Who doesn’t like making top-ten lists?

November 5, 2020

In this extract from We are Satellites by Martin Saunders, we learn how lists of favourite films, books, music or games all have one thing in common, and that is: the creative arts. With creative arts having the same common root of human creativity, where does that creativity come from?

We Are Satellites

9. Creativity

Who doesn’t like making top-ten lists? The chance to reflect on your favourite games, or books, movies, albums or TV shows. It’s always a joy to remember those little highlights of culture that stand head and shoulders above the rest – for you at least. That’s the brilliant thing about the creative arts: everyone loves slightly different things, and everything is loved by someone. You can see a piece of art that looks like two splodges of red paint on a brown wall and to someone else it seems to be a masterpiece. You love an album so much that you listen to it on repeat for three days, and your friend can’t get past the first two tracks. Everyone’s top ten is slightly different.

Pick your favourite field of the arts – TV perhaps, music, film, whatever – and spend a couple of minutes trying to think through your top ten in that area. Maybe even write it down, unless your list is so embarrassing that you’d be mortified if anyone ever found it.*
*It’s okay to love the Famous Five books but prefer everyone to think that you really love The Hunger Games. By the way, that would make for an awesome crossover series.

Once you’ve made your list, look or think over it. The creative arts – those things that others have made to entertain, inspire and challenge us – are a massive source of happiness and meaning for us, partly because there is so much diversity within them. It might be that the ten books that have changed your life are all science fiction novels, but it’s more likely that there’s a broader range than that.

Your list of the greatest Xbox games ever might all involve running around shooting people online, but I’ll bet that it’s more likely to be a mix of genres and styles. One of the most exciting things about art is that when you put it through the filter of human artists, it splits off in a million different directions.

Now let me ask you something: what is it that unites everything on your list – no matter how diverse or radical the things you wrote down? The answer is the creative spark, experienced an incalculable number of times, in every different way imaginable, by people all over the world. Every work of art, performance and ingenuity that you’ve ever known and loved – as well as all things that you didn’t understand or enjoy – all have that same common root of human creativity. And where does creativity come from? Come on, we’re nine chapters in; I think you know where we’re going here . . .

The first thing that happens in the Bible is that God creates. Those are literally the first five words of the book: ‘In the beginning God created’. The universe is formless and empty, and God unleashes the full force of his unparalleled, indescribable creative power upon it. Galaxies burst into life; stars and planets and moons take shape. Light blazes; elements form. And centre stage, to us at least, the world we live in begins to grow and flourish. Over the period of creation,* the most awesome and constant string of inventions and innovations in his- tory is released into the earth. Mountains. Lions. Diamonds. Clouds.
*Could have been seven actual days. Probably wasn’t.

At the end of the creation story, in Genesis 1, God is talking to himself – which if you were paying attention during Chapter 6, isn’t weird at all – and he says something unbelievably significant to our understanding of who we are:

Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
(Genesis 1.26–27)

The final step of God’s great creative process was to create women and men. And as he did so, he somehow made them ‘in his own image’, perhaps not literally to look like him, but to be like little representations of him: small versions, not God but like him. And that wasn’t just about their appearance, but about who they were. They were created to live in community, just like God. They were created to take care of creation, just like God. They were infused with the attributes of God himself: love, care, compassion . . . and creativity. In the very next verse he invites them literally to get creative – in the reproductive sense – but less than a chapter later he begins to draw creativity out of them, inviting Adam to come up with names for all the animals.*
*I guess that’s why we have creatures called the tasselled wobbegong and the spiny lumpsucker.

If you have ever found yourself saying the words ‘I’m not creative’, then you’re wrong. You were formed in the image of the most creative being in the universe, and you carry his creative spark. We all do – the directors of the greatest films in history, and the team behind the worst novelty rap song ever recorded; the great novelists, and the artists who’ve never sold a single painting. In fact, that God- given creativity reaches far beyond the arts; every genius entrepreneur, pioneering scientist, quick-thinking sportsperson and great political thinker carries and makes use of that awesome divine gift. So do all the people who enter those disciplines and never reach levels of recognition or ‘success’. God’s creativity flows through all of us. The question is: what are we going to do with it?