Absurd Brainstorming

My brothers both recently got married and I decided that the most appropriate Christmas gift for the recently hitched love birds would be a collection of Calvin and Hobbes books. Upon flipping through them I was filled with nostalgia and reminded how brilliant Bill Watterson is.

This comic in particular got me thinking about the absurd and it’s place in creative work. In it Calvin’s says, “We laugh at nonsense.” But I would change it to, “We laugh at what we think is nonsense.”

We laugh when we think something is absurd, but sometimes we find it is, “so crazy it just might work”. Isn’t that what creativity is? It is the truth that comes out of exploring the fringes of the possible. It is making the transition from the natural reaction of laughing, to sincerely engaging the absurd possibilities.

Mary Oliver

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.