Curation and Connection: A Creative Manifesto for Life

A few months ago I wrote this idea down:

‘I write in the vague hope that, one day, everything I love will converge on a single point.’

On the surface it reeks of an empty romanticism, conjuring the image of a teenage loner writing pithy sayings on the wall of his mum and dad’s box room.

The idea that, one glorious day, the planets will align as the pen’s nib touches the paper, causing the ink to leak out some sacred babble — some heavenly quintessence of a self I don’t even think I believe in — is hopelessly quixotic.

But you write to work shit out in your silly little head; looking back now I can better formulate the point I was trying to make, and hopefully I’ll similarly revise whatever claptrap comes out of this article in a few months.

What I got wrong

Let’s revisit the insight I started the article with:

‘I write in the vague hope that, one day, everything I love will converge on a single point.’

The main reason this misses the mark is that it fails to recognise that information doesn’t really converge on a single point, but connects in a network of many points.

This idea is reminiscent of Indra’s Net, a metaphor used in Buddhist and Hindu teachings to illustrate the interconnectedness and perfect interfusion of all phenomena. I’m going to write more about this in the future because I think it’s relevant.

But back to the point of the article. Recognising creativity as a network rather than a single point provides, I think, a more interesting and fruitful model to work from.

Imagine if everything we loved gained further lustre from everything else around it. Creative work under this ideal equates to building a dazzling constellation, where each thing, whether a line in a song, an abstract philosophical idea, or a memory, illuminates and enriches the others.

This relates to two deliberate practices: curation and connection.

Creation as curation and connection

For a long time, I’ve been interested in a form of creativity that involves active curation and connection.

As individuals, we make scrapbooks and playlists; as cultures, we curate museums and galleries. Ultimately, they resemble large webs or networks of the things we love or find interesting.

I’m interested in the idea of a life oriented towards actively generating these kinds of networks so that the things we love most interplay with one another in a way that enriches both them and us.

The gonzo style of Hunter S. Thompson, the heartbreaking melodies of an Elliott Smith song, a scene from a film, the personal jokes you have with a mate, a last-minute derby goal. I don’t know what this would look like or how this could work — and maybe it’s just my inner junkie craving envelopment within a lattice of eternal stimulation — but the idea that fragments of these things could resemble individual nodes in a huge network in constant interplay is exciting.

This obviously isn’t a new idea. It’s effectively what creativity is, at the level of the individual anyway, whether it’s conscious or not.

But the image of a network rather than that of a single, condensed node is, to me at least, a more fertile insight.

Building this network

As we’ve discussed, building this network requires curation and connection.

You can use pretty much any medium for this. I want to use writing, to begin at least.

But the point is that different media are just more nodes, and the potential size of a network is essentially infinite.

Emptiness and openness are creative perception

I’ve already mentioned Indra’s Net, but the Buddhist teachings of sunyata (emptiness) and anatta (non-self) are relevant here too. The teachings say that, since all phenomena co-arise interdependently — that is, nothing (including the self) has inherent existence since it relies on everything else to exist — the nature of all phenomena is essentially ‘empty’.

It’s like comparing ‘reality’, whatever that is, to a network in constant flux — a cosmic dance of all phenomena. The Buddhist I’m imagining to counter my argument might claim that creating the type of network we’ve discussed is futile, because that’s the way reality already is.

John Cage might make the same point. Any network based on likes and dislikes is an expression of the ego that makes it. Cage made art a spiritual practice by employing chance operations and non-intention, denying the ego at every point to create 'something that might have happened, even if the person wasn’t there'.

But I’m not arsed what the imaginary Buddhist or John Cage have to say today, so they can both get fucked trying to undermine my ideas.

A potential philosophy for life

The things that resonate, almost by definition, are at least slightly important and meaningful. We know this from experience, but it’s reinforced in Carl Jung’s teachings on individuation and Joseph Campbell’s teachings on bliss.

Curating and connecting these things constitutes something of a creative manifesto and, perhaps, a philosophy for life.

I’m convinced that creating such a network — through writing, music, or any other medium — so that the things we love interact with and illuminate one another, will lead to more types of experiences that feel intrinsically meaningful.

A final note

I’m trying to be more disciplined with writing, and that means getting ideas down even when they’re half-baked in the confidence that more posts and more time thinking will lead to better insights.

So while this may read as a load of old gibberish to you, it articulates some kernel of something I feel intuitively, and that’s all that matters right now.