BrandSoul

Some notes on the All Star game

Call me classic if you want, but I didn´t like this year´s All Star Game. It´s ten years since I last watched it and I was really excited about Kobe´s performance and also the rest of the Stars, T-Mac, Shaq and of course Grizzlie Pau Gasol.

After the first two minutes of play I just thought:

These guys don´t know how to play this game.

Yes, the play was poor, actions lacked any sense of a team game and the big stars just tried shots as if there was nothing at play. They are great athletes and phisically well prepared, but basketball is not just about individual gym training. I just couldn´t believe it. I didn´t like what I was watching.

I read in the NBA.com site reports about the game saying it was a great one. Great? I remember Magic, Jordan, Larry Bird, Clyde Drexler...people who always played well, or at least they played seriously, they wanted to win. I wonder if it´s just my bias, if you see basketball with other eyes.

Odd conversations

Yesterday I happened to talk to a self confessed Marxist. I thought Marxism had almost disappeared, but for my surprise this man was not only a Marxist, but also a very passionate talker. In few minutes he told me Marx had to be rediscovered, that States (in general, not the US) control amounts of information about us we just ignore; they know for example, who we vote for in any election (He was not aware that vote in democracies is secret) and above all, He told me all Christianity has been built on the heritage of Mary Magdalen. I think this man could easily write a best seller, kinda The Da Vinci Code, were he as good a writer as he is an impulsive talker.

After I got home, I recalled a conversation I had recently with another curious personality. This man, again a man, women seem to be more reasonable these days, told me about a friend of his, the poet Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes had been invited by former President Bill Clinton to his Camp David ressidence. Clinton told him it was difficult for him to look like an intellectual to the eyes of the American public opinion. Clinton felt apparently happy to share some moments of intimacy (ehem) with the poet, for he found a twin soul in Fuentes. I wonder why should a leader hide his intellectual side. In the case of Clinton other aspects of his personality were widely spread, so what could be the blend he wanted for his public identity?

And I wonder, is it just a matter of casualty to meet weird people in a short period of time? I just don´t know. The fact is that a wave of oddity is invading my life in the last weeks. Another example comes with my readings. I´m currently reading Gunter Grass The tin Drum. It is the most digressive book I have ever read. I have sometimes defined innovation as diggressive action. Well, if you read The tin drum you can experience both the value of diggression and the weirdness of its impact. I have even been considering the role of balance between opposite trends as a source of beauty. After all, for Nietzsche Apollo and Dyonisos should be reunited, for Thomas Mann the beautiful soul was a commitment between form and nature...

These odd conversations, as strange as they may seem have added some color to my current rainbow of conversations. Are your conversations with people colorful or they just follow the same pattern day after day?

If you want to find out more about my improvised adventures of last week, read this.

The anxiety of influence

Harold Bloom wrote The anxiety of influence to explain the fact that any poetic creation, was related to a previous poem.

The meaning of a poem can only be a poem, but another poem.

For Bloom, in every poet´s work there´s always a tension, a sensation of being captivated by predecessors. He calls this sensation, "Anxiety of influence".

In the peak of the anxiety moments the poet can achive the sensation that everything has already been said. That his work could be vain. For Bloom,

We need to stop thinking of any poet as an autonomous ego, however solipsistic the strongest of poets may be. Every poet is a being caught up in a dialectical relationship with another poet or poets.

What´s the key for an authentic creative career for Bloom? Betrayal or misunderstanding. Any creative advance is the result of swerving.

Most so called accurate interpretations of poetry are worse than mistakes; perhaps there are only more or less creative or interesting mis-readings, for is not every reading necessarily a swerving?

And I wonder, isn´t western education from its inception concerned with correctness and not with betrayal? Are we educated to swerve, to betray with elegance?

Kierkegaard and greatness

Existential thought has always been concerned with the state of powerlessness of men and women. It is our bareness and sometimes orphanhood in life that has been stressed by the existential thinkers. Though a  personality such as Kierkegaard also found inspiration in greatness as a source of meaning in life:

Everyone shall be remembered, but each became great in proportion to his expectation. One become great by expecting the possible; another by expecting the eternal, but he who expected the impossible became greater than all. Everyone shall be remembered, but each was great in proportion to the greatness of that which he strove.

Inspired creation

One of the main reasons why I ended up bored with marketing authors and psycho-marketers (safe some very worthy exceptions, as always happens) is their persistent focus on such topics as the number of messages the brain can process in one second or the time we need to get bored with things (as for instance, marketing books, I would add).

This kind of thought is the son of the cartesian stress on conscious mental processing and their vicisitudes. It forgets the fact that long before the rationalistic reductionism and self satisfaction, creation and beauty where not a product of conscious fast decisions, but emerged in the pressence of the divine element.

That creation is closer to some inspiring divinity than to step-by-step processes can be checked by anyone. You just have to start writing and will see how the words flow as if they had their own life. This is particularly evident in extremely talented people who, sometimes, are not able to anticipate the result of their job just seconds before the work is done. There is something that goes beyond the human control, something divine. The old psychoanalysts would call it "The unconscious factor". But how can something unconscious be beautiful? It is not unconscious, but sublime, creative.

The inspired nature of creation has long been a subject of recognition by subtle souls like Socrates. This is how he explains it in Plato´s Ion:

The divinity drags the soul of the men wherever she wants, linking in this her force one another. And with this, a huge chain of dancers is formed, a chain of choir masters and subordinates, one beside the other, pending from the rings of the muse. Every poet depends on his muse. We express this by saying he is possesed or, in other words, that he is dominated.

Leave space

One of the big masters of litterary criticism, Iser described the reading process as happening between two opposite trends: retention and protension. By protensions he meant the expectations any text creates in the reader´s mind. By retention, the somewhat frustrated experience of those expectations.

I think Iser´s protension refers to the evocative power of any text. The ability to bring ideas or images different than those in the written text. That happens because the product of any reading act is the  conjuction of two souls, the one in the text and the one reading it.

What I want to tell with all this is that if you want your writing to be distinguished with beauty it has to be evocative. And being evocative means putting lots of protension in the act. And it means not trying to exhaust the topic you are writing about. Your writing should have loose ends. Let spaces for the reader.

Big success for "The life cycle"

After the first month, my manifesto, The life cycle of the creative soul is N.61 in the downloads rank of ChangeThis. It is a very big success, and why not say it, unexpected success. 61 is a big jump from the initial 120. For example, Tom Peters´PSF is everything is N.58, just 3 positions ahead.

I just can say: Thanks. Some of the people who have downloaded it were friends of mine, but now I´m sure many others are unknown readers. Thanks to all.

The success of the document does not end there. A London based editor has asked me to write a book out of the manifesto. I have accepted it. It will have much more contents, though in the same style of poetic approach to management. I think it will be written for autumn 2006.

We´ve got a new plan

When Alex, the ultraviolent gang leader of A clockwork orange tries to frighten his gangmate and perhaps use physical force against him, another gangmate warns him:

               He is also part of the new plan.

The new plan? Alex forgets his victim and cannot help but become fascinated by those enigmatic words...The new plan.

Sometimes in organizations we live in situations that reflect a clogged atmosphere. In those situations it is necessary to open a window to the airs of future. The new plan is the answer of imagination to suspended dynamics. Imagine, and don´t let things stall.

Inspiration

I´d like to throw some light on what we call inspiration. I mean by inspiration the effect your work produces on other person´s soul. Jean Paul Sartre described this very special relationship between creator(in this case, writer) and receptor (reader) with these words:

The reader is left with everything to do, and yet everything has already been done; the work only exists precisely on the level of his abilities; while he reads and creates, he knows that he could always go further in his reading, and that he could always create more profoundly; and this is why the work appears to him as inexhaustible.

This inexhaustibility can become a clue to detect the copy and to identify the authentic creation, product or brand. The copy always shows the traits of an exhausted work. You can always notice a lack of inspiration, and a limit on imagination. The copy is the uninspired work by excellence.

It is this inexhaustible character of the creation that pushes to create. The creator feels her soul in motion, a new work has been grasped. For the creative soul there´s always a continuity between the experience of reception of a creative work and the creation of a whole new reality. This is the secret of creative work. It is the thread between work-inspiration-new creation.

Discontinuity and creation

If you read my previous post you will notice we have talked about health and creation. What some creative people or if you prefer talented people can gain by recovering a healthy sense of themselves is the continuity of life and work.

Wilhelm Reich made famous the following statement:

Love, work and knowledge are the well springs of our life. They should also govern it.

What a healthy state can provide to any suffering talent is the possibility of devoting his or her life to those three realms of activity with a sense of continuity.