Creativity

Those big "What if" questions get us every time. I mean what if I took up that invitation from X... instead I did Y. They are like missed opportunities - and they are in their way. However, you did do something else. Perhaps you lived part of your novels. Life in that way is creative. I remember reading of a Russian philosopher. He influenced all the major writers of the nineteenth century. I thought I would like to do some research on his writings. I mentioned this to a British philosopher, Sir Isaiah Berlin, and in a reply, he warned me off him, as this philosopher hadn't written anything - what captivated all those writers was his conversation. I was both disappointed and delighted - disappointed because I wanted him to have written something that would change or inspire me, but on the other hand delighted Sir Isaiah Berlin had felt the same attraction to him and his ideas. I think there is creativity in conversation. There is creativity in how we interact. For a long time, there was an oral tradition - Homer's poetry is a testimony to that. If we read it, we read it as an oral text, its orality shines out. The repetition found in there is as a memory aid. But of course the text, the readable as Roland Barthes would say, is something which we all hanker for, because it seems to take us beyond the spoken word, into another dimension. Those novels in your drawer need to see the light of day. Maybe publish parts - send parts to journals and then afterwards the whole novel to a publishing house. You are creative in your daily life - what you need is time to fit in the recording of it - the record of your dreams, fantasies, your experiences - and that is not idiotic at all.