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Tag Archives: creativity

Inspiration’s Muse

16 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by Jay Magidson in art, discovery, writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

art, creativity, Inspiraton, Muse, Writing

Writing is a lonely sport.  The cursor blinks menacingly on the empty background, angry photons burning trails onto doubt-filled retinas.  What will appear is unknown, something between garbage and genius, or worse…nothing.  When all seems lost, inspiration flutters down like a timorous butterfly.  And like magic, writing begins, timid at first, then braver, growing into a furious boldness that seems uncontainable, unstoppable, but then finally peters out to a whisper.  It is a type of alchemy, lead into gold and ultimately – sweet torture.

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“The Dream of Reason Creates Monsters” by Goya

Inspiration is Courageous

Where does inspiration come from, and with it – courage.  What is brave about banging on a keyboard?  Fear permeates the creative process, scratching roughshod into a reluctant spirit, stealing jewels from the claws of a sleeping dragon.  It is not the fear of a known physical force, injury, pain or death; it is far worse.  Physical wounds heal.  It is the fear of having nothing to say, of having an empty soul.  That is truly awful.

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“The Empty Chair” by Eva Cellini

Creativity is a Job

I lost a dear friend recently.  She was an artist.  She inspired me to write, encouraged me when things seemed at their most difficult.  “Touch it every day.”  She would say.  “No one knows where creativity lives.  It is a job, and if you don’t show up, you cannot succeed.  You must set the table if you expect your guests to arrive.”  She was right, it is a job, the most difficult one possible.  To be honest all the time, to never accept compromise, cowardice or timidity, to stare into blinding infinity and pull something from nothing.  To never give up, knowing that there is no end to your journey.

red_leaf

“The Red Leaf” by Eva Cellini

The Muse is Selfish

The muses of creativity care nothing for our pain, discomfort or insecurities.  They kick at our heads when we are sleeping, driving or eating dinner with friends.  Like selfish children they demand our attention RIGHT NOW, not when it is convenient or expedient.  Ignore them and they will dart away like frightened deer.  Maybe they’ll come back in a day, a week, maybe never. Obey their cruel reason and be rewarded with something new, the blissful loss of time, but also with more insanity.  Because the muses are insane, exquisitely beautiful crazies.

The Muses

Science would have us believe we are bundles of chemical reactions, an accident of evolution that created consciousness.  All that we call beauty is just a hormonal reaction to certain frequencies of light and sound.  But that doesn’t explain Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Beethoven; where did they get their inspiration to bring such sublimity to the Earth.  Science stumbles at the gates of art and we have to look beyond the mundane explanations of logic, through the iron bars of rationality into the swirling mist of creativity – where the muses dance.

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“Memories of Cornell’s Lost Muse”by Ingrid Dee Magidson

Inspiration is the Paint, We Are The Canvas

Polyhymnia, sacred muse of poetry, and her eight sisters live beyond the limited mind.  They kiss our eyes when we sleep, pulling us into the soul-ripping abyss.  They temp us with words, shapes and colors, impossible ideas that would make others scoff or shrug.  Inspiration is their paint and we are their canvas.  One only needs to step aside, lower one’s head in humility and accept their gifts.  Gifts that must be passed on or fester like rotting fruit.

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Books are Dead – Long Live Stories

15 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Jay Magidson in books, fiction, Science Fiction, Threshold of the Mind, Virtual Reality

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Tags

audiobooks, creativity, future, libraries, Sci Fi, Virtual Reality

Long_Room_Interior,_Trinity_College_Dublin,_Ireland_-_Diliff

I love books.  I have hundreds in my library, have read hundreds more.  I get a warm comfortable feeling when I go to a bookstore or public library.  But I also know that the end is near for books.  I’m not sad or nostalgic about any of it.  Things change.

Tens of thousands of years ago, long before speech, man told each other stories through pantomime and play acting.  They acted out their hunting adventures or mishaps, probably laughed when Grog hit his head on a rock.  You can feel the truth in this, have this genetic memory as I do.

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Thousands of years after that, our brains developed speech and the stories got more sophisticated, more detailed.  They were passed around, embellished, exaggerated until they became myths and legends.  Really exaggerated, like Atlas holding the world on his shoulders and Apollo pulling the sun across the sky.

Mankind lived on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years telling stories without books.  Then some clever fellow in Mesopotamia scratched symbols in the dirt and invented writing.  Someone else smeared these symbols onto parchment (no fun for the lamb by the way) and presto we have scrolls, and if they are long enough, are really just rolled up books.

parchment

Thousands of years after that, Gutenberg figured out a way to make multiple copies of the bible and by the 20th Century, we’re neck deep in books.  Millions and millions of them.  Even Hitler couldn’t burn enough to make a dent in the growing pile.

But if you look at the bigger picture, the history of humankind at approximately 500,000 years, books are still pretty new.  Writing is barely 5,000 years old, printed books only about 600 and the novel as we know it, less than 300.  And sad, though it may appear, books are going to disappear, are already disappearing, or more accurately, evolving.

Do you have children?  If not, have you ever seen one?  They love video.  In my day it was TV, “Gilligan’s island, Lost in Space.”  Horrible stuff.  Now it’s six second vines.  Amazing really, that you can tell a story in only six seconds.  YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Vimeo, Facebook, video is king.  We love them, devour them like chocolate on Easter.  They’re stories.

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Oh I know the argument, video and movies do the imagining for us.  Books make us create the pictures in our own head.  “The movie was pretty good, but the book was great.”  But someone had to create those stories, imagine them and how to present them.  Grog didn’t worry about that when he acted out a good hunt in front of the fire half a million years ago.  Plays are high art and movies are not?  Nonsense.  It’s all just human beings telling stories to each other.  And that’s what matters.

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Not long from now, we’ll agonize over the displacement of video and movies too.  We’ll watch and interact with Virtual Reality or maybe someday images will be beamed directly into our minds.  We can’t live without stories.  Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase, “The medium is the message.”  I think it misses the point.  We are not that different from Grog in front of the fire, maybe no different at all.  I think we’re all just kids begging dad to tell us a goodnight story and don’t really care how it gets into our heads.

Threshold of the Mind by Jay Magidson

Threshold of the Mind by Jay Magidson a novel about  mankind addicted to Virtual Reality in the near future.

Available on Amazon.com in print, kindle and audiobook.  Buy it today!

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Do We Over Emphasize the Value of Originality?

24 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by Jay Magidson in books, fiction, writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

art writing, Cavemen, creativity, fiction, imagination, Originality, primitive art, Shakespeare, Writing

Artists, writers, all creative persons struggle with the question of originality.  “Am I creating something unique, earth shattering?”  And the chances are, you’re not.  But is that really all that important?  Consider what would happen if everything we did was unique, new, never seen before.  It would likely be incomprehensible.  Concepts are built on a foundation of past ideas.

The visual arts provide the simplest example.  Primitive art eventually led to realism, which led to impressionism, which led to abstraction, which led to minimalism, which led to conceptualism.  Obviously these movements have branched in hundreds of tangential directions too.  But the point is, one needs a reference point to step to the next level.  The abstract movement would have been completely unique in the 19th Century, but would have also been discarded out of hand.  Why, because there was no foundation yet, it was too big a leap, it needed the smaller steps that got us there as a society to appreciate it.

We see this in many other forms, certainly in writing.  How many ways can writers rearrange the several hundred thousand English words and still be unique.  Though the number is large, it is not infinite.  It is math, a finite number of words combine into a finite possible mix.  Yet, experience and intuition tells us this is not true.  We will not run out of new stories, new ideas.  This is because we are continuing to pile slight variations on top of a very broad foundation – a foundation that can grow infinitely.

Not all that long ago, most believed the sun and stars rotated around the earth.  Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise.  Now, without individual proof or experimentation, we all “know” that the earth rotates around the sun, that the earth is round, that the moon is made of rock and not cheese.  A million little factoids like that.  They are our foundation, our jumping off point of a platform that continues to broaden.

Consider technology.   We take for granted that we can carry around a portable Television studio disguised as a phone in our pocket, that we can use it to speak to almost anyone in the world just by pressing a combination of numbers.  My parents grew up before computers.  They use them, but don’t quite have the easy understanding my generation does.  My children grew up with small portable devices and apps.  They have an ease with them I can’t match.  Their foundation is larger than mine.  They add to this broader base easier, not bogged down in trying to get their heads around what is now commonplace to them, but still new to me.

File:Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Tower of Babel (Vienna) - Google Art Project - edited.jpgThese incremental additions are tiny bits of originality.  And they are very valuable both culturally and artistically.   Our whole base of knowledge is expanding, because we are a society and not just a mass of individuals, we share information, pass it not only to each other, but forward to our children.  And the larger the base, the more possibility for incremental original additions.   Think of our foundation of knowledge as a city.  Long ago, it was a tiny village, it grew into a town, then a city, now it is a teaming metropolis.  We can add a window, a building, or just paint a wall, but there are increasingly more ways to add to and change it.  And the larger the metropolis, the more possibilities for change, for originality.

Every once in a while, a brilliant man or woman adds something completely unique to the whole, people like Homer, Newton, Joan of Arc, da Vinci, Shakespeare, or Einstein.  But the geniuses stand out, because they are so rare.  Most of the originality we experience is not from these rare geniuses, but from small additions, the ones each of us contribute as microscopic bits of brilliance.

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Where do Ideas Come From?

21 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by Jay Magidson in books, writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

artist, creativity, criticism, ideas, Steven Pressfield, The War of Art, Writer's block, Writing

Many people have asked me about writing, were do ideas come from, how do I find the time, etc.  I’ve been writing for decades, starting as a teenager.  I went many years without writing a thing, and many days in sequence being unbelievably prolific, writing one or more chapters at a sitting.  Lately I’ve been a lot more disciplined about it all.

Permission to be an artist

Several years ago I was introduced to a wonderful book titled, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.  If you are an artist/writer/singer/etc. please buy this little gem of a book.  In a sentence: it gave me permission to be a writer.  From that day, I set aside the early mornings for my writing, 5 or 5:30 in the morning (occasionally 4am when I just can’t sleep anymore).  It is quiet and there are no distractions.  My children are up at 6:30 for school so it gave me an hour or an hour and half to work.  Doesn’t sound like much?  Add it up.  If I wrote a single page a day, that is a book in 9 months; 2 pages a day is a book in 5.  That’s pretty good and is exactly what happened.  But better than that, my mind became trained to create.  When I sit down, I’m writing a few minutes later.  What about writer’s block?  It can be a real thing, but only if you let it.  When good ideas are not coming, I go back and edit the previous day’s work.  It’s housekeeping, it’s true, but it has to get done too.  So I’m in the work, slogging away.  And often the simple act of staying connected gives me good ideas and I’m able to move forward again.  It all counts.  Just show up.

Where do ideas come from?

Every artist and writer is asked this question.  And it is unanswerable, not because the writer wants to keep it a secret or hide some special talent, but because none of us really knows.  We read a phrase, see a television show, overhear a conversation and bang an idea for a story or an action for our lead character pops into our head.  Maybe it comes from God, aliens, angels or from a very small man who lives in our ears.  We just don’t know, but it’s magical and every writer experiences this magic.  It’s like a small Christmas present in July.  Just say thank you and write it down.  I do.

Do you have a story in you?

I think there are a lot of people who have a story or two in them and are not writing it down.  Why not?  What is really the risk?  What, that someone might not like it, criticize it, tell you it’s crap.  Oh yeah, those guys.  There are a lot of them and only one of you.  Over time, you learn to say “so what” to their criticism and praise.  None of it matters.  The only thing that matters is that you are writing and writing and writing, numbing your butt cheeks, developing a concrete ass.  Maybe something great will come out of your pen or computer, but only if you write it down, only if you release it to the world.  And if not now, when?

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