Creativity and eccentricity

ECCENTRICITY: Ajith Samaranayake's untimely and sudden death caused me to reconsider human creativity and its association with eccentricity. Ajith has been described as creative genius, who had painted his writing with English prose, which glowed even in darkness to his readers.

He was, I am told, a bilingual journalist. His sudden death opened in me a window to the realm of creativity.

The editor of 'Sunday Island' said he cautioned his friend Joe Sigera, who accosted Ajith take him to a watering hole, though Ajith at that time abstained from Alchohol, as he did not want Ajith to follow the footsteps of many an illustrious predecessor to an untimely death, and others, who survived, to disaster.

Why do great creative men imbibe and inflate the ego of Bacchus. Why do they behave differently from the normal rustic or the urbane polity?

Is there any co-relation between creativity and eccentricity? The manner with which men with extraordinary ability behave is unbelievable and often the subject of discussion.

Sartre lived with his fianc,s Simone De Beauvoir, they were in love, were quite open about their relationship and scorned the Christian concept of monogamy.

They tore the bourgeoisie life of the Parisians and cultural and social assumptions and considered the conformist traditional lifestyle burdened and oppressed by spiritual and religious regimentations and values as against the real authenticity of being human with all its emotions and thinking free from these overbearing trappings.

Why should one, in order to perpetuate one's race, enter into a contract of marriage? It is love which should bind the two persons in matrimony, not a license; all those who enter into these contracts are hypocrites and blindly accept the dictates of a social malaise called marriage.

My friend put forward the question, "If you do not marry but have children?," Then those children would be bastards," I said. 'Why?' he asked. "That is the law," I told him.

He said "You have such primitive laws in this country. Why should the status of new born be doomed and dependent on the status of parents?" I could not answer. "Laws are made to facilitate some group's interests and someone must, by example, challenge these laws," he said.

"We have to live with these laws and customs," I said. "I am mentally different from you", my friend said and drew my attention to the fact that many great works of art and discoveries of immense value to the society had been achieved by people who were mentally different from the herd.

Can this be true or even close to the truth, or are these expressions of a creative genius who is eccentric. It is these views that had changed society. Many currently accepted views were once considered unorthodox, until they were challenged, tried and finally adopted.

Later, my interest and research revealed that creativity - the production of new and useful ideas are by people, who think and act differently, tend to be emotionally unstable, and many are affected by mental disorders. But, yet their contribution is immense.

Sometimes I meet these groups at a watering hole or other places, normally considered beneath the dignity of gentlemen to visit or meet. But, unlike the places of formality, there is conversation and discussion, which explore new depths in thinking and philosophy. Words they speak are pregnant with meaning.

"We have only a middle class, not even an upper class and never had an aristocracy like even the Indians had. These middle class morons live a pitiful existence, bonded and blinded by spiritual conditioning, for them, there is no world other than the money they earn from trickery and crime, enlarging their empire by deceit and corruption. They know of no art or music or theatre or cinema."

Is there an Aristocracy in Sri Lanka, or do we have only the upper middleclass? Have we an upper middleclass that patronises the arts? Yasmine Gooneratne, who wrote about the Bandarnaike family, said "the women were expected to go on grand tours of Europe and visit places, museums and end up in London, the centre of the civilised world."

At least the Bandranike's knew of a civilised world. But the contribution made by the aristocrats towards the promotion of the arts is not known or recorded. I become deeply confused. Though, however, unpopular these sentiments are, the inability in me to find cogent arguments, to rebut these thoughts of a few eccentric persons, bewildered and baffled me.

"We have culture sans music, which evolves from primitive sounds and the Pel Kavi and Vannam with primitive music based on these concepts and adored and commended by critics.

Yet our musicologists still wade their way through the primitive song based Indian traditions, without any serious attempt to evolve from these rude concepts and have voice based Music tradition. No one appreciates and instrument-based music.

Even in singing, counterpoint was only introduced by Khemadasa. It is a pity that our middle class do lap up these rituals with primordial nostalgia and strive to evolve from the concept of the Indian Ragadhari Songs to or instrument-based concepts with singers and songs.

When Maname took the Colombo elite by storm and critics like Reggie Siriwardena transformed Maname into a cultural standard bearer for the future, I met one person who thought Maname seriously retarded the development of the Sinhala theatre. He asked me a simple question, "can you show me, from the whole play, one single line of value?' I did not like Maname for other reasons. But this inquiry had me nonplussed.

At the time, when some vandal mutilated the Sigiriya Fresoces, another said "In other countries, millions are spent for the conservation of art or the indigenous work of art, which may be crude and barbaric, but still has to be preserved as representing the best of us. We have vandals who mutilate the Sigiriya Frescoes." How dare you say that our art is crude and barbaric and refer to the Sigiriya frescoes?

These remarks shocked me profoundly and rudely interfered with what I have believed, from the time I learnt my 'ABC' at Royal Primary, that the 'Sigirya Frescoes' are the best Frescoes in the whole universe and our songs, music and dance, far superior to that of the West. To question the validity of what I have believed and to challenge our culture and our great heritage was the last thing that I would to accede to.

But, as I saw the frescoes of Michael Angelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, I began to wonder whether, after all, the Sigirya Frescoes had certain limitations, with only the outline being drawn in the human body. The artiste seemed to have no knowledge of the human anatomy.

But yet, one cannot forget the fact that these frescoes were drawn nearly One Thousand years before the Sistine Chapel. The question is what happened to our appreciation of beauty during the rein of Kashyapa. Were the frescoes of Sigiriya, the water garden and the citadel the creation of a man who was a precocious eccentric genius driven by a super-ego.

As this may be the only monument, which exhibits the revolt against beliefs and the accepted cultural patterns, of the day dominated by the Buddha's philosophy. Was Kashyapa instrumental in a culutral renaissance, which was abandoned by his brother? The lonely visitor to Sigiriya, astonished by the beauty, wrote verses on the mirror wall.

Like in Europe, did the dark ages fall on us. Or, was Kashyapa, like many artists of all ages, the true destroyer of the established order? His aesthete was unique and never ever to be achieved again by any one in the future in Sri Lanka.

The eccentricity of the human being is decided by his behaviour, which is considered abnormal by his peers.

Was Michelangelo, considered by many as the greatest artist sculptor ever to walk on earth, eccentric and different? He painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and sculpted the Pieta but was condemned by his contemporaries for his eccentric behaviour and his godlessness, displayed by him in the naked youths of the Sistine Chapel.

He was scorned by his friends who fell in love with women. He was an anti-feminist believed who in male superiority and said the highest form of love should be to a man and not to a woman as woman "is not worthy of a wise and virile heart".

He had absolute contempt for his fellow beings, who were engaged in primitive and banal forms of love for women who could never understand the deep emotions and the eternal and internal conflicts in love.

His homosexual, eccentric and abnormal behaviour was censured and chided by many. But he remains the genius who had brought immense pleasure to millions of people with his exceptional ability in painting and sculpting.

This abnormal, funny, eccentric behaviour is not confided to those who excel in the arts, but some scientists who had made yeoman contribution to humanity by their genius. They had similar behavioural patterns.

Take Nikola Tesla, a brilliant inventor and electrical engineer, who discovered the principles that form the basis for alternating current, and who held over 700 patents on his inventions. He had a fear of dirt and germs, and of round objects - especially pearls.

It is not a figment of imagination that most people, who had contributed immensely to the development of mankind and had some idiosyncrasies, were eccentric.

Next time you meet an absent minded professor or some one with a peculiar behavioural pattern and who has a different attitude to life, do not reject him, he may be a creative genius, able to change weariness and the monotony of our very existence with his music, art, sculpture, writings or inventions.

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