The creative spirit:

exploring the muse

First of three parts

By RICHIE DAVIS

Aha! I see you coming early since lately. You used to be behind before, but now you're first of last!

The word games of author Norton Juster's father still echo through his own nimble brain as though the Romanian-born kibitzer was still playing there.

''He loved word play and puns, and he'd always be inflicting them on me,'' Juster recalled recently. The 60-year-old Amherst creator's architectural and fiction works, like ''Otter Nonsense'' and ''The Dot and The Line,'' draw on the inspiration of his father's playfulness.
Juster, like other writers, composers and artists, understands that play has everything to do with the work of creating. But just what is creativity? What's its connection with childhood, with dreams and imagination, with insanity and with the creator himself or herself?

Juster was preparing for his architectural exams more than 40 years ago when he'd won a grant to write a children's book about urban aesthetics. To unwind from the pressure, he visited friends on Fire Island for a week dominated by marathon, solitary walks along the beach.

''A story began to form up in my head, a kid's story about a boy like myself, very much bored all the time. I just thought I was fooling with a little story to get my mind off the other thing ... I had no sense I was writing a book.''

The story became Juster's ''The Phantom Tollbooth,'' published in 1961, with illustrations by Jules Feiffer. Since then, it has spawned an animated film, then an opera with music by Charlemont composer Arnold Black. Now Juster is writing an abbreviated form of the opera and hopes to see a new, live, film version.

What may have seemed like Juster's free-form play taking on a life of its own inside his own bearded, balding head was much more.

''Within the form you're working in,'' he said, ''it has to have its very own meticulous and rigid logic. You get to know the characters, so they're not marionettes on hooks that you bring in on stage and then hang back up. They have to resonate as real in their terms.''

Ideally, he said with a wry smile, ''You're writing something and suddenly realize that what you're doing is not making up anything. They're talking to each other, and you're eavesdropping.''

''I was sitting on a beach on St. Martin, watching an enormous storm rolling over the island, and I could see a formation of clouds and thought, 'That looks like a friend of mine with a bald head.' That's what kicked it off.''

The engraver became fascinated when he read ''Oz'' and found parallels between Dorothy's adventure and Alice's visit to Wonderland, which he'd illustrated years earlier. He saw Dorothy as an American Alice, against a backdrop of images inspired by Walker Evans photographs.

''My creative process involves having an idea that comes from God knows where ... and following it down,'' he said.

The mind voyage led Moser through a landscape of political satire, with Nancy Reagan as the Wicked Witch of the West and Ronald Reagan as the wizard, as well as Jean Kirkpatrick, Lee Iacocca, Casper Weinberger and Alexander Haig in cameo appearances.

Moser, 59, whose most recent work is the first illustrated Bible in 125 years, with 232 original engravings, bristles at the terms ''creativity'' and ''artist'' as overused.

''If you look in the phone directory, you'll find Creative Hair Styling, Creative Care for the Elderly, creative everything. If everything is creative, then hell, everyone on the earth is an artist,'' said Moser.

He calls himself ''the greatest thief there is in the valley. I'm constantly stealing things from people, and I make no bones about it. I don't think of myself as an artist. It's a matter of perception and what you're seeking.''

He also rejects the notion of ''inspiration.''

''After you do something, you realize you're inspired,'' he said in a Tennessee-soaked accent. ''Inspiration for me comes from my work, from the very fact that I can get to my drawing table. I do something and look at it two years later and say, 'Oh man, I was hot that day!' Or 'What a piece of crap!'''

''The painter has colors and shapes, the dancer has movement; we have harmony and notes,'' said Black, who loved listening to the popular music of Gershwin and Porter as a child in Philadelphia and used to spend hours at the piano in the synagogue as a teen-ager setting poetry to music. He has written scores for film, theater, opera, commercials, television and concert halls, including most recently for a New York production of ''Edward II.''

While driving, Black finds, ''You're not interrupted; you're in your own universe. It might be that you've come upon a particular town or city, and it generates a musical idea. Or it's an experience or feeling. A lot of the experience of writing or composing is discovery: there are things that come up from inside you that you never knew were there.''

Yet sometimes the source is obvious, as with the death of his teen-age son.

''I wrote a piece for two guitars and string quartet, 'Laments and Dances,' which uses quotes from an Irish composer. One movement is a father's lament after the death of his son. It's a very peculiar chemistry that comes to me naturally, a chemistry that I don't quite understand.

I don't understand how you DON'T do it.''

Music, as abstract as it is, has a close relationship with feeling because of modes and keys.

Mixing tones the way a painter does primary colors to get different hues, Black can hear in his head the distinct voice of particular instruments. The piece can build in an unfolding tension or lead dramatically to climax and resolution, just as a plot would. It can involve a dialogue between instruments, with statement and response, with one voice leading and others supporting.

Then, too, ''There are the infinite shadings between consonance and dissonance, and our feelings are like that. This conversation is a questioning kind of music in a sense; we're trying to find an answer. Feelings have an infinite gradation of experience that we're aware or not aware of.''

Creating architecture is unique among the arts because it is frozen in time and space, because it has to relate to its surroundings, and to some extent because it is so collaborative, said Juster's former architecture partner, Earl Pope.

''It has to be not only beautiful but useful, imaginary and exciting,'' said Pope, 52, who turned to architecture when he was 16, as an extension of his love for drawing while growing up in North Carolina.

Architecture unfolds as a dynamic work of art, said Pope.
''You never conceive of it in one glimpse,'' he said. ''You walk through. You look up. You look down. Then something else propels you forward, like a film.''

The firm's indoor swimming arena at Eaglebrook School has a modest scale as the young students approach because it's built into a slope, but opens up inside to reveal its grand pool.

Each work has to be created to fit specific requirements of use, of terrain and climate, of its context, said Pope, who has an array of three-dimensional models of the new Eric Carle Museum of Children's Book Illustration, which he's designing on the Hampshire College campus. Pope teaches architecture to Hampshire students as a way to get them to think visually and creatively.

''We analyzed the site, and wanted to take advantage of the views of the Holyoke Range,'' he said. ''How will you see it when you approach it? How does it receive sunlight? We'd like a very sunny, bright building. It's set in an apple orchard. We want to have very plain surfaces so you can see the structure of the trees, so that it feels right on the site. Then there are the forms in the building: the shapes of the galleries, where light comes from, the ways the indoors relates to the outdoors.''

How visitors will flow in and out of the galleries is also an issue, as is the use of interior materials:

''There will be class-loads of kids,'' he said. ''They'll sit on the floor. So the materials need to be physically warm and psychologically warm. We put it into a package that's coherent,'' one that reflects the refined aesthetic tastes of the Northampton children's author-illustrator. But while Carle is the most important collaborator, there will be others.

''By the time we're finished with the construction designs, there will be mechanical engineers, civil engineers, plumbing consultants, fire (protection) consultants, electrical consultants, lighting consultants, soil consultants.''

No wonder Pope, like many artists, has other creative outlets for more immediate gratification: Chinese painting and calligraphy, as well as cooking.

''I start with a recipe, then I get intrigued and change it or make it new,'' he said. ''It tells me maybe what it ought to taste like. Now that I've got that, what do I do with it?''
Channeling his creativity in other directions may be just another way that Pope -- like his former fellow architect and Hampshire College instructor, Juster -- orders his world.

''I think Earl is a more ordered person than I am,'' says Juster. ''I love things around me ... books, pictures, bric-a-brac ... things that interest me. Out of my apparent disorder, there's an order in the sense that I know where things are.''

Intimidated by numbers as a child, Juster assigned each number a color -- which he knows to this day: two is yellow, three is orange, four is blue, seven is black, one is white.
It was Juster's way of making order from disorder, a fundamental aspect of the creative process. ''I find that with almost every aspect of my life, there's a little game I attach to it,'' he said .

The relationship between order and creativity, between the right and left sides of the brain and artistic vision, is complex.

''I don't throw much out. It's not a bad thing to have piles,'' said artist Ruby Rice-White, whose storage area in her East Deerfield home-studio might earn her an ''F'' in neatness from a rigid disciplinarian. ''I'm really disorderly and very orderly. Look in my cupboard. It's chaos. Or like the entrance ... there's a ton of stuff all over the place. I like to make order out of disorder. I pick up junk. I've got piles of junk.''

With the same disciplined focus that helps structure the work of even a free spirit like Rice-White, she said, ''I love seeing all the different layers of colors and textures. I know exactly where to pull what I want to wear. It's like a palette.''

At the same time, she added, ''If I put things in bureaus, they're gone and I never know what's in them. I found I really need closets so I can see everything. What I used to do is beat myself up for being messy.''

The same tension between order and disorder is often present in people with learning disabilities, said Sunderland art therapist Dale Schwarz, with those people often displaying a strong visual sense.

Juster, who was intrigued one day by a young stranger's question, ''What's the biggest number there is?'' lets his playful nature take wing at such points: ''What's the biggest number YOU can think of? Now add one.''

(That no-holds-barred way of thinking is of course the antithesis of the law-and-order mindset that Juster's alter-ego, Milo, encounters in ''The Phantom Tollbooth'': ''Stop that at once. Laughing is against the law. It's local ordinance 574381-W.'')

''The question,'' said Juster, ''is not how you foster creativity, but how you keep from destroying it. Because kids have it. My granddaughter is 3, and she has games for everything. What happens is this old business of 'Stay within the lines when you color.' They're constantly besieged by rules and the right way to do something. When you're a kid, one of the great fostering influences of creativity is time, the time to be bored, the time to not be focused, the time to have to cope with yourself in some way.''

In a sense then, artists reorder what we think of as order, because they perceive it as ''very artificial and tight,'' in playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie's words.

''You don't impose a sense of order,'' van Itallie said. ''You perceive one that's underneath the usual one. You use your art as an arrow pointing toward it. But that's not necessarily the end of it. You're going to want to proceed to the order beneath that ... And each time, it's a letting go of a concept of what's in the world.''

That may keep artists closer to losing their balance than those of us who accept the established order at face value, he acknowledged. ''You don't fall directly into madness,'' van Itallie said, ''but you give up one safety net because you trust there's another one underneath.''

It's that kind of perception, rather than innate talent, that leads artists to hone their skills, believes engraver Moser.

''Until the second or third grade,'' he said, ''everybody draws with pretty much the same skills. What happens is as they grow, their perceptions get a little more acute. My brother and I used to spread out a big piece of paper on the floor and we'd draw battles. My brother would draw an airplane a lot better than I did because he was neater.''

But while his older brother would consistently depict his fighters in side view and his bombs dropping in a straight line, Moser recalled, his bombs were at different angles, dropping backward.

''What that says to me is not that my drawing skills were any better than my brother's, but that I could imagine things in space,'' said Moser. He also believes that his sense of order -- reinforced by years in a military academy -- plays a key role in his work.

In both engraving and book design, Moser said, ''The work I do has too many layers, there are too many pieces I have to deal with. You have to by necessity deal with printers and paper makers and binders and typographers and type designers. You can't do that and set type by hand and be disorderly. It is simply anathema to typesetting. Disorder is anathema to design.''

Even though his studio might look cluttered to a visitor, Moser said, ''it's more an organized disorder. When I start a project, my studio gets cleaned down to the gunnels. By the time I've finished that project, the studio looks like a cyclone hit it.''

But from the disciplined rhythm of his military academy to the drill formation of three lines of nine boys moving in perfect square formation, Moser's military background fits perfectly with the discipline required for setting type and engraving.

''It's a very controlled medium,'' he said.

''Art, like music, exists in terms of tensions.'' said Moser. ''Black and white, complex and simple. Tensions are necessary to give form. There's a tension between order and chaos.'' The finished work of a Jackson Pollack may look disorganized, he said, ''but the intent of what he was doing was very orderly, with sort of an intellectual scaffolding around it.''

NEXT: Order, boxes and art.