The first time we
went cloud jumping
the visionary mountain goat grieved
over my butterflies
But any time we wrote a fluid road we
became one
And every time we mouthed a stony mountain we
rejoiced again
And again
And again
People who hope to thrive in the Conceptual Age must understand the connections between diverse, and seemingly separate, disciplines. They must know how to link apparently unconnected elements to create something new. And they must become adept at analogy--at seeing one thing in terms of another. There are ample opportunities, in other words, for three types of people: the boundary crosser, the inventor, and the metaphor maker. (134)
-- Daniel H. Pink
A Whole New Mind
Pink has, here, hit upon the crux of metaphor as a wellspring of creativity -- the ability to "understand one thing in terms of something else" (139). Note the authors we admire in this blog:
It is always the metaphor maker who shows us a new reality -- an "imaginative rationality" (139) -- whether it's Pink Floyd "Learning to Fly" or a tone poem such as Brian Eno's "Stars."
Pink quotes Twyla Tharp, who "encourages people to boost their metaphor quotient, or MQ, because 'in the creative process, MQ is as valuable as IQ'" (139).
More importantly, metaphor is the basis of empathy, and, just as it allows us to understand others in terms of ourselves, it becomes the very foundation of consciousness, for "the more we understand metaphor, the more we understand ourselves" (140).
Q: What is I?
A: A metaphor. The question itself is metaphorical.
But the creative I is something more...
The creative I
is a metaphor maker.
