A Note on Creation

One day I had the impulse to write but every time I tried to put pen to paper (for me it is always this first scratch, this moment of contact, and to type is not writing) there was nothing. For me, I cannot speak for others, there is always this lag, that is to say that the impulse to write precedes the so-called subject matter. The impulse - which I prefer to call appetency, a word undeservedly sunk these days, fallen into disuse, but essential to understanding creation - this impulse seizes on the so-called subject matter as Picasso seized a bicycle seat and made it a bull.

The appetency is not a desire to externalise what is inside, to find appropriate flesh for what already exists in ghostly outline. It is a desire certainly but a desire to become something Other. An enlargement, but also a qualitative transformation into something else. And not just one but many something elses. A One becoming Multiple, a Simple becoming Complex..  

This appetency is not an intention with a Telos, a telos which only has to find its appropriate instrument. No. This appetency will enlarge and transform itself in several unanticipated directions. It will sprout and develop according to its own several momentums, and these momentums themselves arise only in contact with the so-called subject matter, and – if one is a writer- with the roots and branches of language. So for example, with Picasso, it was not that the intention to create a bull alighted on the bicycle seat. Rather did the intention to create encounter the bicycle seat and give birth to the bull.