Creativity is at backside the combinatorial work of reminiscence and creativeness. All of our impressions, influences, and experiences — each sight we have now ever seen, each guide learn, each panorama walked, each love beloved — change into seeds for concepts we later mix and recombine, largely unconsciously, into creations we name our personal. Essentially the most wondrous factor about these seeds is that, once they first fall into the fallow floor of the thoughts, we have now no sense of what they’ll bloom into years, many years, and selves later, what alchemic cross-pollination will happen between them and different seeds at nighttime underground of consciousness the place we change into who we’re.
Rilke understood this when he contemplated the combinatorial nature of inspiration. Ada Lovelace understood it when she wrote of creativity because the work of an alert creativeness that “seizes points in common, between subjects having no very apparent connexion, & hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition” — one thing she embodied when she fused her childhood impression of a mechanical loom along with her present for arithmetic to compose the world’s first laptop program in a 65-page footnote.
Most artists perceive this if they’re honest about the building blocks of their originality.
As he dismantles the myth of originality within the altogether improbable Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave appears again on his physique of labor as “primarily narrative songs utilizing vivid imagery” and traces this sensibility to at least one significantly fertile seed planted when he was 5 — a 1961 Czech guide of fairy tales he learn and reread for years, into his teenagers when he first started making music.
(I’m reminded of Einstein’s impassioned insistence that fairy tales are the mightiest fuel for the creative imagination.)
Filled with brightly illustrated tales from around the globe, The Fairy Tale Tree (public library) by Vladislav Stanovsky and Jan Vladislav dazzles with its vivid primary-color illustrations by the nice Czech artist and sculptor Stanislav Kolíbal.
The primary web page of the guide casts its promise as half poem and half magic spell — one thing unusual and transcendent that reads like a Nick Cave tune:
Past limitless mountains, past limitless rivers,
on the very remotest finish of the earth
and whither no hen has ever but flown,
there’s a deep blue sea,
and on this sea there’s a small inexperienced island,
and on this island is a stately tree,
all of gold with shapely branches, twelve in all,
and on every department there’s a nest,
and in every nest a nestful of eggs
— a nestful of eggs of clear crystal.You’ve solely to interrupt the crystal shell,
And every has a fairy story to inform.
From there, every chapter proceeds as an egg on a department of the storytelling tree — an idea Cave realized solely in hindsight anchors “Spinning Music” on his document Ghosteen.
Wild and wondrous, partway between a baby’s drawing and a modernist portray, Kolíbal’s illustrations emanate his personal early influences of Egyptian and Cycladic artwork but rise from the web page solely authentic, stuffed with unusual vitality and vim — a pig with a cane, a mouse waltzing with a lobster, a wolf diving down a chimney, unusual and joyful like the most effective of childhood.
Complement with J.R.R. Tolkien on the psychology of fairy tales, the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on how fairy tales strengthen our capacity for powerful emotions, and these stunning century-old illustrations of Tibetan fairy tales by the artist who created Bambi, then revisit Nick Cave on creativity, its relationship to self-trust and faith, and the two pillars of a meaningful life.
