Leaping

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

Colette

As a practical matter, creativity depends on a firm footing in the real world of making things.

The challenge, the research, the insight, the plan, the construction...all of that has to move towards a realizable goal.  Otherwise we are just wishing.  But behind it all is a leap of faith…the belief that the project will work in the world just as well as it does in the imagination.  Or maybe even better.

To make a new thing is to leap into the unknown with only a concept to keep you aloft.  Artists and designers get used to this as a habit.  Or, if they are lucky, they have this kind of trust as an innate intuition.

That is why we have to include leaping in the Ingenarium. 

Leap before you look.

Which brings us to Abbas Ibn Firnas.

Never heard of him?  No surprise.  He is not on the A-list of history’s makers even though an airport in Iraq and a crater on the Moon are named for him.  Yet his life’s work represents something essential, even quintessential, in the dreams of all creative people.

Abbas Ibn Firnas was a 9th century Berber inventor and scientist who lived in the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba in Al-Andalus, an area that is now part of Spain.  By the early 820s, a new Caliph named Abd al-Rahman II, like any enlightened monarch, began to assemble a talented group of thinkers and dreamers to his court.  Among them were an innovative and influential Iraqi musician called Ziryab who fostered the development of the sciences, and the young astronomer and poet Abbas Ibn Firnas.

Like Da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin, Ibn Firnas explored a variety of projects in chemistry, physics, and astronomy.  He designed star tables, built a planetarium, and invented a chain of rings that could be used to display the motions of the planets and stars.  He wrote poetry.  He designed his own highly accurate water clock, devised a way to make glass from sand, and invented a process for cutting rock crystal that allowed quartz to be cut more cheaply in Spain rather than being sent abroad.

In other words, and also like Da Vinci or Franklin, Ibn Firnas was one of those amazing makers and doers who inspire all of us to apply our skills to the whole wide world and all of its fascinations.  But the capstone to this stellar career did not occur until the year 875 when, at the ripe age of 65, Ibn Firnas designed, built, and tested his own flying machine.  Shades of Da Vinci again...but keep in mind that this was 600 years before the Renaissance. 

The device that Ibn Firnas built was really just a simple glider with little relationship to the graceful birds he so admired and studied.  Yet he had enough faith in it that he promptly launched himself from a mountaintop towards a large crowd amid great fanfare.  The flight went well except for the landing part.  He injured his back so badly that many scholars think it may have affected his health and caused his death 12 years later.  Historians who have studied accounts of the flight think that he probably did not pay enough attention to the way birds use their tails to adjust their landings.  His glider had no tail and this accounted for a disastrous touchdown. 

Nonetheless, it is the inspiration, the attempt, the hope that remains with us.  It is his leap of faith that we should keep in mind as we present our sketches, introduce our projects, or even jump off our own creative mountains.  Planning, working, re-working…all necessary parts of the creative endeavor.  But there is always a moment, usually when our work has to be introduced to the public, that calls for a bold, risky leap of faith.

(Note for the Ingenarium regarding bird tails: creative work is about trust in the making of things and a leap of faith too...but don’t forget to sweat the details.)