The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind [Paperback]

E. David Peat (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 8, 2001 | Series: Helix Books

"David Peat is exceptionally well qualified to write about creativity, because he combines being a physicist with a wide knowledge of the arts. The book is packed with illuminating insights."-Anthony Storr, author of The Dynamics of Creation, Churchhill's Black Dog, and Music of the MindWhat does the creation of matter in the universe have to do with humanity's creative spirit? What is the connection between, art, literature, and music, and mathematical formulae and scientific theories? Taking an overarching scientific view of the universe and our place in it, scientist-philosopher F. David Peat explores the profound similarities and connections between the Universe's "creativity," which reveals itself in the laws of nature, and the creativity of human consciousness.Brilliant and wide-ranging in its scientific and humanistic sweep, The Blackwinged Night explores the very essence of the creative spirit and the way it animates the physical world, giving us the power to experience beauty-whether gazing into the night sky, listening to Bach's B-minor Mass, or creating ourselves something extraordinary and new.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Physicist F. David Peat was an associate of the late physicist-philosopher David Bohm and is the author of many popular science books, including Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm and Superstrings: The Search for the Theory of Everything.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (May 8, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738204919
• ISBN-13: 978-0738204918
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #300,267 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Welcome to my Amazon page. One of the most enjoyable tasks of my life has been writing books. Or rather lying in bed dreaming about what I want to write tomorrow then jumping out of bed in the morning and rushing to my computer to get it all down before I forget! And what a pleasure it was to see my latest book in print "A Flickering Reality" which was such a joy to write because it combined by interests in the changing nature of reality along with the chance to revisit so many films I had enjoyed in the past along with some very new ones.

I was born and grew up in Liverpool. My father was an electrician and when his apprentice announced that he would quit to go to Germany with his band my father told him, "George Harrison, one day you'll come crawling on your hands and knees to get your job back." I was also a little annoyed when my closest friend, Dot, told me she was seeing a really fascinating student at art college - John Lennon!

After university I moved to Canada to carry out research in theoretical physics. Then while on a sabbatical with Roger Penrose I met the physicist David Bohm and began a friendship that lasted until his death. Indeed, we were working on a second book together when he died.

I had also been involved in documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and was responsible for a twenty one-hour series on the development of physics in the 20th century. After leaving the National Research Council of Canada I turned to writing both books and plays for radio and the stage. I also made contact with Native American groups which ended up as a circle of Native Elders and Western Scientists sponsored by the Fetzer Institute. Some these experiences found themselves in "Blackfoot Physics".

From Ottawa we moved briefly, and totally by chance, to the medieval hilltop village of Pari in Tuscany, and from there moved to London so I could write
"Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm". In London I made contact with the artists Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley and ended up organizing a weekend where artists and scientists could meet and talk informally.

From London I moved back to Pari and in 2000 opened the Pari Center for New Learning in order to run courses and conferences and have writers and artists come to visit for a month or so. Pari has also been an ideal place in which to reflect and write and to meet new people. It has also been a time when I have developed my idea of Gentle Action which can be found at www.gentleaction.org and well as in my book "Gentle Action: Bringing creative change to a turbulent world".

My latest book is "A Flickering Reality: Cinema and the Nature of Reality". The shows how everthing from Freud and Jung, quantum theory and chaos theory, the neurosciences and postmodernism have changed the way we look at ourselves and the world, and the most direct way to experience this is via films. I also have a blog on this at http://aflickeringreality.blogspot.com.

If you'd like to learn more then why not buy my biography, "Pathways of Chance" or look at my website www.fdavidpeat.com or www.paricenter.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deeper than Dreams..., September 20, 2001

By 

Gregory Nixon (Prince George, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind (Paperback)

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Trite, bewildering, only slightly illuminating, February 6, 2007

By 

Michael Joseph (Michigan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind (Paperback)

Throughout the 230 pages of Peat's musings I often came to the questions, "Who is he writing this for?" and "why am I continuing on with this?". Often, it seemed just as I was once again considering putting the book down for good, I'd come to some gem of insight or information that would keep me going for another 20 or so pages. Still, the insights were seldom original, but instead reminders of something I'd read before -- "Ah yes, maybe I should go read THAT again." And seldom were these gems enough for me to leave the day's reading inspired or my thinking altered. (Not even "a millionth of an inch" to quote Peat's quoting of Beat writer Gary Snyder.) You want to read about creativity as the meeting of Dionysus and Apollo? Go to Nietzche's Birth of Tragedy, or even its Cliff Notes. You want to find the connection between quantum physics and Eastern Mysticism there are many New Age pop books that will explain it if not much better, at least leaving you with that buzz of sustained inspiration. The entire sections on the Big Bang and Science and the Void, I nearly skipped from bewilderment and impatience. (Why did he need to pepper us with algebraic formula's about angular momentum and evidence for "neutrinos?") The section on Language, however, was by far the most insightful and thought-provoking section of the book, perhaps followed by Creativity and the Body. For those two sections, it was possibly worth the time trudging through to get there. If you buy the book and get bogged down, I'd recommend just skipping to those two chapters.

I began the book already wondering if we've chewed the word "creativity" into an overworked and overused piece of triteness. Between the first sentence, "We are all creative," to the moment on page 212 where he writes the anthropomorphic, "The universe is freely giving out energy because it wants to sing for joy," I became convinced of it. And even then, if you are one to be inspired by such sentiments, you, too, may possibly leave the book disappointed.

1.0 out of 5 stars Does it actually say anything?, September 25, 2011

By 

wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind (Paperback)

When I finally finished this book, I still didn't know what it's major themes or premises seemed to be. Then shortly after, even the little I gleaned from it started fading from my mind. Just as well, I guess.

The topic of creativity fascinates me, for practical as well as esthetic and philosophical reasons. In the first two pages, Peat sets out what seems to the be basis of his thinking: that creativity is not just a human action, but something inherent in any living creature and in the inanimate cosmos itself. Then he broadens the to include not only development of novelty, but "sustaining what already exists [and] healing and making things whole." At some point, this defintion becomes so inclusive of just about anything and everything that it becomes vacuous. In information theory, information is a distinction between two or more possibilities. When there is no distinction, when there is only one all-inclusive possibility, there is no information.

The rest of the book bore that out: there is no information. If you like rambling essays and stream-of-consciousness musings, have a blast. My copy will be back in the used market soon, so you might even get to enjoy that one.

-- wiredweird.