Take Care

“God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.”
Samuel Butler

So there we have it – or at least a start – on our Ingenarium.

A creativity whizbang designed as a self-contained ecosystem – like a desktop terrarium – to foster creativity, invention, innovation, enginuity.

We have put in some of the basic ingredients like leaps of the imagination, a talent for projectivity, some wishcraft, a stealmill, dogged persistence, a love of questioning, a tolerance for mistakes, a desire to make things, a hunchpail, and so on.  Dumb brilliance, craftiness, playfulness, clever forgetting, hard work, practice and more.  We have even remembered to include that most precious of ingredients…pure unadulterated whacked out luck.

But even so, the device is incomplete.  

We have yet to put in a number of more complex issues of the mind that affect creative work.  For instance, various styles of intelligence have to match the work in the sense that architects tend to be dimensional thinkers and musicians think tonally.  Also, modes of consciousness have to match the work so that playwrights ought to be socially aware and poets sensually focused.  The structure of feelings should support the insights needed; cartoonists have to think funny.  Personality factors matter too…conviction has to overcome doubt, desire has to triumph over anguish.  Not to mention levels of intentionality, varieties of disappointment, and belief systems which all have to align with the tasks at hand.  And we have yet to consider inescapable influences from the outside world like political restraints and freedoms, social controls or liberties, family support or lack thereof, whichever would work.

Also, what we have added so far are mostly attitudes, practices, habits.   Creative processes and effective ways of thinking and doing.  But creativity relies on actually making stuff so any complete Ingenarium would also supply the raw materials of the work…words, lines, shapes, colors, sounds, forms.  We would have to include every single kind of technology we can muster.

But what we have so far is enough to get started for a number of reasons.  

First, the Ingenarium is not a machine, it is an ecosystem.  It is designed to grow.  Unlike a machine, which is fixed in its form and function, this is a habitat for innovation and as habits feed on other habits and skills build on skills, the creative potential in it, just as in the human variant, will evolve and change.  We have simply put in the basic ingredients to begin the process.

Secondly, the Ingenarium will never be truly finished because creativity itself never is.  Creativity is not a thing, it is a process.  It is elastic, expansive, adaptive.  There will always be new factors to consider based on changes in the material world, the evolution of interacting systems, new technologies, and our own view of our place in the universe, our capabilities and our limits.

Finally, our Ingenarium is also not automatic.  It will not run hummingly all by itself.  Like any dynamic system, it will have to be tended.  We have to maintain it.  We will have make sure that there is constant new input of all kinds; we will have to ensure that nothing like dogma clogs it up so that all the ingredients are given a chance to blossom and grow.  We will have to be vigilant against any kind of outside force – political, religious, or social – that tries to choke off the air or suck out the nutrients.  We will have to watch out for the weeds of despair and self-destruction that plague any creative desire.  We will have to make sure that complacency and mindless acceptance do not take hold.

All of that sounds like a lot of work, and it is.  But to be caught up in the passion of creativity is to be willing to do what has to be done to make it work.

Incomplete and undone for sure, yet what we have so far has promise and promise is what drives us and drives the Ingenarium.

So let us step back and let the mix work its magic. 

In other words, let’s see what happens next…