#8 Musenküsse

ByLukas
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klimt-the-kiss-musenkuss
Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907-1908).

der Musenkuss (German) The kiss of the Muse

Creativity becomes much easier if you see it as a game of finding new ways of describing what has always been there.

Observing, rather than inventing.

It’s liberating. Because now the game changes from pulling ideas out of thin air to a game of discovery. Observation. Paying attention. Building upon what’s already discovered, then connecting the dots in way nobody else has.

Most of all: listening, when the muse finally arrives and visits you for a kiss.

There’s this voice in my mind
Impossible to ignore
And yet I fill my head with noise
Drowning out
What deep down I know to be true
Do I even want to admit
That this song in my heart
Is not about me
But about you?

P.S.: I’ve observed the same principle in language learning (and wrote a book about the consequences of this mindset shift).

Which begs the question…

Where else would we do better if we observed a bit more, rather than trying to invent from scratch?

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    #118 The Process is Predictable

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    #45 The tragedy of the spoken word

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    Language helps us describe the world we perceive. Yet in doing so, it closes our eyes, our ears, our touch, and our heart to the parts of the world we don’t have words for.

    Every language is a lens on a felt reality within and around us – both clarifying and categorizing the world, and limiting it by the words it has available.

    Learning more languages gives you new lenses – and a richer sense of reality.

    But just like the structure of our ears limit the sounds we can hear, and the structure of our eyes limit colors we can see, the structure of any language somehow limits our felt experience of the world.

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    How do we re-learn to listen to the voices of the wordless world speaking to our animal self… the voices that once upon a time, before verbal language emerged, were all we had?

    there’s an eternal song
    drowned out by the confines of my mother tongue
    a wordless melody that once made sense
    until our brain started blurring it with a lens
    narrowing it down
    neglecting its nuances through verbs and nouns

    with all its might language wants us to abide
    but the wordless world it tries to hide
    will forever be inside

    Lukas Van Vyve

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