The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind

by F. David Peat

Book Overview

What does the creation of matter in the universe have to do with humanity's creative spirit? What is the connection between, on the one hand, art, literature, and music, and, on the other hand, mathematical theorems and scientific theories? Taking an overarching scientific view of the universe and our place in it, scientist-philosopher F. David Peat explores the incredible similarities and connections between the Universe's "creativity," which reveals...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0738204919
• ISBN13: 9780738204918
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Inspiring book

David Peat excell his ability to explain abstract and complex concepts in this book which surely will help the reader to understand what creativity realy is about. The author masterly summarizes a subject that frequently is approach in more than 400 pages in half that number. The book is exactly what I expected from it.

Deeper than Dreams...

This is an excellent book, one of those very few that manage to be both disarmingly simple yet profound at once. Peat is a past-master at grasping the most arcane and difficult theories. He has studied and written on chaos theory, the science of complexity, fractals, quantum mysteries, David Bohm's implicate order, and subjects of special interest in the art world. Simultanously, he has translated these ideas into digestible portions for the intelligent layman reader. He is the best of the bunch when it comes to science writing and he is also very knowledgeable about the higher echelons of the current art world. In this book, however, I got the impression he wrote just for himself. He does not bother to explicate complex theories or even to give references for many of the facts and phrases which well up in him. Instead, he just uses his background in science and the arts to make this beautiful pure statement on the varied expressions of creativity, from the human to the universal. Indeed, his book edges into the metaphysical by implying that the Supreme Ultimate behind all things is in fact creativity itself -- the first creative act being the creation of form out of the infinite creative potential of the void. (If anyone wants more excruciating detail about how such creativity could manifest itself, they may need to read A. N. Whitehead.) Peat notes that creative chaos, the Dionysian, begins the furor of all creative inspiration, but also that this phase must be followed by the long period of laborious, ordered endeavour to find appropriate form for this initial inspiration, that is, the Apollonian. He compares this pattern among many of his current favorite art forms as well as in the creative dynamics of Nature as revealed through science. The result is, well, beautiful and moving and, yes, inspiring. I truly appreciated the idea that a sort of blind creativity is the "Prime Mover" beyond the forms of reality. To deny creativity it is to become unconscious and moribund. But creativity is not novelty; it often means seeking new depths in the old or reexperiencing current patterns as though for the first time, as in, for example, human relations. The book is a short, easy read, but one that demands full--creative--attention if one is to comprehend its implied depth. Highly recommended.