Imagine.

The universe is real but you can't see it. You have to imagine it. Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it. 

Alexander Calder

Learning.

Disney Imagineering designer Ray Kinman on the myth of talent ...

There was a period of my career where I really went through some serious burnout. I mean, world class burnout. It was only after I pulled out that I figured out what it was and that I started just trying to crank work out and it was about money. I was just trying to make money and I knew I could get away with not my best work and people couldn't tell.  

And so I started taking shortcuts and that kind of got to the point where I just got really depressed. I didn't like working and I don't know somehow I realized, oh! I stopped learning! I stopped pushing myself to that. That's what happened. So, I was able to regain momentum.

Everything I do, I'm trying to push it a little bit harder because it makes it interesting. It's fun.

Don't forget to get out and walk.

Mind-Forg'd.

Blake, The Ancient of Days, 1794

LONDON

I wander thro' each charter'd street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. 

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear 

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls, 

And the hapless Soldiers sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls 

But most thro' midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear 

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse 

William Blake

Process.

All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me. Oh, and trust me, so have you, my reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic, a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of forming--ay, of forming and forgetting.

Jack London, from The Jacket

Transformed.

Steve points to Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence ...

Artists have always had to contend with influence; every generation has always wished it could birth itself, instead of being born. But the contemporary world is burdened with the biggest glut of influences and models ever available to any people in history. It may seem paradoxical to claim, but nothing proves this essential paralysis more clearly than our era’s massive cultural overproduction, than those creative industries that churn out books and television shows and movies yet always remain fixated on contemporary trends, on context-free content, with little or no connection to any deep tradition. The paradox makes some sense psychologically: one symptom of paralyzing anxiety is compensatory overactivity. Bloom himself had suggested that artists deal with this overabundance by choosing the right influences (or being chosen by them), then redescribing, misreading them creatively—hoping to come up with a radical enough revision to push forward with their own transformed material.

Happy Birthday, Thomas Edison

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

Thomas Edison, born on this day in 1847, from an interview in the New York Dramatic Mirror titled "The Evolution of the Motion Picture,” conducted by Frederick James Smith

Edison's ...

• Mental Models
• Journaling Habits
• Napping Techniques

First.

Wright, Kitty Hawk, 10:35 A.M., 1903

On this day in 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful man-powered airplane flight, near Kitty Hawk, N.C.

Tidying.

I often think that I don’t have a single new idea in my head. But the big mistake is to just wait for inspiration to happen. It won’t come looking for you. You have to start doing something: you have to build a trap to catch it. I like to do that by starting the very mundane process of tidying my studio. It may seem like it has nothing to do with the creative job in hand but I think tidying up is a form of daydreaming, and what you’re really doing is tidying your mind. It’s a kind of mental preparation. It’s a way of getting your mind in place to notice something. And that’s what being creative is really: it’s noticing when something interesting is starting to happen.

Brian Eno

Practice.

Ari Weinzweig on practicing curiosity and its influence on creativity ...

Teaching people to be curious depends in part on the systems in which they work. Structures that encourage people to ask questions create curiosity. Frameworks, or what we’ve long thought of here at Zingerman’s as “organizational recipes,” are a great way to do that. Like Emma Goldman, they make people think. In a sense, all of the dozens of frameworks and recipes we use so regularly here really require at least a modicum of curiosity in order to work. Our Training Compact, 3 Steps to Great Service, 5 Steps to Handling Customer Complaints, 6 Elements of Dignity, Lean, the “5 Whys,” 3 Types of Beliefs (positive, negative, neutral), and more. All of them invite the user to ask questions, of themselves and/or of others as well. All encourage people to explore what something means, what is possible, and what a positive solution would look like. Our long-standing belief in the value of continuous improvement and Bottom-Line Change® encourages us to apply our curiosity as well. We have, I see now, been curating curiosity in the ZCoB for decades now!

Although I only found her work 15 months ago, creative business writer Carol Sanford’s focus is well aligned with these approaches. In No More Gold Stars Sanford states with passion that her focus is on “helping people learn to think for themselves.” The quality of our lives, our workplaces, and our world, she writes, depends on it:

I believe it is necessary because so many of us have been trained out of this fundamental capacity. We are born with innate creativity, filled with the potential to become independent and innovative human beings who can exercise discernment and critical thinking. … Most of us are conditioned to look to others to do our thinking for us. … The consequences of this conditioning are beginning to shake the foundations of democracies around the world.

All of Sanford’s seven books, all of her talks and articles are, one way or another, about learning to think for ourselves, to be curious and ask questions instead of simply following orders and falling quietly into line. In Indirect Work, she says,

Collectively, we are trapped in a mechanistic (or even more archaic) paradigm, and this causes us to make seemingly logical and ethical choices that actually produce destructive results. The urgent question now is how to provide leadership that is more appropriate to the world we find ourselves in, a world that is in crisis precisely because of the paradigms from which we’ve been operating.

(In fact, writing this essay made me curious about my childhood hero, Curious George. In a New York Times article published 20 years ago this week and entitled “How Curious George Escaped the Nazis,” journalist Dinitia Smith explains how the original book, first published in 1941, was written by H.A. Rey and Margret Rey. The couple, it turns out, were German Jews who had escaped Germany for Brazil. Later, they came back to Paris for their honeymoon, and were in the French capital working when the Nazis quickly took control of the French capital on June 14, 1940, a month to the day after Emma Goldman had died in Canada. The honeymooning couple managed to escape, riding their way quietly out of Nazi-controlled Paris on bicycles. The draft of the first manuscript for the book was in their backpacks. Reaching Allied territory, a border policeman, worried that the two were spies, let them go after finding the draft of an illustrated children’s book in their luggage.)

Curiosity, it seems, is sort of like any other skill. To get good at it, we have to practice. Some of us have the benefit of having been brought up in cultures and communities in which curiosity was actively encouraged and supported. Others have had to push past settings in which “too much” curiosity can get you ostracized, or in harder situations still, incarcerated. Practice won’t ever make perfect, but it does sort of make permanent. When something—curiosity in this case—is in our regular routine, it shapes our brains accordingly. Each of us will, of course, have our own way of doing the work. 

Happy Birthday, Buckminster Fuller

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty, but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

R. Buckminster Fuller, born on this date in 1895

Sees.

William Blake's letter from Hercules Street to the Reverend Dr. John Trusler ...

To Revd Dr Trusler, Englefield Green, Egham, Surrey

13 Hercules Buildings,.Lambeth, 

August 23, 1799

Revd Sir

I really am sorry that you are falln out with the Spiritual World Especially if I should have to answer for it I feel very sorry that your Ideas& Mine on Moral Painting differ so much as to have made you angry with my method of Study. If I am wrong I am wrong in good company. I had hoped your plan comprehended All Species of this Art & Especially that you would not reject that Species which gives Existence to Every other. namely Visions of Eternity You say that I want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the Ancients considerd what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act. I name Moses Solomon Esop Homer Plato.

But as you have favord me with your remarks on my Design permit me in return to defend it against a mistaken one, which is. That I have supposed Malevolence without a Cause.--Is not Merit in one a Cause of Envy in another& Serenity & Happiness & Beauty a Cause of Malevolence. But Want of Money & the Distress of A Thief can never be alledged as the Cause of his Thievery. for many honest people endure greater hard ships with Fortitude We must therefore seek the Cause elsewhere than in want of Money for that is the Misers passion, not the Thiefs. 

I have therefore proved your Reasonings Ill proportiond which you can never prove my figures to be. They are those of Michael Angelo Rafael& the Antique & of the best living Models. I percieve that your Eyes is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love but too much Fun is of all things the most loathsom. Mirth is better than Fun & Happiness is better than Mirth--I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity & by these I shall not regulate my proportions, & Some Scarce see Nature at all But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers You certainly Mistake when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination & I feel Flatterd when I am told So. What is it sets Homer Virgil & Milton in so high a rank of Art. Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book. Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination which is Spiritual Sensation & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason Such is True Painting and such was alone valued by the Greeks & the best modern Artists. Consider what Lord Bacon says “Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged & Reason sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted.”

Never.

During the hostage situation, Vetter said a drone was used to lower a 24 oz. Faygo red pop in a bag to Allen. When Allen exposed himself, law enforcement could see him through the glass of the building. State Police said a trooper shot and killed Allen. MSP said Allen never grabbed the bag.

Rings.

Your marching orders.  Every thought and word from one of the most exuberant human beings who ever lived. 

Ray Bradbury interviewed in 1974 ...

RAY BRADBURY: [I]t's very dangerous, I think too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish, and too intellectual and the intellect is a great danger to creativity.

JAMES DAY: The intellect is a danger.

RAY BRADBURY: Terrible danger because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth. Who you are, what you are, what you want to be. And I've had a sign over my typewriter for 25 years now which reads don't think, you must never think at the type writer you must feel and then your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of things there, you do a lot of thinking away from your typewriter. But at the typewriter you should be living. It should be a living experience, just as when I'm here with you, speaking to you, your popping all sorts of questions at me, I don't have time to think about them, I can react to them. I try to say things that are meaningful in a reaction to them, if I stopped and thought too long both of us would fall asleep. And that can happen at the typewriter too. The worst thing you do when you think is lie.  You can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did and what your trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself, find out who you really are and try not to lie, try to tell the truth, all the time. And the only way to do this is by being very active, and very emotional, and get it out of yourself, making lists of things that you hate and things that you love, you write about these then, intensely. And when its over, then you can think about it, then you can look at whether it works or doesn't work or something's missing here, and then if something's missing you go back and re-emotionalize that so its all of a piece. But thinking is to be a corrective in our life, its not supposed to be the center of our lives. Living is supposed to be the center of our lives. Being is supposed to be the center, with correctives around which hold us, like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not aware of life living is the blood pumping through our veins.  The ability to sense and to feel and to know, and the intellect doesn't really help your brain much there, you should get on with the business of living.

JAMES DAY: You rely heavily upon intuitions?

RAY BRADBURY: Oh completely, everything of mine is intuitive, all the poetry I've written. I couldn't possibly tell you how I did it, I don't know anything about the rhythms or the schemes or the inner rhymes or any of this sort of thing.  It comes from 40 years of reading poetry and having heroes that I loved, feeling again. I love Shakespeare, I don't intellectualize upon him.  I love Gerard Manley Hopkins, I don't intellectualize upon him. I love Dylan Thomas, I don't know what in the hell he's writing about half the time, but he sounds good, he rings well.

Alive.

Alive.  The opposite of artificial ...

Any form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art form is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, "I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive."

Carson McCullers

Happy Birthday, Frank Lloyd Wright

Every idea that is a true idea has a form, and is capable of many forms. The variety of forms of which it is capable determines the value of the idea. So by way of ideas, and your mastery of them in relation to what you are doing, will come your value as an architect to your society and future. That's where you go to school. You can't get it in a university, you can't get it here, you can't get it anywhere except as you love it, love the feeling of it, desire and pursue it. And it doesn't come when you are very young, I think. I believe it comes faster with each experience, and the next is very simple, or more simple, until it becomes quite natural to you to become master of the idea you would express.

Frank Lloyd Wright, born on this day in 1867

Himself.

Try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Do not write love-poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile and commonplace: they are the most difficult, for it takes a great, fully matured power to give something of your own where good and even excellent traditions come to mind in quantity. Therefore save yourself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty — describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

Leonardo.

I highly recommend (have your journal handy) the latest documentary by Ken Burns, Leonardo da Vinci ...

Among the highlights is the presence of two historians mirroring the role of The Civil War's Shelby Foote, historians Paolo Galluzzi and Martin Kemp, who figured prominently in NOVA's 2003 masterpiece, Leonardo's Dream Machines ...

I'm grateful to Execupundit for signaling it's approach.

Notice.

Thanks, Kurt.

Risk.

I’m a little bit afraid of words like "proper form" because I don’t think that there is a "proper form."  Were are always on search; we are never there. And there is no "proper" interpretation of anything. The kiss of the muse is the real property. A mistake can be more inspiring than the "proper” thing.  For me, security and beauty and not compatible. When you seek beauty, you have to forget security, and you have to go to the rim of catastrophe. There you find the beauty. If a musician makes a mistake, a crack, because he risks everything to get the most beautiful thing and he fails, then I thank him for this failure because it is only with this risk you can get the beauty, the real beauty. The real beauty is not available at all. If you seek security, you should make another profession.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Escape.

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?  If we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.

J.R.R. Tolkien, from "On Fairy-Stories"