Feel the math
What’s the bridge between logic and creativity?
Are they at the opposite ends of a spectrum, the left and the right brain? Or is that a placebo effect to keep your potential boxed and merely condition your mind to be comfortable?
The pursuit of science is mostly thought of as a logical undertaking, but I feel there’s a lot of similarity in it with how artists create. The “eureka” moment, developing on the works of your heroes, not being able to move forward an inch on a problem (or an idea) for years and then progressing light years in just a few minutes or hours, it’s all the same. This is how great works of art have been created and legacies progressed.
The road from logic to creativity is a spectrum. Creativity is about making decisions. The more complex the set of decisions you can make, the higher you are on the spectrum from logic to creativity.
You can perhaps facilitate creativity, but you can’t enforce it. Unambiguous parts of the creative process can be codified and perhaps will help you with producing more output, in situations where you’re desperate to be productive or working to a deadline. But they should not become a crutch to not push your boundaries, if you truly are a person with honest artistic ambition.
The scientists in Big Bang theory (a series about 4 nerdy physicists who work at CalTech, that I binge watched growing up) spoke about numbers and equations as if they had feelings. They nerded out over comics, action figures, board games, all those things that induce wonder. These are all traits of an artist. What seems eccentric to the world, they call on for inspiration and safety.
“It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.”
- Albert Einstein
Visual artists must have an intuitive understanding of geometry and proportions. How else would a visionary like Leonardo da Vinci create both The Vitruvian Man and engineer drawings of early helicopters at the same time?
“Locking into the groove” and “feeling the pulse” is how musicians feel the math. They use their bodies and voices to embrace rhythm and sound. Music is as much a kinesthetic experience as it is analytical.
Personally though, I’ve found not a lot of value in talking about music analytically or nerding on music theory beyond a point. It isn’t a lexical language, rather an aural one. To illustrate - it’s like trying to translate a visual language like Mandarin to English, or deciphering ancient scriptures and dialects. The translation is perhaps decipherable, and is available to interpretation - but not available to experience the same way as the creator feels it. And mostly, creators want you to feel the same experience they do while creating the piece. I think it is the closest thing to telepathy that exists today.
The energy that is transmitted and captured in the original piece is meant to be consumed in a way that you feel what the creator feels, that is how you get transported to the source of the creation and become one with it as the creator did. A translation in a second language has only snippets of that message, that will never be able to bring the authentic value the original piece contained, that the creator intended to deliver.
It is the difference between listening to rain sounds on your computer and standing in the rain with your eyes closed, facing the sky and feeling the water hit your face.
A lot of ideas come from your head. Some come from your throat, some from your gut and others from your heart.
Then there are those choicest few ideas that come from the void. They come from nothingness, a place you can’t trace within or without. They come uninvited. These ideas feel beyond your capabilities. These are the ones you can’t claim to own.
They come from grace, and they choose you. These can’t be chased, or extracted from a formula.
They set your soul and every cell in your body on fire when they arrive.
And when they do, they will teach you the true meaning of excitement, the kind of wonder a child knows for the first time when their nerves have not been marred by pain or sin, and have the sanctity of a full emotional spectrum and sensitivities.
Science and art are yin and yang. The yoga of the body and the mind.
Nice dude! Now onto the next one.. 😎