A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life as the pages of time keep turning is the great creative act we are here for. Like evolution, like Leaves of Grass, it is the work of continual revision, not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity, which is at bottom the adaptation of the self to the soul and the soul to the world.In one of the essays found in his exquisite 1877 collection Birds and Poets (public library | public domain), the philosopher-naturalist John Burroughs (April 3, 1837–March 29, 1921) explores the nature of that creative act through a parallel between poetry and personhood anchored in a brilliant metaphor for the two different approaches to creation. He writes:There are in nature two types or forms, the cell and the crystal. One means the organic, the other inorganic; one means growth, development, life; the other means reaction, solidification, rest. The hint and model of all creative works is the cell; critical, reflective, and philosophical works are nearer akin to the crystal; while there is much good literature that is neither the one nor the other distinctively, but which in a measure touches and includes both. But crystallic beauty or cut and polished gems of thought, the result of the reflex rather than the direct action of the mind, we do not expect to find in the best poems, though they may be most prized by specially intellectual persons. In the immortal poems the solids are very few, or do not appear at all as solids, — as lime and iron, — any more than they do in organic nature, in the flesh of the peach or the apple. The main thing in every living organism is the vital fluids: seven tenths of man is water; and seven tenths of Shakespeare is passion, emotion, — fluid humanity.Glial cells of the cerebral cortex of a child. One of neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s drawings of the brain.This, of course, is what makes identity such a tedious concept — a fixity of past experience and predictive narrative that crystallizes a person’s natural fluidity, makes them impermeable to possibility, and is therefore inherently uncreative. True creativity, Burroughs observes, is rooted in this dynamism, this fluidity, this irrepressible and ever-shifting aliveness:All the master poets have in their work an interior, chemical, assimilative property… flaming up with electric and defiant power, — power without any admixture of resisting form, as in a living organism.It can only be so because we a fractal of nature, the supreme creative agent, whose processes are a ceaseless flow of change and self-revision. Burroughs writes:The physical cosmos itself is not a thought, but an act. Natural objects do not affect us like well-wrought specimens or finished handicraft, which have nothing to follow, but as living, procreating energy. Nature is perpetual transition. Everything passes and presses on; there is no pause, no completion, no explanation. To produce and multiply endlessly, without ever reaching the last possibility of excellence, and without committing herself to any end, is the law of Nature.Burroughs sees this as “the essential difference between prose and poetry,” between “the poetic and the didactic treatment of a subject.” A great life, he intimates, is more like a great poem than like a great teaching:The essence of creative art is always the same; namely, interior movement and fusion; while the method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate and define; but the principle of the former is to flow, to suffuse, to mount, to escape. We can conceive of life only as something constantly becoming. It plays forever on the verge. It is never in loco, but always in transit. Arrest the wind, and it is no longer the wind; close your hands upon the light, and behold, it is gone.Available as a solo print. Find the story and process behind these bird divinations here.And yet because these interior movements are fundamentally untranslatable between one consciousness and another, belonging to that region of absolute aloneness that accompanies the singularity of being oneself, there is always an element of the ineffable in all great creative work and all great persons:There must always be something about a poem, or any work of art, besides the evident intellect or plot of it, or what is on its surface, or what it tells. This something is the Invisible, the Undefined, almost Unexpressed, and is perhaps the best part of any work of art, as it is of a noble personality… As, in the superbest person, it is not merely what he or she says or knows or shows, or even how they behave, but in the silent qualities, like gravitation, that insensibly but resistlessly hold us; so in a good poem, or any other expression of art.Couple with Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, then revisit Burroughs on the measure of a visionary, the art of noticing, and how to live with the uncertainties of life.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.