"I once knew a painter who determined to hunt down and trap his creativity," the MWL said.
"Why would he want to do that?" asked Tatanya Schwartz who was waiting for him to tell her a story.
"I'm not sure," the MWL said.
"You have some idea," the little girl said. "You know you always have some idea."
"Security, maybe." the MWL offered the hypothesis tentatively.
"As a painter he completely depended upon his creativity and I think his dependence on this intimate, but unseen and un-met part of himself, unnerved and disturbed him. He could not figure out why it did what it did for him, or what it was really doing when it did it. He could not fathom what made it tick."
"It did not seem to mind coming when it was called, or at least showing up when it was needed. It did not even demand regular hours off. But it insisted on serving at a distance, anonymously, as it were, a faceless free agent. And it absolutely resisted any contact more intimate than the assignment of its duties."
"Creativity's irrationality is art's reason," the little girl said.
The MWL jumped involuntarily." What did you say?" he asked the little girl, who was smiling.
"I read it on the back of a box of health cereal," she said. "I'm not sure what it means, but it sounded nice, and now is the first time it ever seemed to fit into any conversation."
"What ever happened to the children's cereals that were soaked in sugar and had cartoons on the back of the box?" he asked. Everyone understood the question was rhetorical. "What you should have asked," the MWL continued, "was what good would come from his seeing it."
"That's just what I meant to ask," the little girl replied. "What good would come from his seeing it."
The MWL thought for a minute. "I think he needed to make it see him as much as he wanted to see it," he said. "This painter felt that if his creativity saw him, if he could force it to meet him face to face, in the flesh, so to speak, it would develop an affection for him, become bound to him, and it would become incapable of letting him down or betraying him. Of course, he was curious about what it looked like. Aren't you," he asked the girl.
She shrugged. "An aroused and agitated creativity is one of God's fiercer creations," she said definitively. "Same box of cereal," she said in response to the MWL's perplexed look, and then, giving it a little more thought she said, "I think I would leave well enough alone."
"Well, he didn't. He set about trying to trap it. At first he set simple traps for it in different rooms of his house. He set them in a stuck drawer of his desk, near a burnt out light bulb, at the end of a piece of string, on a half inch remnant of a pencil all the places he believed his creativity was partial to.
"Did these traps work?" the little girl inquired, clearly unsympathetic to the painter's undertaking.
"No. His creativity had no trouble avoiding all of them," the MWL announced, his tone reflecting a somewhat more sympathetic stance toward the painter.
"What creativity lacks in imagination, it makes up," the little girl interjected.
"I know, I know," the MWL responded, "the same box of health cereal." The little girl nodded.
"Frustration drove the painter nearly crazy," the MWL continued." He discovered that he needed to be creative in order to catch his creativity, but he couldn't use his creativity because then his creativity would know what he was planning and avoid the trap.
"Catch 22," the little girl commented.
"Worse. Catch 24," the MWL advised her. "The painter didn't know which of his other competencies he could trust. He couldn't tell which were allied with his creativity, and which were his creativity's enemies and hence, in this enterprise, his allies. He had doubts about imagination and desire, and was suspicious of intuition. Ultimately, he was reduced to using the most impoverished of human resources, cunning, reason and will, which were servile and untrustworthy, but guaranteed, he thought, to be least likely in cahoots with creativity."
"Did he succeed?" the little girl asked.
"After a few weeks of escalated hunting he was in a frazzle. He had nothing to show for his effort but bilious disappointment, continuous annoyance, and a fat bundle of self contempt. He stopped painting. He used his free time to exercise his obsession with trapping his creativity. It turned out that this obsession was the instrument of his victory. Reason wasn't enough. Will wasn't enough. Cunning wasn't enough. But these plus obsession was plenty."
"Why was that," the little girl inquired.
"I'm not sure you really want to know," the MWL said. The little girl looked at him sharply.
"Only obsession is powerful enough to drive common sense completely out the window."
"One morning, shortly after he had become obsessed with this quixotic pursuit, the painter woke from a quiescent, empty sleep with a idea for a device that he was certain would trap his creativity. The plans came to him in a dream, as fully formed and as well laid out as the plans that come with kits for building model airplanes or doll houses."
"It was a diabolical trap and he immediately set about constructing it. After he had finished putting it together he was certain that it would catch his creativity. It is true that he had been certain that the traps he had set earlier would catch his creativity. But this certainty was different. It had the color and taste of foreknowledge as clear and cold and certain as hindsight, as indubitable and undeniable as...as...as the fact that we to are sitting here talking," the MWL said to the little girl.
"We are not talking," the little girl reminded him. "You are telling a story and I'm listening."
"You are a stickler for details," the MWL commented.
"Anyway, he set the trap in his studio where he had constructed it and went upstairs to his bedroom where he secluded himself to wait for his moment of victory. As he sat on the bed, he previewed his victory: an image seeped into his mind and underneath the image, like titles in a foreign movie, his thoughts flashed. On the screen in his head he saw himself pursuing a very amorphous figure that he took to be his creativity. It was fleeing him on foot. For a long time it out-paced him, but suddenly he saw the gap between them close rapidly. Underneath the image, his thoughts ran in bold letters."
"HOW WILL CREATIVITY REACT TO THIS FINAL VICTORIOUS ASSAULT?."
"IF CREATIVITY TAKES UMBRAGE, FEELS SLIGHTED OR OFFENDED OR HURT, WILL IT RESPOND BY LEAVING ITS MASTER UP A PAINTED CREEK WITHOUT A PAINTED PADDLE?"
"He began to sweat, and the ambiguous figure of creativity that he was pursuing suddenly changed it's shape and direction and instead of fleeing, turned, and snarling, with bared teeth, began bombarding him with vicious blows of foreboding and fear."
"In the darkness of his bedroom, facing in his anemic imagination his aroused creativity he decided, on the spot, to abandon the attempt to trap it. For the first time he saw clearly that hunting it was a senseless and self destructive enterprise."
"But at the moment this resolution formed in his mind, he heard the trap go off and a horrendous caterwauling, keening and banging begin from the general direction of the trap."
"He fled his bedroom and rushed down to his studio, taking the stairs recklessly, two at a time, with an abandon he had not exhibited for years, and then only in amorous misadventures."
"At the moment he pushed open the door and threw on the light of his studio (where he had set the trap) the racket seemed to reach a pitiful climax. Then it ceased instantly and absolutely."
"Standing in front of the sprung trap he nearly slipped out of him mind. He convinced himself that he was in deep, terminal trouble and started to cry. Distraught, he forced himself to move over to the cage from which was coming only an eerie, unnatural silence. He opened it and peered in."
"What did he see?" the little girl asked curiously.
"He couldn't quite make it out. Whatever it was, was pure ugliness; it was shapeless; it looked slimy; and it was drooling. He realized he did not have enough imagination to provide him with a picture of his creativity so that, at that instant, he was not absolutely certain what he had caught. His eyes were smarting from the tears and he blinked, and it seemed that whatever was in the cage was undescribably beautiful, glowing and shimmering. He rubbed his eyes and looked again and the trap was absolutely empty.
"It doesn't make a lot of sense," the little girl complained softly.
"I agree," the MWL said. "But that was the way it was."
"The painter was completely unnerved by this series of events."
"What did he do then," the little girl asked.
"Out of a desperate frustration and confusion he smashed the trap, stamping on it with his foot until it was completely demolished. Then, exhausted, resigning himself to a life devoid of creativity, he turned to go up to his bedroom. As he shut off the light and opened the door to leave, he felt something rush past him into the hall and he heard a cackle, which grew into a laugh, which rushed invisibly up the walls and over the ceiling and cascaded into an explosion of joyous laughter which seemed be joined by laughter from inside of him as from everywhere else in the house."
"He realized that his creativity had used the trap he had constructed to trap him, and that he had been made into the butt of an enormous impractical joke with a sharply pointed moral which he was beginning to grasp. He understood that he had caught it only as he had been caught by it, and had had it, and released it, and never really had it, but had been had, all the time."
"Then he didn't kill it," the girl said relieved.
"No. Not at all. He had barely the wit left to realize that his creativity had used the opportunity to teach him a lesson, and that it had enjoyed the hunting and trapping game immensely, and that its pleasure in embarrassing and frightening him and teaching him a lesson, more than made up for any minor inconvenience he had caused it."
"In the pleasure of sheer relief, the painter affirmed the decision he had made in his moment of clarity to abandon any attempt to force himself on his creativity; he swore he would be satisfied with a good working relationship with that anonymous part of himself that served him so well."
"His creativity mag...mag... magn, completely forgave him then," the little girl said .
"Magnanimously," said the MWL.
"I'm glad that there were no concussions," the little girl said.
"Repercussions," corrected the storyteller. "Not big ones at least, only..."
"Only what?" the little girl inquired, anxious about a hole in the ending of the story through which heaven knows what would climb.
"Only, every once in a while, not often, but too often for him, the painter would start painting a portrait and it would come out a still life with a monkey and bananas."
"His creativity never let him forget."
"You could say that," The MWL said. "You could say that."