| In
the previous section we read about the intellectual lions, those who look
on themselves as experts, tough minded and rigorous logicians, serious
professional thinkers who know all there is to know about their discipline
and need lessons from nobody. In contrast, Solomon now describes another
characteristic of the genius mind — one that is tuned into sensory
experience.
Sensitize
Your Imagination
Notice, for example, the deliberate repetition, in the first line of this
section, of the phrase you have ravished my heart and the allusions later
to the senses of smell, touch and taste. The stress here is on non-verbal
thinking and the need to sensitize the imaginations to other sources of
information and ideas. Creative individuals actually try to get the "feel"
of a project or problem, to discern its "colour", "taste"
and "shape", silly as this may seem to people of a more rigid
frame of mind, and to explore and experience the human and emotional dimensions
of the situation.
Open
Your Eyes to Genius
According to Leonardo da Vinci: “The average person looks without
seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without
tasting and inhales without awareness of colour or fragrance, and talks
without thinking”.
Biographer David Weiss records the following advice that was given to
August Rodin, sculptor of “The Thinker”, by one of his teachers:
"It is up to you to infuse her with your own vision . . . Drawing
consists not only of what is set down, but of what is not . . . Short
brushstrokes, long brushstrokes, they don’t matter, as long as you
have sensitiveness in your eyes. Your eyes must act as intermediary between
you and the subject . . . Let your drawing flow, Rodin . . . Use your
eyes. There is an art to seeing; to see well is the most difficult thing
of all, it requires genius".
Rodin’s teacher continued: " ‘There are two types of
students they wish on me. One type is the clerk, who wants to make straight
lines, although there are no straight lines in nature, who wants to draw
according to a rule, although there are no rules in life . . . Then there
are the second type, who are rare, and where they come from you never
know, who, a la Rembrant, try to use their eyes, try to see their own
way. Most artists see through their family, their teachers, their masters,
the society in which they exist. But the second type, a la Rembrandt,
learn to ignore these things and to see through their own eyes’
. . . August was in despair. He saw so little, so badly".
Reading
Hieroglyphics
“No arrogant man”, said Constable, “was ever permitted
to see nature in all her beauty . . . the art of seeing nature is a thing
almost as much to be acquired as the art of reading Egytian hieroglyphics”
In
“On Not Being Able to Paint”, Marion Milner describes how
she developed a “free” method of painting, rather than attempting
to simply reproduce reality in photographic detail – saying: “I
concentrated on the mood of the scene, the peace and softness of the colouring,
the gentle curves of the Downs, and began to scribble in charcoal, letting
hand and eye do as they liked”. In this way, she found that something
of value emerged, sooner or later, each time she sat down to “doodle”
and allowed here inner feelings and images to flow out.
Savour Your Senses
These great thinkers are preoccupied with emotion, with beauty, joy, love,
childish delight, day-dreaming, awe, wonder and curiosity — with
letting their whole being be ravished and lifted to its creative heights
by music and the glorious beauty of natural things — a leaf, a tree,
the sparkle of a drop of dew, an ant, the paws of a dog, the joy of breathing
in the morning air, the fragrance of a flower, the touch of the hand,
the taste of a piece of toast.
It
was said of physics genius Richard Feynman that he found a wonderful joy
in trying to understand nature and find out how it worked at the most
fundamental level of quantum mechanics. In "The Beat of a Different
Drum", biographer Jagdish Mehra says: "He could almost feel
it with his hands. He liked to play the drums, so when he was doing physics
he was always doing something with his hands. He liked to wave his arms
and make sweeping gestures."
Many engineers and inventors, likewise, find that holding and handling
materials helps their creativity -- and as we saw earlier, artists often
sit at their easel, breathing in the smell of the paints and idly playing
with their brushes in search of inspiration.
Writing
Poetry
Giving advice on writing inspired poetry, British poet Ted Hughes says:
"Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think
laboriously, as if your were working out mental arithmetic. Just look
at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it.
When you do, the words look after themselves like magic . . . You keep
your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste, your touch, your whole being
on the thing you are turning into words . . . So you keep going as long
as you can, then look back and see what you have written . . . You will
have captured a spirit, a creature."
Entering
People’s Lives
Great writers have the empathy of imagination to enter and understand
people’s lives and experiences. Balzac said: “Listening to
people talking I could enter into their lives, feel their tattered clothes
on my back, walk with my feet in their shoes; their desires, their needs,
all passed into my soul . . . It was the dream of a man awake.”
The
great John Keats, similarly, said: “When I am in a room with people
. . . then not myself goes home; but the identity of every one in the
room begins to press upon me. I am in a very little time annihilated”.
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