Creativity, Fetal Pigs and Madness

At that moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with non-Euclidean geometry.

- Jules H. Poincare

Okay, for those who don't know who Poincare is, well, let's just call him a French guy who could not get laid when he was in school. Actually, he is the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He both excelled in the arts and sciences, and basically he also believed that when you let your mind wander, you may unleash your creative juices. Okay, there are a few things wrong with seeing the world his way – he was a genius, and you cannot say that his views are necessarily all of our views. He and, let's say, Paris Hilton, probably don't share too many things. Though I am wondering how many people have shared body fluids with her.

You know, when I was growing up, creativity was not rewarded. Think about it; it was probably the same way in your schools as well. When in elementary school, for instance, we were told to color in the lines. Wouldn't it be more creative to expand the lines sometimes, or help the lines express themselves, if you are highly creative.

When in middle and high school, I remember learning about "writing," and extremely creative discipline. With a mere 26 letters in the English language, you can create things as diverse as erotica, literary reviews, and poetry with no capital letters and diaries. But when we learned how to write, we were first told to give an outline of what we were going to write and then expand the outline, eventually yielding a story. How creative is that? No very. How stifling is that? Very.

And for those of us who wrote good outlines in school, we got our A's and may not have ever been very creative.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

- Aristotle

Madness, like creativity, is not rewarded in school. When you take your fetal pig, talk to it like it can understand you, and sympathize with its plight, the science department does not give you extra credit. When you insist that another person inside your head answered for you when you littered your answer with obscenities, you are not rewarded. I actually think the Aristotle quote was lifted for dialog for "Pirates of the Caribbean," though I cannot prove it.

I leave you today with the opening line of "Auguries of Innocence", by William Blake:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.