creativity creation, and originality

"A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one
Creation, and we are it's members.

To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive
in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see
the Creation anew, to welcome one's part in it anew.

The most creative works are all strategies of this health.

Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on
originality, reduce the Creation to novelty-the faint surprises
of minds incapable of wonder.

Pursuing originality, the would-be creator works alone. In lone-
liness one assumes a responsibility for oneself that one cannot
fulfill.

Novelty is a new kind of loneliness."

-Wendell Berry in What Are People For?

Stranger than fiction.

After reading about a movie by that title last night, I was thinking about that today at work

Truth is stranger than fiction, because God is a better writer then man. Truth is stranger then fiction because God is has all Authority, and hence he is a better Author.

On a similar line, I was reading an article by Doug Wilson in an old Tabletalk (I borrowed some old ones from my grand-mother). The article is called 'Out of Nothing' into the Liturgy, he says:

"True "creaturely" creativity of any kind (aesthetic, liturgical,etc) must therefore come from acknowledging that God is the only one who is creative ex nihilo. Those who lose their lives for Christ's sake will find them. In the same, way those who abandon all hope of autonomous creativity amaze the world with their creativity. The one who is creative is the one who knows he cannot be."

That must be one of the reasons why Tolkien is so amazing. He starts out not as creator, but as sub-creator, knowing we can only "make still by the law in which were made" to quote his poem.

This also must be why so much modern art is so amazingly bad. It seeks to make ex nihilo. In visual art, it refuses to representational, and use the visual language that God made. In music, it refuses to submit to the order God created, wanting to create ex nihilo, all that is left is noise. (Reminds me of the two poets in Chesterton's the Man who was Thursday, the poet of order and the poet of chaos.) In architecture though, the modernist can work hard to make buildings look like their about to fall down, but thankfully they can't escape working around God's physical laws and landscape. Even if you try, you can't construct a deconstructivist building.

Back to the topic, the strangest truth that hit me today was that I'll be back at college station in about a week!