The Backwardsness of Ideas, Part 1

The Value of Turning Around

The Aymara people of the Bolivian Andes speak of the future as if it’s behind them. They gesture in front of themselves when they speak of the past, and backwards when they speak of the future. To the Aymara people, the past is nayra – which means sight or front – and the future is q’ipa – behind or back.

Strange to us, but an equally valid perception of our movement through time, since we can’t see where we’re going but we can see where we’ve been. The Aymara word for tomorrow, q’ipüru, means ‘some day behind one’s back.’ A day you cannot yet see.

This is a post about ideas. And, in the same way we picture our future, I think we tend to imagine new ideas somewhere ahead of us. That’s perfectly natural, since new ideas don’t exist yet, but, just for the purposes of this post, I’d like us to turn around for a moment, like the Aymara people, and look behind us instead, at the life we have lived, the books we have read, the art we have enjoyed. I’d like to propose that the ideas we seek are back where we have come from, not forwards where we’re going.

---

The iPhone changed the world. A big touchscreen as the main interface. No physical keyboard. Apps. But none of this was anything new and, in fact, such a phone had already been invented, in 1994, thirteen years before the iPhone was released. It was a portable phone with a big touchscreen as the main interface, no physical keyboard, and apps for – among other things – email, calendar and notes. It was called The Simon and it was made by IBM. Nobody bought it. It was heavy, calls were expensive, and the battery only lasted an hour. But it did exist. And the point here is not that the iPhone wasn’t innovative, but rather to take a closer look at what it even means to ‘innovate’ in the first place, because everything that comprised the iPhone already existed.

And if you think about it, that’s obvious. How else can you make anything? You can’t invent something new with components that don’t exist. A chef isn’t trying to discover unknown ingredients. A musician isn’t looking for brand new notes. To create is to combine, to rearrange existing elements into something that transcends them. And even this is not a new observation. Steve Jobs himself said, ‘Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it. They just saw something.’

They just saw something. Or, in other words, they paid attention. ‘Creativity starts with attention,’ as Rob Walker says, and I like that thought because it takes a process which seems mysterious and makes it more concrete. It’s not the whole process, of course, but my experience – having spent my life surrounded by creative people – is that they notice more about whatever they’re interested in. And this noticing starts a process, since people who pay attention more will better remember things later. Noticing feeds memory, and memory feeds creativity, since you have more points of reference – let’s call it a well-stocked pantry from which to cook your meal.

So if creativity starts with attention, what exactly do we pay attention to? That’s the easy part, because you pay attention to whatever you want. You pay attention to what you love, what you’re interested in. And notice how you don’t need to choose what you’re interested in. It’s automatic. It comes from some place deep within you, and may, in some way, even be the essence of who you are. Pay attention for long enough and you’ll develop something else all creative people have – taste.

But taste, as Henry Oliver has written, is more than preference. It’s knowledge. It’s not possible, Oliver says, to have ‘good taste’ in wine if you don’t know anything about it. This is him:

Having good taste in wine means being able to identify what you are drinking, being able to distinguish various grapes and regions; similarly, having good taste in art means knowing what you are reading, watching, or hearing.

Sure, you can say, ‘I prefer that wine,’ but that’s not the same thing as your taste in wine until you start paying attention to what it is about ‘that wine’ that you enjoy, and the only way to do that is to understand how it differs from other wines – wines that you don’t enjoy. That’s important. It’s difficult to have taste if you only ever experience what you love. Or rather, if you only eat at McDonald’s, I’m not too interested in your opinion on food.

But hang on a minute. Creative people pay attention to whatever they enjoy, whatever they’re drawn towards, and yet also manage to pay attention to what they don’t enjoy. There’s a seeming contradiction there, because why would anyone pay deliberate attention to that which they dislike? Well, I suspect it’s impossible not to, and so I think the contradiction takes care of itself.

Let’s imagine you’ve got a keen interest in gangster films. If your interest is strong enough, you’ll watch any gangster film you can find. But – even in a scenario where you’re trying to exclusively target films you enjoy – you cannot avoid films you won’t like, because your verdict on a film will only be known to you once you’ve watched it. It’s obvious, but intriguing, because it means the natural result of taking a deep enough interest in a field you love is to expose yourself to that which you loathe. But this is a good thing. Taste is a spectrum of loving and loathing and all the in-betweens.

---

The wellspring that feeds all of this – attention, taste, knowledge, love – is curiosity. There is no such thing as a creative person who is not curious. In the field of ideas, curiosity and creativity are very nearly synonymous. Each feeds the other and – contrary to what we might have been taught – it doesn’t matter which comes first.

A tired piece of advice for would-be writers says that if you want to write, you should first read. Yeah, but why? Education is not a prerequisite for creativity. My two-year-old happily paints but knows almost nothing of the work of Cézanne. Sure, it’s perfectly possible that if you read enough, you’ll want to write. But I’d say it’s more likely that if you have a strong enough desire to write, you’ll naturally start reading more. The order is unimportant. The creative urge can absolutely come first, and will unavoidably feed curiosity about the work of others. The advice for would-be writers could just as easily be: if you want to write, you should first write. In fact, I prefer that version.

Curiosity then. And if the curiosity burns with all the force of an obsession, it will be very difficult not to have new thoughts. You cannot help but connect different ideas in a field you are fixated by. And let’s remind ourselves here that we’re not looking for brand new ingredients – we are only trying to combine existing ingredients in a new way. Popular culture and lingering myths from the Renaissance would have us believe that ideas somehow ‘pop’ into existence, a gift from the muse to the chosen few. Funny how such ideas only ever find those who were looking for them in the first place.

Inspiration isn’t magic. As Natalie Goldberg reminds us in Writing Down the Bones, inspire means literally ‘to breathe in.’ It’s just paying the right kind of attention to what already exists. And the inhale, of course, informs the exhale. Writing is so much easier when I remind myself it’s ok to simply share whatever I’ve noticed. For a surprising amount of my life, that’s all I’m ever really doing anyway.

Looking forwards for new ideas is pointless. We’ll never find them – they’re not there yet. The answers we seek are back where we’ve been, or they’re around us in the present. I find that thought comforting. I feel, at the very least, like I’m not scrambling around in the dark, wondering what the right answer might eventually become. I can put that question to bed entirely, since I have no way of answering it. But I can look for clues in what’s already been created. I can look behind me. I can look around. I can breathe in.