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How To Catch The Really Big Ideas

Reading Notes

10-12 Minute Read | Laptop or Tablet Recommended

Topics and Themes

The big ideas; How to wait and invite the biggest ideas in; How social media keeps us from catching game-changing ideas.

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Like so many others, I watched The Odyssey in IMAX. After the film was finished, I was purblind to gauging my emotional response. I know the reason why, and I really can't put it any other way: The Odyssey somehow reminded me of a feeling I had never felt before. The film stirred emotions on such a deep level that I had trouble expatiating how I felt. The film felt extremely personal, like meeting a person I've never talked to and yet we knew each other intimately. I wasn't the only one with a very unique reaction. Many of my colleagues in film were also blown away, each in their own way. It's safe to say that the film touched something deep in all of us.

That a filmmaker can create a film that resonates so deeply with so many people hits me with indescribable annoyance. I'll fully admit that I wish I could do that. Of course, I have to keep in mind that Christopher Nolan, the director of The Odyssey, commands large budgets, hires the best actors and collaborators, and has developed a pythonic support system over the course of a 25+ year career. But there’s something more to this movie than logistics... something buried under integuments of interpretation.

How on earth did he come to the idea of doing a modern interpretation of The Odyssey in the first place? What does Christopher Nolan do that allows him to think that deeply?

The best theory I've got came after I ruminated on what Matthew Crawford meant by "dumb nature" in the context of modern psychological behavioral adaptations in his book The World Beyond Your Head:

“…When dumb nature is understood to be threatening to our freedom as rational beings, it becomes attractive to construct a virtual reality that will be less so, a benignly nice Mickey Mouse Clubhouse where there is no conflict between self and world.” (Crawford, 2015, p. 77)

We'll get into why I think this quote and concept are important, later. Before we do, a little context might be helpful.

First, know that The World Beyond Your Head expatiates on a theme of the philosophy of representations and symbols. Crawford points out that there's a great deal of weirdness in environments that use symbols to guide and focus our attention for us. He uses The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse as a prime example about how there's deliberately little to no cognitive dissonance in any of the programming, no confrontation with problems without an automatically prescribed solution, or a set of solutions presented as options. If only life were that simple! I'd love to have a set of solutions given to me for some of the problems I face!

Another example would be the ubiquitously creepy catch-all term "social media." At this point, can we really say it's more than a big ole' echo chamber of our favorite content that barely challenges us to think critically about the world around us? If you read Crawford's book, and I recommend it highly, the afflatus of replacing the rub and rash of reality has its origins in Emmanual Kant's writing and theories, but in the past 200+ years has morphed into a leviathan of social engineering that I suspect secretly wishes to separate our wills from reality. This scares the living shit out of me. Without a direct experience of reality as it is, how can we develop any sense of character, let alone a ideographic response to the world we live in?

If I am reading Matthew Crawford correctly, dumb nature could mean to be reality at it's most raw. Reality that is whatever speed it wishes to be... Maybe a lot of boredom punctuated by moments of high drama and excitement. The good, the bad, the ugly. Dumb nature, in short, encompasses everything deliberately not engineered for us, occuring and unfolding as it will. Contrast that with highly addictive symbols that are socially engineered, aka the posts we see on our Instagram feeds, providing a limitless supply of entertainment, stimulation, and bright and shiny objects. Dumb nature cannot hope to compete with the sheer amount of novelty that a curated, personally informed digital environment can deliver.

And yet, what are we to make of something as big and monumental as The Odyssey? I can't help poo-poo the social media feeds because it seems that the most lasting ideas were given to people who don't even bother with them, people who are a bit outside the mainstream. I'm going to bet that the directors that I most admire in this golden age of cinema are willing to tolerate dumb nature because they expect it to deliver something extraordinary to them. When it does, they are in the enviable position to capitalize on these ideas. What comes out of that are films like The Odyssey. Like Dune. Like Michael. Like Sinners. Like The Revenant. And, though it’s an oldie it’s a goodie, Pans Labyrinth.

In the hush of dumb nature, I believe the most epic ideas have more room to come to us and are more likely to be taken very seriously. I believe that when we have just the right balance between the the outside and inside worlds, when we disregard the noise loops and keep an Apollonian distance from the comings and goings of algorithms, we can logically expect the bigger ideas to come. I chuckled out loud when I saw an example of this in Antoine Fuqua's wonderful film Michael. When Michael Jackson's character, played by Jaafar Jackson, was floating in a pool and was gazing off into the distance, his brothers in the movie asked him what he was doing:

"I'm letting the Creator give me a song. If I’m not there to receive these ideas, God might give them to Prince."

To encourage those big ideas to come and to be ready to hold them, we have to be quiet enough to hear them in the first place. Hushing to that level requires silence and a still mind. This practice is highlighted again and again by many authors writing on the subject of creativity. It's highly recommended by the author Eric Maisel in the book Fearless Creating:

"Hushing is what we do when we go into a museum and sit in front of one painting for fifteen minutes. Hushing is what we do when we drink in a book or a movie. Hushing is what we do when we quiet our mind so as to catch the snatch of melody or lyric that is wanting to arrive. Hushing is quieting and opening... To create... you need a quiet mind so that ideas have a chance of connecting." (Maisel, 1995, p. 4)

To be quiet is to come into contact with dumb nature, and that also comes with a bit of adversity. It's not a bad idea to expect a little conflict. In the absense of novelty, the time is filled with the best kind of creative anxiety about what we plan upon creating and working on. It's like in the Allegory of the Cave: When taken out of the cave and pulled into the sunshine, it can be extremely painful and overwhelming at first, but indescribably beautiful after you get used to it. Fortunately, the literature on creativity also points towards the extreme goodness of embracing that confrontation. David Bayles and Ted Orland have a passage about it in their book Art and Fear:

"We're all subject to a familiar and universal progression of human troubles—troubles we routinely survive, but which are (oddly enough) routinely fatal to the artmaking process. To survive as an artist requires confronting these troubles. Basically, those who continue to make are those who learned how to continue—or more precisely, have learned not to quit." (Bayles and Orland, 2010, p. 9)

Confront we must, and though we put up a mad fuss when we're frustrated (or maybe I'm just speaking for myself) we don't quit when the going gets tough. I don’t like quitting. Quitting annoys me. I dare say that keeping at it makes me feel alive. And, in that confrontation with dumb nature, we're waiting for that big idea to hit us hard. It’s gonna come to us, we can feel it. That gargantuan idea will soon call us home.

The painter Jeane Carbonetti captured the sentiment of waiting and the conflict it creates in a beautiful way in her book Making Pearls:

"For the oyster making a pearl, waiting is characterized by two events: It recognizes instinctively that it is hungry; then it literally cements itself to a surface and waits. For the human pearl maker, waiting is when you hear the first stirrings of intuition that seem to beg for development—the tug of instinct that gnaws in the gut, a restlessness, perhaps an anxiety... this is the life force tapping you on the shoulder, asking to be engaged, whispering in your ears, 'It's time for this, now.'" (Carbonetti, 2001, p. 20)

To wait for such a moment requires a great intensity of purpose and a fuckload of faith. It requires a willingness to chill out and allow things to come together on their own accord, away from any sorts of unceasing demands of the outside world. Julia Cameron describes this intensity with her fabulously effective technique of reading deprivation in the classic book on creativity The Complete Artists Way. Reading deprivation is an exercise where she asks you not to read anything for a week (!):

"It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distraction we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world. With no newspaper to shield us, a train becomes a viewing gallery. With no novel to sink into, (and no television to numb us out) an evening becomes a vast savannah in which furniture—and other assumptions—gets rearranged... Reading deprivation cast us into our inner silence. …We often cannot hear out own inner voice, the voice of our artist's inspiration, above the static." (Cameron, 2007, p. 96)

Miracles happen in this space away from the distractions, but they are simultaneously rare and elephantine. Some would say that they happen when you’re ready for them. But when you do experience a creative miracle of that magnitude, it is an irresistible experience. You won't forget it anytime soon. The rarity guarantees appreciation. It’s like dreaming you are a virtuoso pianist, fingers flying all over the keyboard, and it sounds epic. The only difference is that the miracle is real. It happens in waking life!

The price for admission? We have to be cool with being quiet and ready for large creative miracles to come to us, and we must willingly and directly confront reality. If we're not present, if we're not calm and hushed, if we're not primed and ready for the conflict and the anxiety, forget about it. The most irresistible ideas will elude us.

I am becoming more and more convinced that our ability to invite and hold ideas on this level becomes just a little more endangered when we give ourselves up to doom-scrolling. I don't think it’s helpful to be so plugged in that we miss the larger, incredibly delectable, unbelievably irresistible ideas that are waiting beyond the periphery of our attention. To catch them, all we need is a tiny bit more space to receive them with the alacrity, care, and attention they require.

One day, maybe after a great deal of hush-time, a lot of exposure to dumb nature, that pantagruelian idea will show up. We have primed and prepared ourselves to receive it and be open to it, so it makes sense it should arrive. When it does it springs forth with great aplomb! BOOM! Big ideas are few, but with great anticipation and with an immense relief and satisfaction, they arrive.

To invite the big ideas that have kind of impact, I do believe we need to be willing to limit screen time to receive them. This is a great reason to give doom-scrolling a break, for putting your phone in a box, for trying to do something mad different. I think it's extremely healthy to confront dumb nature long enough to get in touch with the depths of our imaginations and commune with the game-changing ideas that make us feel alive.

Bibliography

Creative ProductivityDave WirthCreativity, Creative ProcessComment