we are bringing order to a situation or a moment or an idea. But we are only imagining that. We are playing. And what we are playing at is being God. That is what hubris is—it is humans exceeding the limits of their capability, and playing, or trying to play, in the realm of the gods. We do not belong there; we are not welcome there. And we cannot survive there.

There is no new world order, because there never was an old world order. The complexity of every moment in time and in space makes order a ridiculous vanity. Disorder is the reality and rather than trying to escape from it, rather than trying to eliminate it, the only sane response is to find our place within it and to celebrate that place. The great spiritual sugar pill—the medicine which is nothing, but which will cure everything—is the irrational.

The irrational lives in all of us, no matter how we try to suppress it. It lives in us, and it saves our lives from drudgery. It is joy, it is love, it is lust, it is terror, it is sadness, and much more. You could add to the list. It is almost infinite. If we stopped naming it, it would be infinite. And taken all together it is what leads us to be creative, to make and do things that go beyond the bounds, things that astonish and horrify, attract and repel ourselves.

It is not the rational, but the irrational that we need more in our lives. When we speak and write and draw and paint and otherwise exercise our intellects, we need to pay more attention to what we evoke and signify, and less to what we think we mean. When we study we need to pay more attention to how the material we study enters out lives, and less attention to what we think it means. When we teach we need to pay more attention to how we are playing with what we are teaching, and less attention to what we are teaching. When we work we need to pay more attention to what we are pretending to do and be, and less attention to what we are actually doing. When we love, we need to pay more attention. Ditto, when we hate. I could go on and on, but this seems like a good place to stop.

A small disclaimer: I have been pretending to be speaking to you. But actually I have been speaking mainly to myself. I have been imagining and making up lessons for everyone else. But in fact, the only one who can hear me the way I mean to be heard is myself. Which is a good thing, since no one needs to learn these lessons more than I do. Thank you for your attention