I had a conversation with a person who went to art school the other day and it occurred to me that one of the worst hangovers from that time was the quest for the non-obvious.

For some reason, folk seem to have come to the idea that the weirder something is, the more it must be art, somehow.

That if you were to take a straightforward picture of a flower, that would denote you are not talented or artistic.

So everyone does their damndest to NOT take a straightforward picture of a flower.

We must throw paint on it first, then take the picture.

Or we must take the picture, hanging upside down from a tree.

Or we must take the flower to a dump and take the picture there to make a socio-eco comment - that's REAL art!

Wow ...

NOT IT FUCKING ISN'T.

That's being a total muppet and at the same time, installing a horrendous pathway in the brain where you go towards the truth but at the last moment, take a sharp turn left or right and go off into INSANITY instead - because just the flower would be "too obvious".

"It's been done before ..."

Yeah! It has!

And guess what?

Every time, EVERY TIME, a person gets a camera, finds a flower, engages with the damn thing on a deep and profound level so they have some sort of EXPERIENCE in the process and FROM THERE, takes the picture we have ART.

The transmission of human experience in truth.

8 BILLION people can have a crack at doing that and you have a chance for something amazing to arise.

But it's not just art, it occurred to me.

I keep going into various fields, whatever they may be, and I point out the obvious.

People gasp in amazement.

Why isn't the obvious being seen? Why is NOBODY seeing the obvious?

Ah ...

It's the same pattern that the art students have learned. It's not INNOVATION if it's obvious. It has to be somehow weird, or strange, or bizarre and THEN it's an innovation and then we're back to art and folk saying, "Oooh you're such a creative genius ..." which is what the so called innovators are after just the same as the scientists, and the computer programmers and the business people and the painters and the authors and the sculptors ...

This mental movement away from the obvious and into the weird DOES NOT PRODUCE art, or elegant solutions, or useful innovation.

It just produces WEIRDNESS.

It produces schizophrenia.

Some teenager writes, "My heart feels heavy like a stone ..." and the teachers, brought up and trained in the art of destroying the obvious, comes down on them like a ton of bricks and says that's no good, that's bad writing, it's a platitude, you need to think of something that NO-ONE HAS EVER SAID BEFORE.

So the student goes back, learns that movement of looking at the obvious, THEN REJECTING IT IMMEDIATELY and going off into weirdland and they write instead, "The crawling elephant claws mirror sharp cascading butterflies ..." - and the muppets who just CAN'T tell an energetic reality from a tin can, go, "Oh wow - that's so creative ..."

Let me be perfectly clear here.

That is NOT creativity. It's just insanity. Garbling data to the point of not just uselessness, but to the point of painful destructiveness.

We - any and all aspects of us that have been trained, or should I say programmed, to look at the obvious, and REJECT IT IMMEDIATELY as being "no good" - need to learn to release that barrier, that mindcontrol reflex against the obvious to make real progress on every level.

In the obvious, there lies the truth. If every poet since time immemorial had used the same words to describe the feeling of the heart being as heavy as a stone, would we have had EMO sooner?

Damn right we would have!!!!

Somewhere along the line someone would have NOTICED the OBVIOUS - namely that people's "feelings" are correlated, logical, and have a cause and effect across the board of humanity.

We might have had a logical psychology since Roman times!

And how much further would we be by then?

So, and the moral of the tale is this: Don't be afraid of seeing the blatantly obvious. What's staring you in the face.

Amazingly, it's in the obvious where the true magic lies, not in insanity or weirdness. Nothing lies THERE, - just more insanity and weirdness, basically.

The obvious is what gets you from point A to B, and then beyond to CDEFG ... but it doesn't stop at Z.

And without the foundations of the absolutely obvious seen, understood, recognised and integrated FIRST, how can any progress occur at all?

Well it can't!

So I recommend in all dealings and doings as the first point of call, not to go back to basics, but to try and find the obvious.

Don't be afraid of it.

Seeing the obvious is not a sign of not being clever, but in the contrary, the cure for being far too clever by half.

Silvia Hartmann

Quote from a PSDL Student:

"I had great problems with the "locating an artefact" exercise. It didn't help that every time I tried to find a meaningful artefact in Sanctuary I was being followed around by a large mushroom which significantly undermined my abilities to concentrate on the exercise, especially when it began hopping around and jumping up and down in front of me...."