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Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.
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Sarah Lewis (The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery)