Don Satz wrote:

>If Stirling were to dispense with his customary negativity and
>rigidity, I think he would agree that different people do not have their
>creative "bursts" at the same time and under the same circumstances.
>That's all I was getting at.

I can't speak for Mr Newberry, but I can for myself.  As an actor, and
more to this particular point, playwright, I do not recognise Don Satz's
"creative bursts", which sound horribly like emotional geysers.

As a writer, I work best when intensely focussed on my material - the
thing itself, character, situation, word, observation, knowledge - to the
exclusion of anything outside, and the less personal emotion has to do with
it the better.

The stuff which tends to stick around, duly tinkered and patched, through
rewrites 2, 3 and 4 of a particular piece, will have been worked through in
a world of transcendent focus.  For me, this process cannot happen without
a practised escape from the unhelpful distractions of emotion.

I have been moved seeing my plays, but certainly not whilst I was
writing - or indeed acting - in them.  As with Mr Newberry, my worst
rubbish has been perpetrated "under the influence" of emotion.  Most
writers and composers are like court advocates, at their most effective
when emotionally distanced from the case.  Feeling is helpful, emotion is
not.

>Personally, I'm at my most creative while driving alone on interstate
>highways; there's something about the constant motion, privacy, and
>continuous speed which gets my creative juices flowing.

I might have hoped you'd be concentrating on the road, rather than on your
creative juices; but I think you're describing transcendent catalysts which
Wordsworth and Delius, say, would certainly have recognised.  Emotion here
would be mere doodling, as the so-called "Romantic" artist would recognise
quite as well as his "Classical" sibling.

>Emotion which clouds judgement is useless.

Says Mr Newberry, with unusually aphoristic accuracy.  Don Satz's
speculative conceit of an "appropriate dose of emotion" improving one's
creative judgement doesn't ring true.  It sounds like a forced march
towards some sort of unrecognisable - and undesirable - creative balancing
act.

Such a balance does not exist.  I think our major problem, as artistic
creators, executants and auditors, has been our gross elevation of emotion
above thought and feeling, which is sensory perception.  We suffer from a
guilty need to justify ourselves as "emotional human beings" even in our
most secret, private worlds.

Human happiness, human creativity, are much richer, more complex mechanisms
than this world of emotionalism would ever allow.  The ideal of emotion is
not art, but intoxication, which of course makes life vivid and rich; but
to conflate this with art makes for barbarism.

Enough.  Handel got the call supremely right with Dejanira's last aria in
"Hercules", which says all this and much more in about five minutes flat.

Christopher Webber,  Blackheath, London,  UK.
http://www.nashwan.demon.co.uk/zarzuela.htm
"ZARZUELA!"