the impossible distance between each hop of a skipping stone

I don't really remember the finer details that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions brought up, but there are two points from it that seem to float through my head every couple days: the majority of science is backfilling and verifying the knowledge-base that larger discoveries create, and large discoveries themselves do not happen often, but when they do they completely shift what we see as being an absolute truth about the world. People once looked into the sky to see the sun and assumed it circled us, whereas now we look to the fixed (relative to us) star of our solar system and know that we whirl around it with the rhythm of a cosmic boom-a-rang. This was a moment of intellectual revolution, which is all the more impressive when we gauge it against the contemporary ideas of the time (another point brought up by Kuhn, the author of SOSR, that book mentioned up above. Which I now, looking back at that acronym, have the compulsion to spell out, but I will restrain myself and waste this space instead in this other fashion.). I think comparing this process of scientific process to that of creative output/thinking sheds light onto some of the frustrations and underlying systems at play in my brain. I will verbally stumble through some of this now.

Having a great idea is one of the things I look forward to most. Not just any idea, but an idea that rockets to the front of my brain and bangs into my skull like cowboys ringing dinner bells. Maybe this idea is about something to build. Or paint. Or write. Whatever it is it breathes and stands on its own, chest out, holding a flag for some nation I've never seen before, but know that I want nothing more than to be a citizen of. To flesh out the characteristics of this idea maybe takes a week. Or a month. Or a year. But eventually the proud diplomat is fleshed out for the thing it is. And there is a lull that follows. A boundary (or tower?) has been placed in my mind whose foundation and cement is ground from the hands of this one idea. I can stand at this place, find it easily in my mind, and look out over the land that it gives vantage to. And with this view comes a period of topography. Walking the ground created by this idea and plotting. Measuring rivers. Taking in the rise and fall of fields with the squiggly line of a contour drawing. This period can be incredibly frustrating. It can make me feel depressed and lonely and as if my head is in the process of checking boxes and filling in forms. I can loose patience with the process of mapping the area that my ideas have laid bare for me. And then one day I stumble on a piece of rubble (maybe a contemporary of this idea's land… maybe just a piece of some other history risen from eroded soil) and the land of this idea is forever changed. Dimensions are suddenly different. Or maybe this landscape doesn't change, but it is added to, and a new tower is built suddenly allowing the sight of a long range of young mountains in the distance, their peaks like torn blue jeans and loose dangling cigarettes. Angry and young. 

There is a rhythm to this process that I sometimes forget to respect. A process that is continued and when followed with diligence the path that allows for us to create the most complete picture. I used to think art had a certain unique beauty in the fact that I could throw a stone deep into the blackness of the mind and come to some conclusion with no ties to any previous idea. Art doesn't require proof in a formal sense. Art can create an island floating gloriously in its unlikely discovery. But even in this, I forget the duty of the day-to-day. Of backfilling the ideas of this discovery, otherwise I will end up with an infinite mind full of small towers and islands, versus an infinite mind full of swatches of cloth and honey.

we never became who we are. and some other tangents and life experiences.

There's a lot of takes on the Coming of Age story. The moment that one transitions from childhood to adulthood; the moment a person becomes themselves in some important way. I've decided I don't really like this idea; I think it is rude to the process that is the majority of ones life. The simple fact is that the one thing that has changed consistently since the moment I popped (dropped?) into this world is the amount of time I have been alive. That's just a simple little (true) statement. My personality and how people view me is just an averaging of my behavior (with a couple outliers thrown in there for good measure) with a weight applied due to the fallacy of memory. I am not taking this moment to discuss human development, or act as if humans as a biological system don't go through some startling changes in the first couple decades of their time on this Earth (small tangental geek out). I fully respect the massive transformation that the structure of the brain undertakes during this time and how through it's various imprints creates dispositional representations that are triggered through emotion, semantic markers, chemical pathways and other means in order to massively influence my process of decision making and action in the world. Most of the time this is all going on with me being completely clueless of why I am actually doing something, and most of these sub-routines are shaped early on in life/development. 

A small aside on my current beliefs concerning the Mind and the troubling Self.

I've always thought about consciousness as residing outside of the body in a type of plane; a field, like gravity. I took my line of thinking from a very amateur view of physics, with consciousness being a sort of probability wave created as an emergent behavior of my neural network. There's all kinds of conscious states that I could be in, but at each moment, the wave collapses in a particular way and I'm brought into a particular conscious state. I suppose I saw this conscious plane sort of drifting through my brain; a bit like when I used to get X-rays taken of my teeth at the dentist and they'd stick these plastic prongs in my ears and pull my head up to keep me still. Consciousness I see like those pins. Or maybe it's more like peaking out of a manhole cover where consciousness is the street suddenly crashing into ones head from all sides. But I've been forced recently to take into account the body into this whole equation, and how it plays into ones conception of self. At the start of it all, a human brain was a tool to keep the body alive -- help the body find food, people to have sex with, spot animals that would kill it -- and it would stand to reason that the feedback my body is still giving my brain now about my environment, has as much to do with who I believe I am as are my love for playing basketball or looking over large mountain peaks (sidebar: I got jabbed in the eye very hard a few days ago -- my eye was bleeding with my contact getting shoved so far behind my eye that it didn't come back out for a full day -- and I thought that if the doctor told me I was going to go blind, I was going to jump on a plane and fly somewhere that I could look at a range of tall snow-capped mountains. In my head it was a very dramatic movie, with great cinematography: the camera framed me looking out over mountains in Tibet, or some other place that would invoke, superficially of course, a sense of spirituality (in my vision there was a german shepard next to me, which I assume is some subconscious thing where I find them to be the most stoic of the dog breeds) and the scene slowly faded to black. You can clearly see that my daydreams can sometimes be crushingly formulaic and speak to the immense amount of trashy cinema/tv I have consumed). So as before where I saw the mind and self wrapped up in this probability wave flickering around my ears with the intensity of an angry swarm of bees, I now am thinking about it more in a womb-like way, with my body getting in on the action, too. Cradled by consciousness, is how I would put it. I still hold to my probability wave idea, but the action of collapsing is putting on a full outfit of clothes now, opposed to just donning a cap. I'd also like to throw out that the pace of perceived conscious states play heavily into how I perceive the passage of time and how interesting I find myself at a particular moment. I definitely can look at myself and notice I am being particularly boring, with my consciousness ticking away like an old grandfather clock while a whole family sits on poorly upholstered couches, in silence.
Though these structures are most drastically impacted and formed during our early years, they are anything but permanent. Brain damage aside (this guy seems to always come up during these discussions) the Mind, and self, really comes down to the feedback loop between brain and body. The self rises from that beautiful little ferris wheel that evolution has set up for us. And so what bugs me -- and I admit, it actually pisses me off -- about when people make comments about people becoming who they are, is that it seems to throw away the fact that we are continually becoming who we are; it is a comment that throws away the fact that when we show up in the present there is already a new "us" waiting in the wings. The feedback loop that is us, is always happening.

Karry Mullis describes in his book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field about how he was able to turn on and off a lightbulb attached to circuit that used his skins conductance as a switch. He found that when he thought of naked women that his skin conductance would increase. Think of a naked woman, light on. Think of grocery shopping, light off. Skin conductance is a pretty base response in the body. It actually has been shown that a persons skin conductance changes before they make a decision, indication that their body already has an idea of which decisions are better or worse for them. That Karry could manipulate this through imaging certain visuals, is maybe not so impressive. But there's other examples of people tackling their deeper set processes. Take for example Vipassana meditation and the idea of sankaras. A sankara is described as a cycle of thought that you continually find yourself in that does not have beneficial outcomes. Through repeated exposure, sankaras become more deeply engrained in our psyche, making them harder to escape. One part of Vipassana mediation is that through meditation we can learn to unburden ourselves from these sankaras (note: I've tried one of these courses exactly once, so this description may be about 50% accurate, and gloss over many things. Also my aunt coincidently just sent me this link). 

In the first couple decades of my life, a brain has been given to me that allows me a foundation to interact with the world. Some base processes and environmental inputs that set up some beliefs about how my body works in the world. But it is a block of wood, really. It is through living my life that I'm given the opportunity to find what is possible inside of my mind and continually become myself. It's almost as if we are born with a handful of legos. Over the course of some years we learn how they can click on top of each other. What works. What doesn't. How bad it hurts when you step on that one that blends perfectly into the carpet. Then one day comes and we say "Ah, these are legos" and we can suddenly go and start building whatever we want. This point, the launching point, is where I am given the opportunity to learn to be a conduit for myself. It is not the point where I became anything.

there is some truth over there under that sudden feeling that ripples like heat on highways

 

I babble on about truth a lot. I use that word: truth. I throw it around and swing it from my mouth. It seems like such a natural word to sum things up: what we strive for to have be part of the things that are important to us. If someone asks me what I find pleasing about a piece of art, I will answer "truth". If someone asks me my purpose in life, I will answer "truth". 

I realize, though, that the word is pretty tainted. It's like "awesome". I've always felt that awesome when used appropriately is a great word; it can be so dialed in to something that elicits not only admiration, but fear and apprehension as well. Unfortunately the sentence "that ______ was/is totally awesome" is a phrase that is heard far too often (I say it. I admit it. I probably even throw a "like" in there for no reason whatsoever.) and it bastardizes what the word can mean at its heart. Words, of course, change based on usage and repeated context so that over time they contain their own histories; their own skeletons in their closets built of letters. 

Truth, as a word, has many skeletons I've come to realize. For instance, people living through the 60's can associate it with a social movement where everyone spoke of The Truth. For me, then, to use the word I need to step aside, shake out all of its pockets, give it a shower, stand it against a wall, and have a little photoshoot. Maybe apply some eyeliner to its tired eyes. I need to pose it and present it for the word I find it to be.

So what do I think of when I think of truth?

I think I first started talking about truth in the context of incompleteness. I've always been drawn to Kurt Godel's theorems of incompleteness, one of which states that any formal theory that contains basic arithmetic, will have statements that it can create, which will be true but unprovable as such. In order to place this unprovable truth inside of the theory, the theory must be encapsulated in a new theory. This new theory, however, will have further unprovable truths, so that we must go on and on, encapsulating till the end of time, never having created a complete theory. For me, I saw this process as the process of being human. If we think of any system as begin analogous to formal theories as laid out in the Godel's theorem, we can think about ourselves as a system (we contain arithmetic, don't we?). And this system, us, has statements that are true but we can't prove. These can be spiritual. These can be about love. These can be selfish. Whatever these statements are, though, we must encapsulate ourselves inside a new self in order to allow that truth to be part of us. We must create constructs -- cultural objects -- to support our truths; to reflect the proof that we have created for ourselves.

In this first look into truth, the word really came to me, I didn't go looking for it. It floated out of the language of the theorem itself, and nestled into my lap; a word dressed as a friendly cat. It lead me to the idea of Truth, the full encapsulation of a theory, as being this thing that we can never touch. We aren't meant to. Truth will always be truth with a lowercase 't' for us. Yet we buttress it over and over again through our lives, hoping to eventually climb the enormous tower it is and look out from the vantage point it provides.

At this point I started to move away from the idea of buttressing and building, since truth is slippery and doesn't really afford continuity in the way these metaphors imply. I started thinking about dimension. Dimension in the way I'm thinking about it, is a portion of a perspective. A single dimension contains a way that we look at the world. We have a dimension for how we treat strangers, a dimension for how we care for a friend, a dimension on our feelings towards pit bulls. At any one particular moment, a moment at the intersection of many dimensions, we have a view of the world with each of the dimensions giving a portion of the perspective we hold. And I think the move towards truth is the continual shifting and broadening of dimension. It is taking the day and turning it a bit to notice the corners you can look around, the flatness that you once saw as being complete (like Flatland itself). 

But dimension in this sense is not how I think of physical dimension, because dimension in this sense means that new dimensions can swallow up or replace entire sets of the dimensional space I am in. As I find new dimensions and build on the truth that I have experienced, these dimensions can make superfluous or unnecessary previous dimensions. I think about it like opening a box and finding my whole childhood in that box. All of it. Or peaking in the fridge and seeing the view from Voyager 1. The pieces added don't have to be smaller than the space that seems to be available for them. Truth has a way of making small spaces larger than any space I have ever been in. Larger than any space it has made itself known.

The ending point of this search for truth in this light, is a point in time were my perspective is dimensionless. Where there is no coordinate system, but just a moment in time that is perfectly smooth. I think about how people who believe in God say that He is love. If I were to believe in a God I would think He should also contain Truth. Perfect and complete. And saying Love is Truth, is something that I can chew on. Because love is something that seems to have rightly occupied humans since they could first stand and look one another in the eye. I also think about other religions where to be awakened or enlightened is the goal that is sought after. To be perfectly present. And this also echoed in the idea of dimensions to me; to cast something completely away is sometimes just the same as being engulfed by it.

Whether it is Love or Presence, I think we all seek Truth. And what we value in our lives, what we love in our lives, what we surround ourselves with in our lives, are those things which bring us closer to truth.

we all pray to something or another

 

I have a friend that I've known since I was in middle school -- I probably knew him before then, but other memories like playing Homeless Bears with my sister (an activity that dictated wandering around like bears, pretending that we were homeless. We were very literal in our naming of activities) has clouded them. Let's call him Mr. Max to hide his identity: MM for short. The thing about MM is that he has the uncanny ability to get me into an argument about what on the surface can be a very mundane topic. A vision: high school Tolo. Tolo, for those uninitiated or being from the East coast (this is not a dig at East coasters, I think the term, however, is a regional one), is a school dance where boys (soon to be men) invite girls (soon to be women) to dinner and a dance. A vision within a vision: MM and me sitting on a deck outside a house, after having picked up our dates, alone, arguing over whether drug testing in the work place should be enforced (side note article here). (A vision within a vision, within a vision: this particular Tolo did not end with either of our dates being even remotely pleased or having a good time. Everyone ordered only appetizers for dinner and I think we asked for the check immediately. We then proceeded to sit in near silence. It was, in fact, one of the more awkward experiences of my life, somehow becoming more awkward in adulthood as I realize how little I grasped the full crushing awkwardness of it during the time; I was probably playing with my silverware the entire time trying to figure out why the number of tines on a fork were decided as they were (this you can read about, of course, at you leisure here).) If I remember correctly he was for it and I was against it. I don't remember our points to back up our positions. What I do remember, in what was one of many (and I mean MANY. I have debated the following with MM at various junctures of my life: The validity of knowledge bases coming from reductionism, the proper placement of a togo coffee lid in relationship to the cup, generalizations versus specifics when creating lines of reasoning, pornography preferences and their meaning, whether people who enjoyed the Waking Life were stupid, the purpose/point of dedicating ones self to something) arguments, is that MM had put in the time to form an opinion WITH FOUNDATION on all of these topics. For instance with the placement of the coffee cup lid -- and I agree with him on this one -- he was quite adamant that the drinking hole be on the opposite side from the cup seam. This was to avoid the very small occurrence of a drop of coffee slipping between the lid and cup due to the space the seam created. 

I would hope that everyone would be as lucky as me to have someone like MM in their life. Because between arguments about brown versus white eggs in grocery stores, there were obviously (see list above) questions that had a weight that mattered to me. Here are a couple things that thinking about MM bring to mind and I just feel like writing about them:

Our Binary Selfs

It strikes me how often arguments can have two very distinct positions. Sides as they are. And not just arguments, but most thinking that we do tends to be along the lines of negative/positive, front/back, for/against. It's as if we have a massive coin collection of our ideas, showing the face that we align with. I think one of the reasons that MM could always draw me into a debate about most anything (see: the rise of fixie bikes) is that he didn't really collect coins. Instead of a binary thought process it was like we were in this huge lake slapping the water to form this wave that perfectly supported something inside our heads. And who doesn't like slapping water? I think as humans we are predisposed to break things apart and categorize. To sort and chop up. (Oh, you magnificent brain!). This saves energy for your brain by making life a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure game, where you reach what you perceive as crossroads and choose between left or right. Heads or tails. One thing that my debates with MM taught me (see: proper ways to cook an egg and whether an One Eyed Egyptian Special is a valid technique.) is that seeing only crossroads is making shortcuts. Not that shortcuts are all bad, but realizing that you are taking them is important. Our brains are made to save energy by creating defaults for us to fall back on, but we can choose to look at all our interactions past the default.

The Joy of Disagreement

MM could make me really want to punch him in the face sometimes. That calmness: almost impersonal. But then there was this piece of me that one day saw what was happening; saw The Operation. Because good argument is like an autopsy of a murder victim (I don't know why that just popped in my head as the analogy, but it does bring to mind some article I was reading about actors who specialize in playing dead people due to the rise of TV crime dramas in the US), where each participant gets to make conjecture and check against the available information spread out before them (The Body in the case of my analogy). I think finding people who you disagree with often, but can approach the argument in this fashion -- not attacking personally or standing behind rhetoric -- are some of the most worthwhile people to spend time with discussing ideas.

That's all I have to say about that right now. And pay attention next time you put togo lids on your coffee: there really is a right way to do it.

the sometimes annoying serial property of my pockets

When leaving my residence I have to use an electronic keycard to exit the lobby. This means that upon locking my apartment door behind me, I have to go to to the elevator, push the proper keys to call it and tell it where to go ("first floor please", I usually say under my breath. It's not actually voice operational, but ever since reading The Intuitionist a while back, I can't help but see the time in elevators as being somewhat detached from my current timeline. Meaning that the possible outcomes while in an elevator are unbounded.), and then walk to the electronic pad to tap my key to exit the building. What agitates me on every expedition from my apartment is where to put my keys while waiting to reach the lobby. In my one pocket I have my wallet, in the other an iPod and spare change. Throwing my key in the iPod side causes a tangle with the headphones that I don't really appreciate, and throwing it on the wallet side can cause it to be tucked in between various folds -- almost as if my wallet has become a particularly heavy subject of a Lucian Freud painting -- requiring removing everything from that pocket in order to rescue my key. As a small side note about the iPod/Change pocket: my change in general is usually an unhelpful tag-a-long to my iPod pocket, spilling out when not needed, and remaining hidden when bills are not the type of money needed. Change is basically the friend that offers advice to watch out for a puddle after already stepping in it, or staying silent on the bus as you accidentally pass your usual stop. 

Let me be the first to acknowledge that merely holding my keys in my hand for the journey to the lobby is an option. But it makes me feel like I'm on a date and being forced to hold a drink for a partner that has decided their trip to the bathroom also requires countless social niceties on both legs of their journey. 

To the bigger point of all this!

This made me start thinking about things that are in parallel versus things that are in serial. I mean this in a pretty loose way, but, for example, with my pockets they are pretty serial: dump some things in the left pocket until it's full and useless, then move on to the other pocket and dump some things. There's no simple modification of my pockets that allow them to take on a new role. I mean this in a very serious way. Take for example a Murphy bed. In a room with a Murphy bed, I can literally have a dance party where people would not have the sensation of being in what is essentially my bedroom. The room acts in parallel. This is a stupid example, but if you think about the idea in a more subtle way it allows for two different ways to approach how we interact with a created stimulus and more importantly how we create objects (art, buildings, roads, etc) for others. We can either choose to create serial objects -- those objects that step someone through the experience of using it -- or parallel objects -- objects that take someones expectations and offers a facet of itself to that experience. I don't necessarily think one is better than the other, but I think we often think in a serial manner to what we create. Take a painting that is made using a very structured technique: it is only reasonable that as a viewer I will approach this in a serial fashion; my brain will fall in line with what it sees as part of the foundation of the object.

Oh. And the picture that goes with this is because I've been reading a lot about the possible proof to the ABC conjecture and this whole loose serial/parellel idea struck me like addition and multiplication where there seems like there should be this deeper connection between the two if I could just look at it the right way.

an object is the master of its domain

Objects become like leaders if they capture the imagination of a scene. This requires a particular contrast in the scene between the object and its environment; an environment that sets the object above what is in most ways typical for it. It belongs but it doesn't; the subtleness is a gentle swedish massage on ones brain. Take a bathtub for instance: we can make it mystical in appearance by perhaps filling it with marbles and setting it among wheat grass in a perfectly still and open plain. Contrast is in the eye of the beholder. Contrast is the compliment to the majority of a perspective. Making the perfect contrast is creating the perfect complimentary sub-perspective. Add the complimentary sub-perspective and the rest together and there is perfect unity; a nothingness with depth and energy, bounding along like kangaroos made of pure color. Red, or green, or blue; whatever your color preference is. The perspective of expectation with the perspective of an object forced from its default place: this is perfect contrast.

   

oh satellites, bring me salvation

 

This is the view from the balcony of my room. As you can see, there are a couple of skyscrapers and a couple of satellite dishes present. I've found that satellite dishes add a certain dimensionality to landscape scenes. It's like an optical illusion of a cube, where my brain flips between seeing the cube inside-out or rightside-in; if I stare out at a landscape long enough -- a landscape that contains a certain threshold of satellites -- I either see a set of geometric structures stacking together into the urban scene, or a multitude of satellite dishes perched around like hopeless butterflies (or maybe pheasants or some bird that runs instead of flying to evade attackers). It is one or the other, but never both. In optical illusions our brain is trying to battle itself to create a norm from given visual stimulus. It is clear, if this is true, that satellite dishes must cause a battle of some sorts in my brain under some circumstances.

that's one way to do it

 

I read this short story once about a man who eats a bunch of blue paint to try and commit suicide. His wife (girlfriend?) divorces (leaves?) him after she sees what he has done. I don't know if it's obvious, but I don't remember much about this story. I think it was part of a short story collection in which there is another story (maybe) about a highway and a diner. What's strange about both of those stories is that they still pop into my head today, yet I have no recollection what the point of them was. The story about eating paint pops into my head whenever I see ultramarine blue paint in stores (I'm not sure in the story if he ever makes a point of discussing the exact shade of blue, which makes me a bit baffled why ultramarine is my trigger AND it makes me think that this was a missed opportunity in the stories narrative), and it dawns on me that I would never commit suicide by paint, but I guess if I did I'd use a lighter blue; probably something more along the lines of a brandeis blue. And I'd definitely use an acrylic; oils are bad for you, don't you know? As for the story about the highway (maybe a truck stop is in it?), it makes me think of this diner that was a half hour away from where I grew up as a kid. It sat along a stretch of road that sold a lot of RV's and cars; tucked away next to some gas station it was curled up in neon and breakfast specials. I always drove by, but never went in. For some reason I always felt (do feel) connected to this diner, as if it's had a significant part of my life. When I consciously know it has had nothing to do with my life.

 

with so much insight, this is all becoming fantastically unclear

 

Persepctive is built from a collection of data. Points of light, previous observations, wants, assumptions; it's a finite set, though. A few things in this lobe of the brain, a few others in that. And from this place we can turn around and think about how we would rather perceive our environment. We can think about how it would be interesting if ones perspective where forced to see things in a slightly different way. We have names for these people: artists, philosophers, mathemticians, architects, etc. People who at their core are meant to alter perspective. (Which I guess could cause a long parenthetical about how the alteration of perspective are moments of being drawn closer to Truth). What I've been hung up on is how a shift of perspective can be thought of as analgous to altering elements of a data set. A pinch more fear, adding a color receptor (which I guess is already something that's in 15% of the female population?... quadchromatic eyeballs or something), taking away a spacial dimension. In other words altering elements, removing elements, or adding elements. Say you bounce around altering your data set. Hacking away, forcing changes in perspective. What eventually happens with the set you started with? All that you once saw is now a shadow of itself; the elements (or maybe they can be thought of like vectors) required to add up to a specific perspective are gone. This leads to the question: How do we create shortcuts for others to end up with our dataset? I think this is what cultural objects are for. Little decoder rings for a data set.

that was entirely expected (a new new essays on human understanding).

 

The brain is said to be the creator of visions of our expectations. Our senses -- ears, eyes, and whatnot -- kick in to moderate those expectations. We watch waterfalls for long enough and everything looks like it is crawling uphill; stationary or not. I think it's called the Waterfall Effect, or something like that, where our motion detecting neurons get put into a sort of loop watching moving water for a while, so once we look away from a large moving field (water or otherwise, but something uniform), we only see things as moving. This overlap where everything does not seem as it is (i.e. where the majority of observers would indicate that all is stationary) is just the brain being pulled back, not to reality, but in line with a set of electronic pulses coming from our eyeballs. And that's the part that really sticks in my head: the part where our senses are at best backseat drivers and at worst movie goers yelling at the screen. 

It makes me wonder a bit about aesthetics and what we feel good about seeing/experiencing. It would seem that that which is most pleasant to see/hear/taste/touch/smell is what our brain expects -- our senses perfectly confirm and amplify that which was expected. Like two waves briefly overlapping while traveling in the same direction. It's as if a beautiful experience is when the brain is expecting a dollop of red paint, and we instead treat it to a room bathed in cadmium. The creativity that touches on this or creates this experience -- the creativity that pulls out a masterful painting, writes a piece of prose that seems to be drawn from somewhere on the first few pages of our instruction manual -- is something that reaches past our senses. In other words: part of creativity is touching on that which was never meant to be perceived by the senses.