The Eccentric Creative

And why they see things differently than you and me.

Maybe you’ve heard of Doris Duke. Doris was an heiress, a social gadfly in Newport society and in the last years of the Gilded Age, as eccentric a human being as you were likely to find on Bellevue Avenue or maybe anywhere.

While Doris wasn’t what you’d call a recluse, she didn’t have much patience with trespassers. Rough Point, the mansion she called home, was an obvious target, as was every other mansion in Newport, for thieves and cat burglars looking to sneak off with the cutlery, a diamond necklace or two, perhaps a rare Monet or Degas.

Thus the sign she chose to adorn her front gate, “Warning: Guard Dogs. Do Not Enter Without Protective Headgear”. No polite request to please refrain from relieving me of my personal fortune for Doris. Hell, no. Instead she went for the, um, jugular.

Not that we should be surprised by that. A lot of wealthy people are eccentric.

Germaphobe extraordinaire, Howard Hughes, comes to mind. Hughes spent most of his life trying to avoid germs. He would sometimes spend hours sitting in a chair in the middle of a sterile white room, as far from the outside, “infected” world as he could. He was terrified of flies. He wore tissue boxes on his feet to protect them. He burned his clothing if someone near him became ill. Toward the end, he lay naked in bed in darkened hotel rooms in what he considered a germ-free zone.

Doris Duke might have been many things, but what that sign on her gate tells me is that she had a creative side to her, one that few of us know and that I call The Eccentric Spark. Simply put, it’s a creative subset that taps into the weird and the off-kilter, resulting in offbeat ideas that defy categorization.

You might remember Dean Kamen, the incredibly prolific and creative inventor of the Segway scooter. As far as anyone can tell, Dean dresses almost exclusively in denim. In itself, not all that weird. But. Kamen also presides—along with his Ministers of Ice Cream, Brunch and Nepotism— over the Connecticut island kingdom of North Dumpling, which has “seceded” from the U.S. and has its own currency in units of pi. Visitors are issued a visa form that includes spaces on which to note identifying marks on both their face and buttocks.

The Eccentric Spark.

It wasn’t like anyone familiar with Björk, the Icelandic singer and actress, expected her to show up at the 2001 Oscars in a classic black dress that night. A few weeks earlier at the Golden Globes, she’d worn an outfit featuring Michael Jackson’s face in sequins, accompanied by a handbag shaped like an owl. But this was beyond bizarre even for Björk. Never before had someone appeared on the red carpet dressed like a swan. The reaction was quick and nasty. “The girl should be in an asylum,” quipped Joan Rivers. “Probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen,” said TV fashion pundit, Steven Cojocaru. While Björk didn’t win the Oscar for best original song, her creative talent, although not everyone’s cup of tea, has never been in question.

So, what about it? Are eccentricity and the creative spark connected? And if they are, why?

The answer might lie with Mary Rocamora. Mary ran an adult school in Los Angeles for gifted grownups. She counseled accomplished writers, actors and other creative professionals for more than 24 years. She chose to wear unconventional clothing, like shoes hand-painted with colorful designs, and coveralls she made herself.

Here’s how she explained it. “It keeps me from growing up, it keeps me a kid,” she explained. “To me, the greatest danger for anybody that’s gifted is to start becoming a grownup and taking it all seriously. A lot of gifted people do that. They start getting all caught up in the business of their creativity. They grow up and they lose a lot of that childlike spontaneity that you need, the part that isn’t judging, isn’t restrained.

“I don’t want to be perceived as anything other than as a sort of kid. I don’t want clients to see me as anything other than a peer, and if anything to see me as some kind of a fruitcake that they could laugh about - and they like to do that. It’s not that I’m less esteemed or respected, but when they think of me, they think of all this nuttiness, and it gives them a giggle.”

And there it is.

The link that I’m convinced explains why some of our most enormously creative people are drawn to what most of us would consider bizarre and weird behavior. It’s our sense of loss. That time in our lives when we at the height of our creative powers. In some ways, whether we know it or not, we all realize that when we were children, we were different. We didn’t question that the sun could be blue or zebras could have pink and purple stripes or that Wonderland was a real place.

But of course, as in The Polar Express, we grow up, and before we know it, we can’t hear the bells anymore.

We’ve decided that if we allow the quirky in us to disappear, if we let our oddball selves shrivel up like a raisin in the August sun, then we will sure as hell end up a shadow of what we used to be creatively. The creative spark will be extinguished once and for all.

And so we dress funny. We swear up and down that faeries are real. We live in strange houses. We name our children after Roman gods. We cling to our eccentricity because if we don’t, our creative superpowers will be lost forever. Imaginations that once roamed freely through the world will go dark and silent. We’ll see only what most grownups see. Which isn’t very much at all.

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