Crackpotting

"Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way."
William James

The imagination is a place where things happen that don’t. 

This is because creativity does not follow the rules of the hard world, only the laws of the mind and heart.  Whereas logical thinking is always this or that, yes or no, one or the other…creativity relies on ifs and maybes and this-is-crazy-buts.  Innovation involves newness more than knowness.  In this realm, useful fictions are often more helpful than facts, and futzing and fudging take precedence over focusing and finalizing.

Not everyone is comfortable with this kind of lunacy; most people want clarity and consistency.  But creative folks crave jinglejangle.  They are both/anders rather than either/orers.  Anyone willing to follow their muse is willing to leave reality behind, at least for brief flights of fancy.

That is why artists and scientists and other creative types are often seen as nut cases because, in fact, they are.  Not crazy, just loony.  Comfortable with crackpot ideas, haywiring, and the half-baked.  They carry hunchpails not lunch pails.  They have an ability to doubt the obvious and a talent for accepting the inane, at least as a mental exercise.  The scholar Erasmus said that the highest form of bliss was a certain degree of folly and this certainly applies to creative efforts.  Nonsense over common sense, the quirk over the quark, the weird rather than the wired; it all amounts to a kind of intentional conjury that can lead to new insights.

At the turn of the last century, Henri Poincare was the great master of physics, the man who knew the most and saw the limits in Newtonian mechanics.  Poincare even came close to developing a theory of relativity…but he didn't.  It took a young 26 year-old upstart like Einstein, not vested in old patterns, to come up with a revolutionary view of things.

It was Einstein who posed questions that other people thought were nuts.  Thought experiments like imagining what a beam of light look like if you were traveling alongside it at the speed of light.  Or how people traveling at different speeds would experience time.  No one, including Einstein himself, had an answer for that.  It was new kind of question, not meant to be resolved with an answer but used as a starting point for an inquiry. 

In the same way, Tesla’s loopy experiments with X-rays and Dali’s offbeat surrealist fantasies seemed off the wall batso…until they didn't.  In other words, we need a little madness in the Ingenarium.

This is not to put down sanity, always admirable.  Intelligence is the grasp of useable knowledge and a key to understanding.  But craziness is another kind of key.  Not just reading but reading outside the lines.  Not just memorizing facts but locating good drivel.  Not the right answers but the best questions with no answers.  Not simply which is true and which is false but how it may be both.  The physicist Heinz R. Pagels said: “The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer.”

Like the engineering student who was asked to come up with a levitation device and, thinking loony, came up with a belt that strapped a cat to a piece of buttered toast.  Since cats always land on their feet and toast always lands buttered side down, he had a hovering device with no moving parts.  Completely crackpot of course, but then you start wondering about combining materials that might have counterforces acting against each other, like magnetic fields, and even cat/toast levitation might prove fruitful.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to creativity is normalcy itself, being stuck in a mental rut.  This is the safe space where innovation dies.  As the old saying goes: the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.  Same habits, same influences, same old same old.  A runaround of sane approaches and solutions.  Creativity, though, is more about shots in the dark, the leapfrogging of facts, and off-the-wall solutions.

For this reason, crackpotting as a kind of talent for the oddball goes into our Ingenarium.

Craziness, haywiring, sheer blunderment.  After all, the ridiculous is only ridiculous just before it makes perfect sense.