I Love Film! (books) (creativity)

Hey, my Baby,

It's Tuesday, so I am back and forth between Pearl's, church (Golden Agers) and home. I like your pictures! Glad you are still shooting some film, and it reminds me to finish up the roll of b&w I've had in my Pentax since last Fall. I think I've got some good ones on there, so I need to finish it and get it developed. Maybe tomorrow morning will be a good time for one of my little Trail Trips like I was taking last year. Maybe up to O'Melveny Park in Granada Hills........

Just a quick check-in for now, gonna do some dishes, jump in the shower and then back to church. I'll be back here around 2:30 and then around more or less the rest of the day, at home or at Pearl's.

I hope you are having a great day and I'll see you in just a bit.

I Love You!  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

7pm : Just getting home. I saw your posts at Pearl's, and first of all, I'm glad to hear you are working on a project! Is it for school or just for fun? No matter. Interesting that you are using children's books as part of your material. In recent years, since about 2008 or so, I started to track down some of my favorite books from childhood. I say "track down" because some were more obscure. Of course, one of my very favorites was Dr. Suess (like most kids), but I also had others that I wondered if they were still available, like the "Homer Price" books by Robert McCloskey. And, I found 'em! Another McCloskey book had been an absolute fave when I first learned to read : "Make Way For Ducklings". That one I checked out from the library about four years ago, cause I had to read it again, lol. But one of the hardest to track down, was also one of my most cherished childhood books, "Hamid Of Aleppo". It's about a little hamster who lives in Aleppo, Syria, in his own little house complete with furnishings. And one day he decides to go see what's out there in the world, and so begins his journey. It's not a long book, but it's so imaginitive, and most of all I loved the drawings, which were by an illustrator with the singular name of Giovannetti. The author was Clive King. This one wasn't available at the Libe, so I checked on Alibris, and all the used copies were over 50 bucks. So, I kept checking periodically, and lo and behold, in 2012 I found a copy for sale for I think it was about 10 or 12 bucks. The seller didn't know it was a collector's item, and so I now have my own copy of "Hamid Of Aleppo"! There is still one book I am trying to find, and I've been trying for about 5 years now. The trouble is, I don't remember the title or author. Dad went to England, France and Belgium on a business trip in 1968, and some of the gifts he brought back were children's books. For Chris he brought Babar, and an English book with a character named Humbert (that's all I remember), and for me, he brought a weird little book from (I think) Belgium (maybe France), that had a dwarf child as it's main character. He was an outcast of sorts, he was also a hunchback, and he went to live with all sorts of people, many of whom were cruel. All I remembered about the book was the dwarf boy, and his hunchback, and that he worked as a cook for a while, with a character named The Major Domo as his boss.

And periodically, I Googled and Googled and Googled those various details as search terms. But I still haven't been able to discover the book. I won't give up though, cause I've gotta have a copy!

Other favorites were "Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel", and all the "Curious George" books, and especially, "The Little Engine That Could". I remember right when I first learned to read, I would say that famous line from the book, over and over again : "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can"........

And it sorta became my motto in life, haha.  ;)

So there's some favorite children's books of mine. I hope you find some good ones for your film!

Your other post was awesome as well, and at a glance, while I was at Pearl's, I saw that most all of those traits certainly applied to me. Now I will go back and read them, and then I will write more later, at the usual time.

I Love You, my Highly Creative Angel!  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

11:18 : That list of creative traits is interesting because so many are things we have talked about - the daydreaming, the observing, working their own hours....I could go down the list and they almost all fit. Some more so, some less, but in general, those are the exact traits. What I would add is that a creative person, at least in their formative years, isn't really aware of these traits, as traits. It's interesting that these listed were derived from an observational point of view, from studying the creative mind.

For me, I just remember being little, and always feeling like there were two worlds happening - the one everybody was living in (meaning the one I could see, hear, etc), and the one inside myself. Now, I suppose you could say everyone has this experience, but I think in certain people it is pronounced.

In those whom it is less pronounced (or even non-existent), it is easier to fit in to the group/civilization idea of what I will again call "format" - that there is a Format (formula) for what they perceive life to be, and I think that in people with a lesser or non-existent degree of creativity in them, that format is based in a Finite Approach. Life is defined as having a beginning and an end, because the five acknowledged senses are all that are considered. And so, having put Life into a Format, the majority of people (society) tend to place a schedule on everything. Childhood lasts until such-and-such year, schooling until such-and-such, and then Career. It seems rather pointless, unless under some rare coincidence a person who finds him or herself in this format actually finds joy in it.

Not just acceptance, but joy.

And, because I do not like to judge or criticize, I can believe (or at least not disbelieve) that many people in greater society do indeed find some measure of joy in living a formatted life. It is important to note here that by "formatted", I mean in the mind as well as in how they spend their days.

So therefore, in the opposite extreme, is the highly creative person. What is "creativity", anyway?

Pretty simple : it's just the need to make something, be it a finger-painting or a symphony. Even a skyscraper. But some of the highly creative are really into their inner world and the daydreaming aspect, and I think that is because they, in some part of their mind, are still attached to the creative matrix or fabric or whatever you want to call it, from which they emerged in the first place. That's why they may have their heads in the clouds, because the Real Them is up there, and they can sense it.

From my own experience, these kinds of people (and I've known a couple besides you and me, but not many) know pretty much from the get-go that the world of society, the Finite World, is not the entirety of the world they know. This is why they want to create - to "make something" - so that, living amidst this so-called "normal" world, they can have something in their life that they see as normal.

The creative person is living in a larger, infinite world, and that is normal to them.

I always go back to Emily Dickinson as an example, because she wrote hundreds of poems, poems that would become classics, and yet that was not her initial need or impetus. Her need was merely to create, so that she would have some essence of Her World with her. She expressed her words, and wrote them down, and her creation was made, and therefore she had pulled her real world into this world. Once she had written her words down, she stuffed them in a drawer because simply creating those poems was enough for her. It satisfied her need to acknowledge her idea of The World.

Others have a drive to share their World with others, to enlighten, to entertain, or for whatever reason.

But the creative person, above all, is in a minority in that he or she knows, from early on, that their life is really a Life, something enormous and not immediately knowable. It is something that must be learned in bits and pieces, with subjects constantly changing as the input directs. And creative people have constant input, because as the list says, they always observe .

We see life, and we see anything but what people say, "is". Oh, we see that, too. But after a while, we are living apart from it or above it. The formatted life is regimented and temporary. It is what Spengler refers to as The Become. "Become" has an end.

A creative person knows, instinctively, that he or she has no end. And so, they are always Becoming.

I Love You and will see you in the morning, my Darling.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

p.s. I wanted to add this little quote from Joan Didion, author and intelligent person. This is from the list you posted, and is very apt for what I call Glimpses :
"However dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable 'I,'" Didion wrote in her essay On Keeping A Notebook. "We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its marker."

Me again : the part that registers with me is "bits of the mind's string too short to use", a literary way of describing a Glimpse.