Buffets and Padded Cells
No one dragged you. You didn’t stumble or bumble inside. No, you’ve requested this padded cell. You measured, tailored, and sealed it. The objective: to safeguard your work, your identity, your style. You removed distractions and created a sanctuary where nothing is allowed to interrupt your muse.
Floor, ceiling, and four walls are indistinguishable from one another. A promise of safety envelopes you. Light permutes the space until time itself feels misplaced—somewhere between day and night, dusk and dawn. With no sound, no color, no texture, even the air feels implacable.
Escape? How? What do you have to work with?
When people nurture a mystical creativity in a private grove, summoned through meditation under a soothing bower, they weaken its power before it lands its punch.
Note this isn’t about a distraction-free workspace or tried-and true rituals: fermentation happens before that, before your work begins. Once started, it continues, bubbling and seething, through the thick of your work.
To woo creativity, abandon your curatorial attitude. That peaceful grove? Stuff it instead with garden gnomes, swings, trampolines, picnic baskets and mud pies.
Should the strains of a Gregorian chant drift through the leaves, let them. Or blare New Orleans jazz. Or hand the monks a Florence + the Machine score and watch them waltz on wet spaghetti.
Open the gates. Populate the grove with misfits. Invite the fever dream, the charlatans and magicians, clowns and chefs, ghosts and your grandma. Greet the toddler screaming “MINE!” who proceeds to shoot arrows at chipmunks. Spiders, porpoises, movie posters, a sandbox of sourdough, a pool of chocolate pudding—all welcome.
Because? Creativity has a fondness for a tapas bar. It enjoys your attempt to use an old shoe as a kettle to make espresso. It delights and revels in chaos and in the collision of things that do not belong. For new ideas: eat the weird sandwich, read the wrong book, watch the movie everyone secretly hates. Seek inputs that violate your sensibilities, that breach taste and style, that pair the absurd with the familiar. And talk to people, everyone and everywhere. (It is no coincidence that Hemingway and others in the Lost Generation frequented cafés.) Something alchemical occurs in exchanges between humans: ideas meet, thoughts and notions take wind, connections pulse along alternating currents of thought. Listen carefully and watch for the shift, the unexpected visitor you court, the splinter, the insight.
Now, let’s talk about the jump: the moment your fancy is catapulted from one associative island to another. The jump is a product of a thousand collisions.
Tepid pap results from regurgitating pre-digested baby food. Shuffle and limp with a tidy banquet of shrimp and oysters. Develop wings and world records if you metabolize the unlikely squid and peaches combo meal. It’s then that you link the blinking neon of a Vegas slot machine to the architecture of your next painting, a street dance to the design of a new trowel, or, with a nod to Hedy Lamarr, synchronized player pianos to a guidance system for torpedos, our earliest wifi.
Input variety is not optional. It is oxygen for artistic intelligence.
And while you may experience a bounce while perusing screens, this is a fast food version of a forgettable-polite shuffle, short the jitterbug of delights that could fling you across the room. Reheated leftovers settle the gut, not the imagination.
The jump requires friction between the familiar and everything else, the inedible and the incredible. Real collisions require detours and discomfort.
Yes, there is risk. The messier your inputs, the higher chance you will go off-track, not finish what you start, or become incoherent. Treat these delays as necessary vomit and chills before digestion. The best ideas destabilize and throw you into a turmoil. They often accompany the feeling that you should start all over. And do that. Start all over.
You won’t be sorry. (The delay is often shorter than dreaded.)
And, like that, your padded room smells of popcorn which sends your mollusk mind to find the buried microwave with its candied electric cord which you engage to char walls triggering the sprinkler system that rains tapioca pearls you stack into steps and climb to discover a soufflé ceiling concealing a vent that opens into a crawlspace lined with gum and silver paper and you remember the chef who made chocolate airplanes and sent them flying off the plate so you delicately peel the paper and taste, swallow, fold it until you stand upon a veritable meringue peak and your amuse-bouche—lifts you into the open.