Stopwatch

“Genius is nothing but a great appetite for patience.” 
Georges Louis Leclerc De Buffon

We really should put a stopwatch into the Ingenarium.

Not the timepiece that first comes to mind, but a different kind of mechanism….something that forces us to stop and watch. 

We think of creativity, correctly, as all about making, producing, generating.  Creative people are always working on something because there is always something new to work on.  But to be innovative, we also have to be aware of what there is out there so that we can change it and make it better.  And to be aware involves watching and looking and listening. 

In others words, we need time away from the studio, the lab, or the computer.  We need time to observe and absorb. 

Yogi Berra said that you can observe a lot by just watching and we might add that you can also hear a lot just by listening and see a lot by just looking.  The focus here is a kind of receptive mode in which we can sponge up the world.  This is crucial because what we notice there can become the raw material for our projectivity.  But this does not mean being idle or lazy.  Instead, it is an active effort to induce rather than produce, to take in rather than put out.  And of course, like most aspects of creativity, it takes work.

Darwin began the explorations that led to his theory of evolution by noticing the slight differences in the wings of sparrows.  He was a student of variations in form.  Da Vinci noted the patterns of shape and color in urine stains on alley walls, observing the visual impact of accidental imagery.  He was a keen observer of visual effects.  The poet Langston Hughes listened carefully to patter, cadence, and slang and this influenced his poems.  Merce Cunningham studied the way ordinary people move to enliven his choreography. 

What we need in the Ingenarium, therefore, is a willingness to stand back and be receptive.  To note and notice.  Open eyes and ears are a good place to start but a few pieces of technology would help too.  A pencil and a notebook or sketchbook, invaluable to writers and artists, help to record observations.  A camera or an audio recorder can work too, or any kind of tool that can enhance our looking and listening and force us to pay attention to what there is.  As an example, a standard assignment in photography classes is to walk around your city and capture as many faces as you can find – either designed or imagined - in the architecture and environment.  You can do the same with numbers or shadows or circles.  An audio recorder can achieve the same thing in terms of the music of motion, the rhythms of the industrial world, the melodies of speech.  These exercises may not lead directly to new work and the goal is not to think in terms of a final product.  Instead, they are disciplines that allow us to pay better attention, to take a break in the making and immerse ourselves in the world.  The goal is to look more, hear better, notice and note.

And practice patience.  Patience is already a natural part of the Ingenarium since everything takes time.  But here it allows us to experience times in between bursts of energy when we simple wait and watch.  And perhaps even shut up for a change, fight the urge to purge (verbally, that is).  There is a saying in Yiddish that suggests:  “Better to be quiet and thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”  That’s good advice but quiet and observation serve another purpose too.  They get us out of ourselves and our incessant tinkering and thinkering.  They allow us to let the world in and that is critical to creative work because it tells us what needs to change.  The stopwatch being included here would force us into that mode of thinking.