The Creative Act

I am my mother’s illegitimate son, the only happy result of a tryst with a Notary in the region of Florence. Back then, in 1452 things were different, people cared about the places they lived and paid closer attention their surroundings. I am profoundly disappointed that this has altered. Some change is good (I have been a driving force of much over time), of course, but other change is inherently worrisome. These are my notes to the future for any who care to read them. I must write them out because to remain silent is against my nature and because we the people of the past have a great deal to teach to any willing to listen. Lew Welch proclaimed, “Speak old man, thy wisdom’s meant for me,” to him and those like him is this letter addressed.

I developed many ideas over the course my lifetime. Some say I was the first to conceptualize the helicopter and the tank, both of which I am today not proud, but at the time seemed like fantastic and wonderful things whose applicability were unclear. I also established the idea of Solar power and pondered what it meant that man could harness the sun (I thought a deep relationship with nature would ensue from such an endeavor)…the technology as it turns out was nearly 500 years away and would foster no meaningful relationship. People of the future think I am brilliant for having these thoughts. They find me to have been original and find my mind to be special. These notes are to clarify that my specialty was in taking the time to write what I knew and thought.

You see, it all started when I was but a child learning to draw. In an act of inherited knowledge I grasped hieroglyphic use of drawing. I came to the conclusion that I ought to always use words to draw my thoughts, cataloguing them so that in the future I would remember what it was like to be a boy. I am not sure how I came to that conclusion but it seems to have been a real stroke of serendipity. I am sure however, where my “famous” thoughts came from. Whoever said “who knows where thoughts come from?” meant it as a rhetorical question, but that only demonstrates how little they knew about what they were writing of.

One day I was reading an old work of Plato’s (still fresh in my day) and I noticed that there was an aspect no one focused on. Do you realize that Socrates often visited pomegranate trees? At the time I looked up to him and though of him as a role model, I wanted to be like him so I was attempting to copy everything he did. Part of doing this was visiting pomegranate plantations near my village. I spent many hours sitting beneath them. I took to drawing scenes of all sorts on the ground. I could pass whole days doing this, I would like to say lost in thought but the reality is that I was lazily passing the hours in a thoughtless trance of sorts.

One day I drew the face of Socrates as I pictured him. I began to sweat as I did this. I became very excited and working on one of his eyes accidentally dug a small hole in the ground and broke my favorite drawing stick. I was very saddened by the break and my blood flew through my system as I panicked in response to the sweating. As I calmed down I noticed something that transformed my life. The little scratch upon the face of the earth held within it a great secret. I was fascinated by what it contained and took great effort to understand what had come my way. It was to reveal many more to me over the course of my life.

On this first visit to me it revealed the concept of plate tectonics. I cannot describe to a cynic how this happened or scientifically explain what transpired in that plantation on that day. Only that somehow the earth spoke to me, maybe into my ears, perhaps my eyes saw it clearly or maybe my hand could feel the idea through the stick. Regardless, I knew the theory and began to write some notes about it. I trusted my instincts and the earth. As it turned my theory was not all that far off from the best the future scientists could offer using all their equipment, they could not predict the timing of an earthquake any better than I.

The reason I am telling you about this is that many of my ideas were spawned in this manner and I believe many of Socrates’ questions came to him in this way. It is not obvious in the book because he never asked his students about the secret knowledge found at the base of a tree, perhaps he was guarding the secret because in his time many would have had enough faith to follow him and in dong so may have ruined the magic. Today I do not fear this will happen, even in my time there were few who would be willing to listen to a scratch, today it seems there will be very little interest in this portion my notes because people are more concerned with destructive powers that are “financially viable” such as Tanks rather than things of beauty or innate utility like the affect of the smell of flowers on the brain.

So I write out my truths and thought and risk ridicule on the part of the faithless, I do so in the hope that there will be readers open to a renewal of a very old way of seeing. With you that hold the faith to understand this letter remains the hope of the future generations. Care for it well and listen.