Clicks and Creative Manifestos

After Patricks class on the creative process last week, I began researching creative manifestos, I found each are personal opinions reflecting its own time, its habits, its rituals. Many explore the ties between art, politics, truth, liberation, sexuality. One even called for the abolishment of pasta – which, as a half-Italian, I have strong thoughts about (turned out to be propaganda for fascism, enough said.)

Today, many people see things in black and white, certain of our own reality. But what if there’s another dimension?

I’m interested in the space in between, the grey area – some boundless existence that only happens between A to B. I imagine it resembles the first-ever video game ‘pong’, the line on the screen where the square ball crosses from one paddle to the other, and for a mere millisecond the ball seems to have disappeared – that’s the sweet spot.

As I was researching, I read that Anaïs Nin once described in D.H. Lawrence’s work as escaping the clinical or scientific and giving “instinct a language”.

I interpret this as those certain moments that just ‘click’. These are the moments that feel just right, an alignment, an intimacy, an outer-body moment.

We each have our own version of clicks. One friend described it like sensing where the mushrooms are when he goes foraging.

I feel it when…

Watching a dance that’s perfectly timed to the music,
Or listening to a joke as it lands,
Or getting lost in a painting,
Or taking a great photograph that happened entirely by accident,
Or, especially, when cracking an idea.

So perhaps the point of a manifesto is to capture these personalised moments before they pass. And rather than spending most of our time one side of the line or the other, we are in constant pursuit of disappearing over the line.

It’s a knowing, and here I am trying to bottle that feeling.

So here it is, Patrick, my very own 100 words, (you did promise a free book for a creative manifesto, so yes, I’m invested):

I find, often the thoughts in my head lose their meaning when spoken. The beauty lies in undefined existence – the fleeting, the in-between. My mind moves from A to Z, I learnt to map the dots for others to understand, but perhaps the magic lives in the grey, where the lines are blurred. We all exist between worlds – mine include British and Italian, logic and feeling – and I’ve learned that uncertainty is its own art. In a world of binary thinking desperate for clarity, I choose the murkiness, the surreal, the unknown. I stay with the trouble, treading water in the liminal, because that’s where transformation begins and creativity is found. Only then, it clicks.

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