The Curiouser

  Once you start cultivating them, ideas are everywhere. The seed of an idea is a question, asking "what if". But the seeds fall from an earlier flower: observation.  Observing the world, understanding yourself in it, compassion for others, seeing past the obvious, stoking curiosity -- there are all ways to enhance your observational skills to generate ideas. Because an idea is not the end place. The idea is one of many little floating bits, one the air, underfoot, in the dirt. The art of it is being able to find a workable idea, a strong idea, the one to grow.  The selection process can be luck when you are first learning to cultivate, and as you get better at recognizing the worth, that's wisdom. 

I know , I know, the famous quote form Steve Jobs is "Real artists ship." And the wonderful Seth Godin has a whole book dedicated to artists and creatives getting to the work and simply shipping as a daily practice (his book is called "The Practice" after all.) But there's this whole other way of doing the work, a wee bit at a time -- chipping away in a consistent manner... one little sliver more, one beat, one sentence, one stroke, one step... it's not a race. Chipping, you often have to step away for perspective, and then return to chip some more, and step back again to make sure you're chipping the right bits off. Little and Often Make Much is a mantra that got me through writing a whole book and so many other things. Keep chipping at it. Step away. Return.  As Michelangelo remarked about the marble, the giant is sleeping within. We have to release him. But be careful not to knock off the nose or something because you were determined to simply chip ...

 In the story, the greatest hero rarely slays the villain.  Monsters, sure, henchmen, yeah, but the arch-villain, the main object, hardly ever goes over the edge. Or if they do perish, it's usually their own fault.  What was the goal? When the hero first set out, it was probably to slay the villain. But things change. The hero acquires skills and friends and knowledge along the path, gaining a broader perspective. When they face the villain the hero has realized that there are other goals beyond this one.  When we consider our own goals, what happens if we think about the larger mission? What if the mission isn't simply to reach an objective, but to be immersed in the journey? What if the goal is a learning path that meanders and eddies and takes a little more time?  Instead of goals, we seek an adventure path. How might this change what we consider the outcome? 

 Today I watched a live performance via live-stream. A friend of mine had adapted a one-woman historical drama to work through YouTube and Facebook Live.  Sitting together in a theater is a long time away. Until then, it's important to practice resilience.  What hybrid forms will this time we are spending suspended in square bubbles on screens inspire? 

Aristotle did a lot of thinking based on his observations of the world. It was his observations that got him to begin questioning, and the questions led to more observations. He worked to discover essential qualities and find rules and definitions for the structures that governed the organization of the world. One of the basic principles he questioned and sought to define was the difference between what was alive and what was dead. He came up with rules that could determine if a thing was animate and inanimate, and examine properties that drove the living force from a creature to make it dead? He determined that the living force was a "vital" quality. For two millennia people sought to measure or capture this vital quality, this living spark. Vitalism survived as a science until the late nineteenth century.  While it is no longer a "science", I do think this question of vitalism applies to the performative arts.  I once heard playwright Romulus Linney state, ...

In a cognitive science course on Art & Perception, we learned that part of what makes us recognize art as an art object is that we understand the frame. Without the frame, we can mistake a construction for reality.  Yesterday on a podcast I heard a successful creator speak about how he organizes his life by narrowing the frame that allows choices to flood in. This helps him reduce the cognitive load on decisions so that he can simply get to work. He produces a lot, including a daily blog. Today I am thinking about the frames as I work on learning how to frame the commands for making this blog space. I am on day 2 here. The window of this blog is a frame, yes? I am working to narrow my frame and figure out what is essential enough to put here. 

Over the holidays one of my friends gave me a mug.  BE A VIKING it said, and there's a picture of an old norseman on it. He had gone into a shop to find something funny about England or Scotland or Ireland, maybe a tea towel with the queen, knowing how much of an anglophile I am. But the shop turned out to be exclusively nordic. So the mug has a viking on it.  For the past couple of years I've found a word that I write in my book around the new year that is to be my guide word to get me around the sun. The first time I chose the word "help" and worked to either help someone or to be helped each day. This proved to be a great way to be useful and to practice asking for aid when I needed it. For the beginning of 2020 I chose "forth" which was intended to remind me to "go forth" and do and create in a bold sort of way. Well, we all know that going anywhere became problematic what with a pandemic and lockdowns and social distancing. Although, I did wor...

  This is a test ride faster