Inspiration for Creativity Springs from the Effort to Look for the Magical in the Mundane

In 1686 the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho wrote a haiku of seventeen syllables about a frog jumping into an old pond, and the sound of water. Nothing happens in it. A small creature does an unremarkable thing in a place that no one would notice. Yet generations of readers have found that the poem opens a stillness larger than its subject. The topic suggests that inspiration for creativity springs from the effort to look for the magical in the mundane, and Basho's frog is one of the clearest proofs.

The word effort in the topic is important. The mundane is by definition the thing we have stopped seeing. Familiarity dulls perception, and the psychologists call this habituation, the way a clock's ticking disappears from awareness within minutes. To find magic in the ordinary requires a deliberate act of attention, a decision to look at what one has looked past. The Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky argued in 1917 that the purpose of art is to make the stone stony again, to restore the sensation of things which habit has turned into automatic recognition.

Wordsworth stated the programme in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800. His aim, he said, was to choose incidents and situations from common life and to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, so that ordinary things should be presented in an unusual aspect. His poems are about a leech gatherer, a beggar and a child who counts her dead siblings. Their subjects are humble, and the poetry gains power from the dignity it finds in them. Kabir, the fifteenth century weaver of Varanasi, drew his verses from the loom and the potter's wheel in the same spirit.

Visual art tells the same story. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal signed with a false name to an exhibition and called it Fountain. The work was rejected, and later became one of the most discussed objects of the century. In 1962 Andy Warhol painted thirty two canvases of Campbell's soup cans, one for each flavour then sold. These works asked viewers to look at what they passed daily in a supermarket and to see in it a design, an economy and a culture. The ordinary object had become a question.

The ordinary object had become a question.

Science has examples as well. Newton, according to a story he told in old age, was prompted to think about the force that holds the moon in its orbit by the fall of an apple. Archimedes, it is said, grasped the principle of displacement when he saw the water rise as he entered his bath. These tales may be embellished, but they capture a truth about discovery, that a trivial occurrence becomes significant for the person who is asking a question. Penicillin and Velcro both began with an everyday annoyance, a spoiled culture dish and burrs on a dog, noticed by minds that were ready to be curious.

Philosophers have tried to explain why this works. Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space in 1958 about the corners, drawers and attics of a house and the way that daydreaming gives them depth. The ordinary is rich because it has been lived with, carrying memory and association that a distant wonder lacks. Proust built a whole novel on a mouthful of tea soaked cake that brought back a lost childhood. The magical in the mundane is in part the accumulation of a life in small things.

A practical implication is that creativity does not require extraordinary materials or experiences. A writer can write about his own street, a scientist can study a puddle, and a teacher can find a subject for a lesson in a bus ticket. The training of an artist, whether in sketching, journalling or photography, is largely a training of attention. Many creative people keep notebooks for this reason, since the act of noting makes them look, and the habit of writing down one small observation a day is among the cheapest and oldest techniques of the craft. A person who practises it for a year has a store of material that no hurried search for inspiration could have supplied. Schools that ask pupils to memorise what is distant might do better to ask them to describe what is near.

Indian everyday life shows the principle in practice. The tradition of jugaad, the improvised repair that keeps a bus or a pump running with whatever is at hand, begins from looking at a broken thing and seeing materials. The rangoli drawn at a doorstep each morning and washed away by evening, and the coded marks by which Mumbai's dabbawalas deliver thousands of lunches, turn routine into design. These are not museum pieces, but they show the same habit of mind, a readiness to treat the ordinary with invention. Children do this naturally, turning a cardboard box into a ship and a stick into a sword, and finding in the world possibilities that adults have trained themselves to overlook. Much of creative education is the recovery of that capacity.

There is a risk, however, in romanticising the ordinary. The mundane is the condition of many people whose days are made of repetitive labour, and to tell a woman carrying water for miles or a worker on an assembly line that her routine is secretly magical is to add insult to hardship. The magic is not a property of the object that guarantees delight. It depends on a leisure of mind that poverty often removes. Some critics suspect that the artist who finds beauty in a slum has the luxury of leaving it.

The deeper question is whether the magic is found or made. If it is found, the world is full of hidden wonders waiting for the patient observer. If it is made, then the observer's effort lends the world a quality it did not have, and the magic is a gift of the looker to the thing looked at. The topic suggests the second, in its stress on effort, but the frog that jumped in Basho's pond did not know it was a poem, and no one can say whether the pond was waiting.