How Do Ideas Come to You?

How do ideas come to you?
By
MajiriOghene Bob

I wouldn't be able to know about you and how ideas come floating to you from whatever source. I wouldn't know when ideas suddenly invade your subconscious like some marauding army and refuse to broker a truce until you give them life by setting them down on paper. You remember John Donne's 'A Dialogue Between Body and Soul', a metaphysical conceit that had both soul and body arguing on which member constituted a nuisance to the other's chances of breaking free of the other? Okay, if you don't remember that one, surely you must know something of EM Forster's homo fictus and Homo sapiens; the one a creation of the other's figment of imagination? Well never mind if you cannot remember some of these incidences. All that these writers want to say is that ideas and the way you conceive of them don't have a fixated formulae.

Some people certainly can recognize when those sneaky little bastards and personas and voices creep into their head and tell them things that otherwise may just be classified as figments of the imagination. As I do try to recollect, I recollect Wordsworth's 'Preface to the Lyrical Ballads', where he pointed out that a lot of creativity is 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling', mostly recollected in a tranquil state of mind. I think I agree with Mr. Wordsworth particularly that part that has to do with recollections in tranquility. You see, this idea of the state of creativity hardly plays discordant tunes with that other idea of the Aeolian Harpsichord - it is said that that musical instrument just lies there dormant until the winds from the muses strums it to life. I also read it somewhere that the whole thing has something to do with the way a conductor harmonizes the sounds from a smorgasbord of musical instruments. Whether or not some of our life and the ideas play out in the manner of that Aeolian harpsichord is something that may be of interest to us.