Authors: Eric Weiner
Hare sold his business, turning his attention from the mechanical working of watches to the workings of the human mind. Hare was the exact opposite of the disinterested colonial overlord. A generous man, he paid the tuition of those who couldn’t afford it and took a real interest in his students’ well-being, to the point where, as a friend recalled, “their sorrow was his sorrow—their rejoicing was his rejoicing.” He established the Hindu College, the first Western-style university in India, thus introducing to the subcontinent the very Scottish notion of better living through education. Indeed, Calcutta’s flourishing is a clear example of one golden age begetting another. The genius of Adam Smith and other Scottish greats was transmitted to Calcutta via zealous messengers such as David Hare.
I spend hours, days, sequestered in the dusty archives of the Asiatic Society, excavating the past. The deeper I dig, the more connections I unearth. Both peoples like their libations and are the only two nations in the world to name their national drink after themselves—Scotch for the Scottish and Bangla for Bengal. Both places suffer pangs of insecurity. Calcutta, says the writer Amit Chaudhuri, is “in conflict with itself.” That’s very Scottish, very Deacon Brodie–esque. Both peoples, too, were marginalized. So how did they manage to produce so much genius?
Again, timing is crucial. David Hare arrived in Calcutta when competing currents swirled around the city. “Hare watched with keen interest these clashes of rival ideologies, and exerted all his might to evolve a synthesis out of it, where East and West could meet, could give and take,” says his biographer Peary Mittra.
Hare’s superiors supported his efforts, not out of altruistic motives but because they needed an educated, and literate, workforce. Little did they know. Just as Scottish Church officials spread literacy thinking they would get a nation of Bible readers, British colonialists spread literacy in India thinking they would get a city of clerks. Instead, they got a city of poets.
The hotel guard swings open the gate and I step onto Sudder Street. It’s no wider than an alley but packs in more life than a small city. I walk past the backpacker hotels, forlorn buildings where you can rent a room for
less than the cost of a beer at the Fairlawn; past the Blue Sky Café, which serves Indian, Chinese, Thai, and Italian food (and does all of it surprisingly well); and past the little shops that somehow squeeze a Costco’s worth of goods into a space no larger than a studio apartment. I’m taking this all in when a taxi, driving on the wrong side of the road, whizzes by and nearly hits me. Clearly, traffic signs are taken as mere suggestions. A red light means you might want to consider stopping. Or not. Oh, and the one-way streets change directions once a day. (That’s a very
interesting
time of day.) As for lanes?
Bffft
. Those are for other, less creative drivers. There is no place on earth more creative than a Calcutta intersection.
Let me be blunt: Calcutta is an ugly city. It is, though, a lovable ugliness. It is the ugliness of the platypus or the armadillo, or a toothless old lady who melts your heart. It is an ugliness, as writer and film critic Chitralekha Basu says, “that draws one in, inscrutably.”
This sort of ugliness has its advantages. Just ask the Rolling Stones. In a 2003 interview, guitarist Ron Wood said of fellow band member Keith Richards, “Keith brings the air of raggedness, which we’d be lost without.” Nothing sticks to a smooth surface. A certain roughness, and ugliness even, is required in our creative lives.
I enter New Market, a teeming bazaar, and find workers, still sleeping, splayed across the pavement, a clutch of boys playing a pickup game of cricket, chai wallahs heating the morning’s tea over open fires, a billboard advertising a cream that promises fairer underarms, smiling children, pigs gorging on a trash pile, baskets of squawking chickens. On the streets of Calcutta, food is sold, cooked, consumed, and evacuated. Life is on public display all the time. People brush their teeth, urinate, and do all the things that, elsewhere in the world, take place behind closed doors.
I realize I’ve seen this before. The agora of Athens, the lakefront of Hangzhou, the piazzas of Florence, the streets of Old Edinburgh. Life lived so publicly increases the amount and variety of stimulation we’re exposed to. Think of a packed commuter train versus the backseat of a limousine. If creativity is about connecting the dots, then the more dots at our disposal, the better. Private spaces hoard dots. Public spaces are awash in them, and they’re free for the taking.
Creativity also requires kinetic energy. Calcutta has plenty, even if the energy is mostly circular, an “undying, directionless motion,” as one local writer puts it. Nothing much happens in Calcutta, and it doesn’t happen at great speed. That’s fine. The destination matters less than the velocity.
The great affair is to move.
As we’ve seen, motion primes creative thinking—witness the walking philosophers of ancient Athens or Mark Twain pacing in his study. They didn’t get anywhere physically but traveled far in their minds.
I walk another twenty yards, in heightened alertness, then spot a small statue nestled between a travel agency and a tea stall. The man depicted is bearded, and sagelike, with a garland of marigolds looped around his neck.
Every Renaissance needs a Renaissance man. Florence had Leonardo. Edinburgh had David Hume. Calcutta had Rabindranath Tagore. Poet, essayist, dramatist, activist, Nobel Prize winner, he embodied the full flowering of the Bengal Renaissance. Though he wore so many hats, toward the end of his life he summed up his existence in four short words: “I am a poet.” For Tagore, everything else was derivative. This points to an obvious but nonetheless important aspect of people who lead creative lives: they see themselves as people leading creative lives, and they’re not afraid to say so. “I am a mathematician,” shouted Norbert Wiener in the title of his autobiography. Gertrude Stein went a step further, boldly declaring, “I am a genius!”
Today, Tagore is not so much read in Calcutta as worshipped. His image—always with long, flowing beard and wise, crinkly eyes—is everywhere. His songs blare from speakers at traffic crossings. Bookstores devote entire sections to his work.
You must read Tagore,
people tell me, and they quote Yeats, who famously said that to read one line of Tagore “is to forget all the trouble in the world.” There are two types of geniuses: those who help us understand the world and those who help us forget it. Tagore managed to do both.
Tagore’s work possessed the timeless quality that distinguishes all genius. There is nothing yesterday about him. One day, I walk into a music store and am shocked. Shocked that a functioning music store still
exists somewhere on the planet, and shocked that the world’s last music store contains so much Tagore. Entire aisles are devoted to his music. This would be like finding Gershwin occupying prime real estate in US music stores, if we had music stores, that is. If genius is defined by staying power, then Tagore is clearly a genius. As a popular musician tells me one day over coffee, “Tagore is the most modern form of music ever. He is the most modern because even now you go to the toilet and you can sing his song. You get onto a bus and you can sing his song. And people do it.”
A golden age is like a supermarket. It offers boatloads of choice. What you do with that choice is up to you. Shopping at a supermarket doesn’t guarantee a delicious meal, but it does make one
possible.
By the time Tagore came of age, the foundations of the Bengal Renaissance had already been laid. The supermarket was open for business. He was a regular and creative customer there. Tagore, like many geniuses, eschewed parochialism. He took inspiration where he could get it—Buddhism, classical Sanskrit, English literature, Sufism, and from the Bauls, itinerant singers who wandered from village to village, delighting in the moment. The genius of Tagore was the genius of synthesis.
I want to learn more about Tagore, so I decide to visit his ancestral home, called Jorasanko. I’m pleased to discover that not a lot of squinting is required. The red sandstone compound is a bit worn, but it doesn’t look all that different from in Tagore’s day.
I step inside, removing my shoes, as instructed—this is holy ground—and am greeted by a smiley woman named Indrani Ghose, keeper of the house of Tagore. She is a large woman, with a smile to match her girth and, on her forehead, a bright red bindi. Her office looks as if it hasn’t changed since the nineteenth century either. Old filing cabinets, an underpowered and noisy ceiling fan, chairs with torn rattan, all lit by that particularly pallid brand of fluorescent light found in the offices of Indian bureaucrats and Scottish academics.
Not surprisingly, she is a fan of Tagore’s: “I don’t know if there are gods or goddesses or not but there was Tagore. He is like a god to me.” We sit for a moment in silence. “You want to find the heartbeat of the city, of Tagore, right?”
Yes, I say, exactly.
She assures me I’ve come to the right place. This is where young Tagore came of age. Growing up, he experienced both intense loneliness and relentless stimulation. The youngest of fifteen children, Tagore was constantly surrounded by chaos and culture, both on the streets and inside his home. The Tagore children roamed the grounds barefoot and unfettered. It was a heady, tumultuous time and, years later, Tagore would write: “Looking back at my childhood I feel the thought that recurred most often was that I was surrounded by mystery.” That mystery, and its accompanying chaos, infuriated and inspired him, in more or less equal measure.
Chaos
. The word is often used, incorrectly, as a synonym for
anarchy
. “It’s chaos in here,” we say when confronted with our teenage daughter’s room, or our emotional lives. Chaos, we believe, is bad and must be avoided at all costs.
What if we are wrong? What if chaos is not toxic? What if it is actually the stuff of creative breakthroughs?
At first, I concede, it doesn’t make sense. Aren’t creative people constantly searching for ways to contain chaos, to “find a form that accommodates the mess,” as Samuel Beckett said? Yes, they are, but they also periodically crave chaos, and if it doesn’t present itself naturally, they produce it. Beethoven’s notoriously messy desk. Einstein’s messy love life. Self-induced chaos, I call it. Creative people know that randomness is too important to be left to chance.
This thirst for chaos, as well as order, is deep-seated, and evidence suggests it has a neurological basis. A number of years ago, neurologist Walter Freeman conducted a fascinating experiment into how the brain reacts when confronted with new odors. He attached electrodes to the brains of rabbits, then exposed them to a variety of odors, some familiar, others not. When confronted with a new odor, one that did not correspond to any other odor in their “databases,” the rabbit’s brain entered what Freeman calls an “I don’t know state.” This “chaotic well” enables the brain “to avoid all of its previously learned activities and to produce a new one.”
Freeman concludes that our brains need chaotic states to process new information—in this case, new odors. “Without chaotic behavior the neural system cannot add a new odor to its repertoire of learned odors,” he writes.
Freeman’s conclusions are incredibly profound. Far from being an impediment to creativity, he says, chaos is an essential ingredient. Our brains not only make order out of chaos, they also make chaos out of order. The creative person doesn’t view chaos as an abyss but, rather, as a mother lode of information. True, it’s information that doesn’t make sense to us, yet, but eventually it might, so best to pay attention.
The creative person collaborates with chaos, but collaboration is not the same as capitulation. Perennial chaos is hardly conducive to creativity any more than perfect order is, “yet somewhere between the two, there is a magical meeting of overview and surprise, which creativity builds upon. Within it, exists all possibilities,” notes Belgian chemist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine. Creative people are forever dancing in this space, on the edge of chaos.
Recent research illustrates just what a powerful dance this is. In one experiment, subjects were given shapes and forms—lines, circles, triangles, rings, hooks, etc.—from which they had to create objects with recognizable functions, a piece of furniture, for instance, or a utensil or toy. The products were then evaluated by judges for their creativity. Participants were given a choice. They could either select the materials and category in which they created or let them be randomly selected for them.
The results were as clear as they were unexpected. The less choice people had—the more random both the objects they had to work with and the type of products they could create—the more creative the outcome. That result might surprise you since we live in a culture that worships choice (or at least the illusion of choice), but randomness is the more potent elixir for creativity. Why? Constraints, again, explains Dean Simonton. “By beginning with the totally unexpected, the participants in these experiments were forced to stretch their creativity to the highest degree,” he concludes. (There are limits. Too much random stimulation produces anxiety, not genius.)
We thrive in “chaotic,” stimulating environments. This is true physiologically as well as psychologically. Rats raised in stimulus-rich environments develop more cortical neurons, the brain cells that enable thought, perception, and voluntary movement. Their brains weigh more and contain higher levels of important chemical compounds compared to rats deprived of stimulation. Our bodies, and our minds, crave not only stimuli but complex, varied stimuli.
A number of years ago, prominent cardiologist Ary Goldberger discovered something unexpected about the human heart: a healthy heartbeat is not regular and rhythmic but chaotic and irregular. Goldberger showed empirically that extreme regularity, not irregularity, predicts imminent cardiac arrest. Another example is to be found in epilepsy patients. Epileptic seizures were once thought to be the result of chaotic brain activity, but the opposite is true. “In seizures, the EEG becomes regular and periodic, and it is the normal EEG that is irregular,” notes medical professor Alan Garfinkel of UCLA.