I think that at times our success-oriented society demands too much rationality and order from all of us. I mean, look, unless you are obsessive compulsive about being neat and orderly, society really frowns on you. I prefer to have a messy desk, a few stacks of books, a pile or two of papers, and a disorderly briefcase. Why? Why wouldn’t everyone prefer to keep things in perfect order all the time? Because the world of thought and imagination is anything but orderly. Too orderly means predictable, and predictable is boring. The human imagination, out of where all of our best creations have emerged, is any extremely unpredictable and messy place, but you have to feed it. If you keep an orderly imagination, it will wither and die from loneliness, feeling abandoned and unkept. Chaos, disorder, fragmentation, non-linearity, and strangeness all feed a healthy imagination which is constantly running away to join the circus. The imagination makes no sense whatsoever, but without it, creativity and the healthy mind are nowhere, boxed and shoved off into whatever closet they have been thrown. Whenever two objects come in contact that never had any business coming into contact, there lurks the opportunity of something new happening, which may be irreverent, irrational, and unintended, but that’s how new ideas come about. The success-oriented society of over-consumerism, abject capitalism, and blind success cannot survive an active imagination that wishes to shed itself of false parameters for success and spurious myths about materialism and money. The creative process, for as nutty and unreasonable that it has to be, is about liberating the spirit, giving flight to dreams, and allowing the individual to shed the heavy yoke of mainstream capitalism and consumerism in favor of spiritual freedom, whatever that might mean to any given individual. We don’t always have to make sense, stay in line, keep our mouths shut, or blindly accept what the powers that be feed us.
