Zerebria

It always happens as a surprising yet pleasant accident: I suddenly find myself interconnecting fields that have very little or nothing in common. I cheer up my 80 years old aunt using a joke I learned in the ‘Rockanrolla’ film. I use in a blog post an expression I only heard once in an interview from the 70’s that I saw in a DVD. I repeat an expression from a friend that shocked me 15 years ago. All of it just because it FEELS right.

The results are usually very fruitful, because the simple change in context turns the words into a completely different thing. Maybe that’s what creativity is about: you create a different thing by combining elements that already existed and adapt them to new circumstances. Virgil wrote the Aeneid by taking the story of Troy and choosing a different angle and main character. Dante, later, wrote the Divine Comedy and used his beloved Virgil as a character. Etc.

In all of this transformations, the main ingredient is LOVE. Because they admired the works they wanted to imitate, they were sort of helped by their models. Maybe there are no original ideas, only the original combining of what we have received: good cookers use very subtle graduations in their recipes.

But you don’t need to be an artist to make use of and get benefited by what you receive from your human community; it works in all fields. Human being is imitative. The funny paradox is, the more areas you interconnect (the more things you borrow from others), the more original and personal you become. But, again, you need the electricity of admiration running through the final product: do not turn something alive into a dead tool, into something that you simply make use of (for example, those TV scripts where such making use feels more like an acquisition, like an act of parasitism, and many times you can tell where this joke or that idea come from, and how many times they have been used before; when the act of borrowing is not generous it is something very sad to see, like some kind of looting or something).

Like the Italian writer Gabriele D’Annuzio once said, “I only have what I have given”. Maybe it is the usual case for all of us human beings. Each of us is like a giant neuron, whose happiness consists in letting pass through the different electric flows (information, but also emotions, happy moments, whatever). The paradox is, one more time, the more you receive, convey and deliver stuff from others, the more personal you become. I think humanity has been stuck for too many centuries in the trap of cult of personality: adoration of this, that particular being. Things like Internet’s collective intelligence, the liberalization of information and resources that it allows, are giving an end to that sad conception, which treats human beings as isolated entities. The changes in the latest decades have been too rough and  maybe we’re still not fully ready to make the leap -besides, there will always be dinosaurs who cling to their old vices and are willing to die killing-. But I’m sure one day we’ll leave egotism behind. It is like a dam whose cement shows the first holes. Drops of water fall from them, and they are becoming bigger every day. The final result will be a flood of creativity.

Are you inter-connective? Which are your favorite electric flows?

Related posts:

There’s nothing wrong with being a freak
Use verbal icons for your projects
More about being absolutely positive
Playing death
How to become optimistic with very little effort

July 16, 2010 at 10:09 pm by Nacho Jordi
Tags: Books, Brain, Communication, Creative thinking, D'Annunzio, Emotional intelligence, Experience, Happiness, Humor, Ideas, Interdependence, Internet, Language, Motivation, Poetry, Society, Transcendence, Virgil, Words