will.
William James (Henryâs brother) called the ability to make novel connections between ideas âdivergent thinkingâ, a mode of thought in which âthe unexpected seems the only lawâ. When I asked the writer Will Self about his creative process he echoed this theme, describing the creative mindset to me as a continuous willingness to pick up on aspects of the world, aspects of thought, and put them together with other things to produce juxtapositions. We get a glimpse of a creatively focused confabulatory process in No Direction Home, Martin Scorseseâs documentary about the early career of Bob Dylan. Itâs 1966, and Dylan is standing on a street corner in Kensington, London, wearing a blue suede jacket, Ray-Bans, and pinstripe trousers. He is on his first trip to Britain and in a playful, high-spirited mood. Dylan has come across a series of three painted signs on a pet shop, which evidently doubles as a tobacconist. He reads them aloud:
WE WILL COLLECT, CLIP, BATH & RETURN YOUR DOG
CIGARETTES AND TOBACCO
ANIMALS AND BIRDS BOUGHT OR SOLD ON COMMISSION
Dylan then uses these words as the raw material for a series of verbal riffs that are part nursery rhyme, part Beat poetry. Dancing around, waving his cigarette in the air and giggling at his own inventiveness, he spits out new versions faster than most of us can think:
I want a dog thatâs gonna collect and clean my bath, return my cigarette, and give tobacco to my animals and give my bird a commission.
Iâm looking for a place to bathe my bird, buy my dog, collect my clip, sell me cigarettes and commission my bath.
Iâm looking for a place thatâs gonna animal my soul, clip my return, bathe my foot, and collect my dog.
Part of what makes this vignette so compelling is that it lays bare one of the key operations of improvisational creativity: taking elements of the familiar or mundane and remixing them until something new is born. It would be stretching it to call the resulting doggerel art, but this is where much art begins: in the power of confabulatory combination. Dylanâs creativity often spilt over into lying, especially when it came to his own biography. When first making a name for himself in New York he told interviewers that he was raised in Gallup, New Mexico, had lived in Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota and Kansas, and had been taught guitar by the blues singers Arvella Gray and Mance Lipscombe. In fact, Dylan had lived only in Minnesota and New York by that point, and had never met Gray or Lipscombe. This is exactly the sort of story a confabulating patient would tell, mixing truth with fantasy and wish-fulfilment. The difference is that Dylan presumably knew he was fibbing.
In 1996, during a now-famous libel case, the former cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken recounted a tale to court which vividly illustrated the horrors he was having to endure after his name was besmirched by a national newspaper. He told of how, on leaving his home in Lord North Street, Westminster one morning with his teenage daughter Alexandra, he found himself âstampededâ by a documentary crew. Upset and scared by the crewâs aggressive behaviour, Alexandra burst into tears. Aitken bundled her into his ministerial car, but as they drove away, he realised that they were being followed by the journalists in their van. A hair-raising chase across central London ensued. The journalists were only shaken off when Aitken executed a cunning deception: he stopped at the Spanish embassy and swapped vehicles.
Aitken, a wealthy, handsome, and highly articulate man, had a weakness for melodrama. The year before, at a press conference announcing his intention to sue the Guardian newspaper, he declared: âIf it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it. I am ready for the fight. The fight
William James (Henryâs brother) called the ability to make novel connections between ideas âdivergent thinkingâ, a mode of thought in which âthe unexpected seems the only lawâ. When I asked the writer Will Self about his creative process he echoed this theme, describing the creative mindset to me as a continuous willingness to pick up on aspects of the world, aspects of thought, and put them together with other things to produce juxtapositions. We get a glimpse of a creatively focused confabulatory process in No Direction Home, Martin Scorseseâs documentary about the early career of Bob Dylan. Itâs 1966, and Dylan is standing on a street corner in Kensington, London, wearing a blue suede jacket, Ray-Bans, and pinstripe trousers. He is on his first trip to Britain and in a playful, high-spirited mood. Dylan has come across a series of three painted signs on a pet shop, which evidently doubles as a tobacconist. He reads them aloud:
WE WILL COLLECT, CLIP, BATH & RETURN YOUR DOG
CIGARETTES AND TOBACCO
ANIMALS AND BIRDS BOUGHT OR SOLD ON COMMISSION
Dylan then uses these words as the raw material for a series of verbal riffs that are part nursery rhyme, part Beat poetry. Dancing around, waving his cigarette in the air and giggling at his own inventiveness, he spits out new versions faster than most of us can think:
I want a dog thatâs gonna collect and clean my bath, return my cigarette, and give tobacco to my animals and give my bird a commission.
Iâm looking for a place to bathe my bird, buy my dog, collect my clip, sell me cigarettes and commission my bath.
Iâm looking for a place thatâs gonna animal my soul, clip my return, bathe my foot, and collect my dog.
Part of what makes this vignette so compelling is that it lays bare one of the key operations of improvisational creativity: taking elements of the familiar or mundane and remixing them until something new is born. It would be stretching it to call the resulting doggerel art, but this is where much art begins: in the power of confabulatory combination. Dylanâs creativity often spilt over into lying, especially when it came to his own biography. When first making a name for himself in New York he told interviewers that he was raised in Gallup, New Mexico, had lived in Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota and Kansas, and had been taught guitar by the blues singers Arvella Gray and Mance Lipscombe. In fact, Dylan had lived only in Minnesota and New York by that point, and had never met Gray or Lipscombe. This is exactly the sort of story a confabulating patient would tell, mixing truth with fantasy and wish-fulfilment. The difference is that Dylan presumably knew he was fibbing.
In 1996, during a now-famous libel case, the former cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken recounted a tale to court which vividly illustrated the horrors he was having to endure after his name was besmirched by a national newspaper. He told of how, on leaving his home in Lord North Street, Westminster one morning with his teenage daughter Alexandra, he found himself âstampededâ by a documentary crew. Upset and scared by the crewâs aggressive behaviour, Alexandra burst into tears. Aitken bundled her into his ministerial car, but as they drove away, he realised that they were being followed by the journalists in their van. A hair-raising chase across central London ensued. The journalists were only shaken off when Aitken executed a cunning deception: he stopped at the Spanish embassy and swapped vehicles.
Aitken, a wealthy, handsome, and highly articulate man, had a weakness for melodrama. The year before, at a press conference announcing his intention to sue the Guardian newspaper, he declared: âIf it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it. I am ready for the fight. The fight
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