Dot connectors

Making life more-ish

There was this baby on the tube in London once, sitting in a stroller, bundled into one of those furry playsuits that have a hood with little ears on it. They had a box of Smarties and had been dexterously plucking out one at a time while watching the people all around. At the same time, the toddler was kicking their foot. The foot had a tiny polka-dotted Wellie on it and every time the baby kicked their foot, the Wellie came off a little more.

At some point, the child became aware that something was going on with the foot and looked down to see the Wellie half off. They pulled it off entirely. Now they had a box of Smarties in one hand and a dotty Wellie in the other. I watched them look from hand to hand and – sometimes, in rare, beautiful moments, you can see the machinations of another’s mind – I knew what was going to happen next.

The child poured the Smarties into the boot, dropped the empty box beside them in the stroller, and proceeded to pick Smarties out the Wellie, while they continued with their people-watching.

This struck me as a highly intelligent solution to several problems. Getting the boot back on was – apart from pointless to a child – physically challenging, whereas dumping the Smartie box to free up a hand would be easy. Access to the Smarties was made simpler because the boot’s mouth could accommodate an entire little hand, while the Smartie box only allowed a thumb and forefinger into its opening.

A dotty life: this ‘garden’ was part of an exhibition called A Dream I Dreamed by the artist Yayoi Kusama.

In a book called On Creativity, the physicist David Bohm sets out to try and understand creativity by distinguishing those actions that are rote, familiar and mechanical – and those that are creative.

Habit makes us inattentive. A fundamental requirement for breaking out of ingrained ways is to nurture new ways of seeing. He writes this:

‘…real perception that is capable of seeing something new and unfamiliar requires that one be attentive, alert, aware, and sensitive. In this frame of mind, one does something (perhaps only to move the body or handle an object), and then one notes the difference between what actually happens and what is inferred from previous knowledge. From this difference, one is led to a new perception or a new idea that accounts for the difference. And this process can go on indefinitely without beginning or end, in any field whatsoever.’

To watch a small child – whether they’re transferring colourful sweeties into a colourful boot or finding a dishcloth and tootling over to the washing machine to open its door and put the cloth inside – is to see how creativity works. Creativity observes, it makes connections, it has ideas, and then it takes action.

I haven’t written poetry for a long, long time. There’s more than one reason, but the reason I always blame first – and it’s justified – is because I’ve stopped ‘living poetically’. This silly phrase came into my head one day when I became aware that I can write poetry when there is a softness in my senses that allows the world to penetrate in a certain surprising way.

Sometimes I can’t easily activate that softness. An image might surprise me and entrance me, but I do nothing with it. I take no action. It’s like the first part of creativity – observation – has entered a dark corridor and bounced off the end wall, without taking any exits to adjacent rooms. Dead end.

The softness of ‘living poetically’ might be, using this image, a kind of light then, that leads you away from dead ends.

Creativity seems to me to be perception plus action which together illuminate. A torch shone under a bed; a split dioptre lens bringing two focal distances onto the same plane. It’s magnification. Echo. Reverb. Pattern.

The softness, the ‘poetic life’ does not have to do with not having time. I produced both of my poetry collections during times of extreme stress and under ridiculous time constraints, but during periods when I chose to live poetically.

The softness has to do with something I choose, or choose not to, activate. It’s a conscious rejection of habitual response or rote behaviour, and a decision to act on new insights.

It’s easier, in some ways, to not live poetically. It means I burn food less often; I strain my brain less often. I have more time because I don’t have to spend my leisure hours fiddling with a poem only about seventeen people are ever going to read.

By not living poetically, I avoid being rejected. I don’t have people clicking their tongues at me, the way the mother of the Smartie tot did when she discovered the boot off and the sweeties inside it.

But just getting through a boring adult day without having made anything new or marvelling at something familiar for suddenly seeming amazing or being pleased for having solved a problem in an amusing way seems like such a dull way to live.  

Bohm again:

‘What, then, is the creative state of mind, which so few have been able to be in? As indicated earlier, it is, first of all, one whose interest in what is being done is wholehearted and total, like that of a young child. With this spirit, it is always open to learning what is new, to perceiving new differences and new similarities, leading to new orders and structures, rather than always tending to impose familiar orders and structures in the field of what is seen.’

I want a wholehearted life. A total life. Not a paltry, predictable one. I could be wrong about this, but I only know of this single one I currently have and I want to cram its corners with the loot my senses bring home to me every day. I want to make new things from that loot for no reason other than that it distracts me from my mortality. I want to keep creating this one life until the door slams – or creaks – shut.

I want to eat Smarties out of my Wellies until I die.