A Barrel of Cosmologies - Breaking Down Human Creativity

A Barrel of Cosmologies

A Theory on the Creative Process

by Jon Michael Babb

This essay is a dichotomy of different cosmologies which the creative teenage male goes through before reaching manhood. I’m certain it varies from man to man, but having only lived one life, this essay can only describe my personal journey through this process. But, through acute observation of myself, I have categorized my cosmologies into these different phases: Play, Make-Believe, Inspiration, Hope, Creation, Delusion, and then Reality. In the beginning it is majoritively fun, and at its end it is majoritively applicable. I’m writing this in hopes to bring hidden aspects of the creative teenage process to light, so that the Delusion phase may be properly turned into the Creative and eventually Applicable phase. Some men never quite make it out of the Delusion phase, so I hope this paper can help with that.

I once read a book entitled Masters of Doom. This book was about two programmers, both of which grew up at the start of the personal computing revolution. On their Apple 2’s and with knowledge gained from their tome-like Basic manuals, they delved deep into the command line and designed 8-bit worlds from scratch. They were later part of the founding of iD Software, and quickly became rockstars of the gaming industry.

This inspired me. A similar coming-to story was that of my own father, who taught himself to play the bass from the age of 15, and, when he was kicked out of his house at 18, used his bass skills to woo women and inspire bar crowd after bar crowd—meanwhile singing songs of distant worlds and sword-and-sorcery apocalypse-scenarios. His teenage years were spent delving into the works of Tolkien and channeling that inspiring energy into his written music—much like how Tolkien’s elves channeled Eru Iluvitar’s “essence” into their handiwork.

The normal teens and adults of the 70’s often mistook my dad’s “creative edge” as we’ll call it, as wizardry. The Greatest Generation and Baby Boomer parents of that era were very grounded in the practical from what I’ve heard, and the generational leap between that practicality and the mystically of young musicians and Tolkien fans often type-casted young men such as my father as “wizards”. Schools have their roles such as nerds, geeks, and jocks, and wizards usually found themselves in the nerd category.

Back to Master’s of Doom, I once found a review for it online and thought it so integral to understanding the “wizardry” book that I printed it out and used it as the bookmark. It is this, "To my taste, the greatest American myth of cosmogenesis features the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy who, in the insular laboratory of his own bedroom, invents the universe from scratch. Masters of Doom is a particularly inspired rendition. Dave Kushner chronicles the saga of video game virtuosi Carmack and Romero with terrific brio. This is a page-turning, mythopoeic cyber-soap opera about two glamorous geek geniuses--and it should be read while scarfing down pepperoni pizza and swilling Diet Coke, with Queens of the Stone Age cranked up all the way." --Mark Leyner, author of I Smell Esther Williams.

I inherited my dad’s wizardry. Being a teenage boy, I often spent most of my time in my insular bedroom thinking. I wasn’t as active as I wanted to be, though I was never lazy. I suppose most of my own wizardry came from genetics, though my understanding of it came from my surroundings. I was raised around Tolkien, 60’s and 70’s Progressive Rock music, and I tried my hand at writing similar mythopoeic prose to much success.

Masters of Doom showed me that this creative spark that I found within myself was not limited to just writing and music. It could be found within programmers, engineers, architects, and visual artists too.

So, in my own life, and the lives of most creative men I have observed, this process of divine inspiration starts with Play.

The rough and tumble play of childhood often turns into the engagement of full-on sword and sorcery quests that involve lots of running around and waving of paper-towel tubes as swords. This is simple make-believe. This analogy can be done with super-heroes as well, but for this paper we’re sticking to classic fantasy tropes.

Play can eventually evolve into inspiration. The small snippets of hero myths and tales of dragon slaying we pick up as children begin to come clear. We start, perhaps, to understand why they were written, and ourselves seek to be like the protagonists within those stories on a personal level – more so than in just a pretend way. This happens when we begin to look up to those characters and seek knowledge from their roles and courage.

Hope comes next. Some people could call this false hope, but I call it child-like wonder. Often, as a child, I would walk through the woods, hoping to turn a corner and find myself in Middle-Earth or Narnia by some magical fluke of universes crossing paths at just the right time and right location. My dad can confirm that he did the exact same thing as a kid and young adult.

It is the hope of our world converging with a fantasy one that drives us to seek meaning in our life and eventually stir that same wonder into our own works of creation – for there is no greater adventure than that of creation and oversite over tiny little worlds of our own.

That would be the creation phase. This phase is the most rewarding. It completes our desire to add the beauty into the world that we started to aimlessly seek within the Hope phase, while also expressing our deepest desires in our own unique ways. Some people are innately born already within the Creative phase, while others must go through all the previous phases to reach it.

Some people settle in the creative and become writers, painters, musicians, and architects right off the bat… while others go through the delusion phase,

This usually happens the younger a Creative is, while they are still developing emotionally. It is by no means a bad thing to intertwine one’s persona into their creative work, but it is a bad thing when someone takes their work too seriously and uses that as their persona. This was experienced by me as a young teen, who had nothing better to do than think all day. I often would pretend to be characters within my various worlds. I often pretended to be a very successful author that had written a very successful series – much to my own detriment, as I should have just been spending my time writing my actual book.

The Reality phase is when a creative product comes together to enhance the lives of others and inspire them to finish the creative journey that begins within us all during the Rough and Tumble Play of our youth. Full Circle.

Within each one of those phases, we are subjected to different worlds from different authors, while in and of ourselves we are creative or modifying our own worlds from the inspiration in which those authors sparked within us. Whether our own worlds be an expression of our subconscious, or are simply a swashbuckling pirate tale, they all can come to inspire those who read them.

But one thing is true, the Creative process works differently within different people. It informs and shapes how individuals view their reality, some for the better, and some delusionally. But no matter at what stage in the creative process you may be, never stop hoping. Never stop hoping for Gandalf to appear suddenly before you, beckoning you to adventure.