Consider the Opposite
How do we think about things now? How to refresh our thinking? How to re-frame, retrain our brains, how to shift or jostle or shine up our thinking? For me, I’ve been wanting to reset my brain, freshen up my thoughts, reconvene on worn subjects. I want to see anew, think more creatively. I want sparks! This seems like an opportune time, the proper juncture.
One of the secrets to being creative, and to creative thought is this: (which is really no secret): the more creative you are the more creative you are. So if you do one fun and creative thing in say, photography, then when you go back to the page to write something, it somehow seems to boost your ability there to think in new ways. Another secret is that, for example, before I go out to take photos, I often flip through some coffee table books of photos by my favourite photographers, or if I’m doing portraits, I look through Pinterest. When I’m writing poetry, I read some favourite or brand new to me poems. If I’m writing an essay I might read a paragraph or two from an admired essayist. Etc. You see where I’m going here. When I was in university doing my undergraduate in English literature, (pre-internet and AI etc), I learned that the trick to getting a good mark on an essay was to go and read a bunch of criticism — not even necessarily on the topic at hand. Just essays that you admire written by scholars. And then, what you do is forget whatever it is you’ve read or seen, and write your own thing. Maybe this method seems quaint these days — creative absorption — but it helped me to get thinking in the proper direction.
A lot of it comes down to play, and to turning things around, to see from another angle. To shift things. To pun and put together odd things. To juxtapose. When I took the photo of the rose in the coke bottle, I’d initially planned to drink the coke and then replace it with water. But then, it seemed like it would be more fun to put the rose into the coke. And then initially I put it on top of a book of women photographers, but then it seemed interesting to put it on top of the book nature morte. I took the photo one day with the bud of the rose quite closed up. The outer petals were quite muted. And then I cracked open another coke a couple of days later when the flower had opened. This is all fine, right? I find the photos amusing, if nothing else. But what happened next was that I came up with three new ideas for the book I’m writing. Coincidence? Maybe.
I’ve had many people mention how useful was the first piece of advice in a post I wrote in 2019: Consider the Opposite. It’s a good exercise in general, I think, and I use it on the regular.
I recently came across two examples of thinking about things differently in the same day. One I had read before, and it’s in the book by James Elkins titled, What Painting Is. He talks about how painters think in paint. And it’s something I know because I once attempted to paint on the regular, years ago, but also because I watch this process on a daily basis because my partner has his studio in the basement. So James Elkins muses:
“What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting.”
“To a painter, it is the life’s blood: a substance so utterly entrancing, infuriating, and ravishingly beautiful that it makes it worthwhile to go back into the studio every morning, year after year, for an entire lifetime. As the decades go by, a painter’s life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete.”
“The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter’s muddy humours, and its brilliant transformations are the painter’s unexpected discoveries. Painting is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colours and the artist responds in moods.”
Painting, this act, contains liquid thought, says Elkins, and the paintings themselves preserve this — we can see it in a work hanging on the wall of a museum: “the quick jabs, the exhausted truces, the careful nourishing gestures.” I don’t think there is even a proper catalogue of names for all the gestures and techniques that oil painters use. But there are some names. For example, there is a technique the Japanese call “flying white” where “a partly dry inkbrush will leave flashes of white as it drags across the silk.” You might have heard of terms like, scumble, alla prima, smudging, daubing…etc. But Elkins describes all the types of brush movements visible in a Monet painting, and how complex his techniques were. It’s the kind of thought, this thinking via a material, that is tough to get down into words. And you can see why painters might hesitate to try because there is a danger in losing the mystery by oversimplifying what goes on while painting. (Elkins gets all this which is why I think his book is so indispensable).
So even if you don’t paint and have no desire to ever do so, knowing that painters have a different way of thinking is instructive. This is obviously true for many tactile activities but it’s visible in interesting ways in paint.
Next, I read a newsletter I subscribe to, Raptitude, which I’ll let you go to and read yourself, where he makes an unexpected analogy between smoking cigarettes and using your phone. And honestly, it seems brilliant to me. The comments are interesting too, and a good example of how to have a civil discussion to boot. You don’t have to one hundred percent agree with the analogy, but it gets you thinking about things in a new way, which I think is always beneficial.
There’s a poem by James Crews, that I keep quoting from and here it is again: “I ask for just the slightest shift / in my thinking, the kindest sifting / of my busy mind, so only wonder / and peace are left behind.”
I’ve been stuck in a rut for a while (sign of the times and I’ll bet many others have faced a similar thing to one degree or another). I’ve been prone to spiralling thought, to dwelling, and to getting hung up on weird and inconsequential things. (Also more consequential things, but there you have it). But, I want to get back to poetic thinking, which isn’t something our time has been overly friendly to, has it? In Teju Cole’s Blind Spot, he talks about the filmmaker Tarkovsky’s sense of poetry. He says that “the secret channel that connects the work to other work” — this is poetry. And that it’s this channel that “allows different kinds of excellence to understand one another.”
The kind of thinking that results from when two people from completely different fields of interest get together to talk is so exciting to me.
Lately, I’ve noticed people talking about a book from 2004, a business-y kind of thing that I normally avoid, tbh. It’s the Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation. I haven’t read it, but perhaps the resurgence of interest in it has to do with a more collective desire to think about things in new ways.
I myself think a relatively easy shortcut to changing or enlivening our thinking is pretty much always going to be: read more poetry.
I’ll end my post by quoting from an interview with the poet Sean Thomas Dougherty:
“I suspect the lyric impulse in poetry is more perhaps to ask “what is my story” over and over, and in the act of writing our poem we reaffirm our existence and human right to speak, to be, to sing, without ever really getting to the answer, or at least not the right answer. Poetry is probably the act of giving the wrong answer. That is why it always feels so dangerous to the secret police.
