Creativity needs The Crazy: A cowardly approach.

It was Monday night, and as all Monday nights, I had the objective of closing the door to the garage.

A dark, humid, garage, a place that no light sources are curious to look at, and a big, yet fragile wooden door yet unlocked, opened to the max, hidden behind the fixed panels on it's side, as playing non-existence.

A garage after all... so I closed the door, key-to-lock, lock-to-place, me-to-bed, asking myself nothing about that common situation.

Long had passed since the last time I imagined a monster.


A week later, same quest, but something had change.

Now, it had been three days since it started again, that feeling of creativity, of curiosity, of being able to imagine strongly all the enjoyable scenarios you normally aren't allowed in what we call "real life".

Now, I could again meditate with a smile at my face and a self-made movie occupying a no-space at my forefront.

Now, I could again design weird games based on similarities between Apples and Asses.

Now, I could again turn into an unbelievable coward in front of that opened door, looking at the deep, deep stomach of that garage where monsters and demons have been trying to surprise me since I was a child, waiting for the moment I expose my back to launch their fatal blow.

That day, I laughed.

After I closed the door in a forcefully slow pace, my ethereal self running in a haste, of course, but I laughed.

After I passed throught the jailed window of the basement, vividly imagining that something was going to break throught it and grab my legs, but I laughed.

And I laughed because, from my new perspective and knowledge, this experience had taught me something.



Long has the world being talking about creative people. All kind of geniuses, mathematicians, philosophers, artists mostly, who always seem to have a lot of illogical and uncommon behaviours and habits, inherent oddities.

Being normal examples on twisted minds Van Gogh, Beethoven or Gaudi, with many others helping to fill whole books with fun facts about their crazyness, one can't help but ask himself: It is necessary The Crazy to be creative?

Well, as far as I know, no, not really,


it is the other way round.


The other night, I was scared, scared by something that wasn't there, clearly imagining it as almost real and material. I was curious about this reaction, mostly because I had not been scared in a long, long time, and I wanted to know why was that, given that I'm constantly exposed to situations that might would have scared me in the past.

Or maybe I just wanted to rationalize an excuse to recover my lost manliness.

Either way, I made it work taking my now usual approach to problems, language psychology:


Under this light, I define creativity as: Capacity to explore (imagine) the highest number of outcomes a given situation may have, in the most coherent way possible.

Given that everything a human being understand are symbols created out of perceptual stimuli (senses and emotions), "the most coherent way possible" needs, by force, to incorporate the most vivid stimuli, that is, haunt you with images, emotions, smells, sounds... trying to convince you that the situation is real, so the simulation is succesful and you can imagine what could be done in that situation to reach the best outcome.

My guess is that, as we are mainly machines of problem solving, and we are always taking decisions based on the variables we know (or think we know), we all, in some point, get to the beginning of the "crazy" scenarios, but only when someone is being creative he is able to communicate the possible problems to themselves in such a strong way that they get trapped into the simulation. They get to imagine a new world of outcomes forcing their own suspension of disbelief.

Ironically, and going to extremes, crazy people, who we normally think about as "inconsistent minds", can only be that much crazy if they are capable of being extremely consistent in their internal language.

It is well known, too, that strong internal language, and entusiasm and belief in an idea, is contagious beyond limits, so it is a no-brainer that a lot of artists, whose job at the end is guiding you throught any form of experience (convince you/transmit what they feel and think), are considered crazy by their own merits.


So!

Next time you poo your pants in front of a darkened corridor, cheer up!, you are a highly influential human being in that moment!

Wihich is useless because you are alone.

And you smell bad.



Or well, let's say all of this is bad science and just go with "Humans like to be scared".

Happy door slamming!