Sight Seeing On The Isle Of The Invisible
Thursday, February 7th, 2008 by Mark | Posted in Unconventional Thinking | CommentsThere’s a part of all of us that wants, that demands, to be rooted in reality. To see what we are asked to believe in and to have empirical evidence of its existence.
Makes sense.
No it doesn’t.
You’ve never seen relativity, E=MC2, but you believe in it. You have never set eyes on it, you have little or no idea of how it works, but you embrace it as one of the great feats of human history. Hmmm.
Still we are convinced that the really wise amongst us are hard-nosed realists who refused to indulge what we can’t put under a microscope and see with our own eyes. And then we fall in love and are swept away – sometimes over and over again – by a chemistry that is completely invisible.
And then there’s Beethoven’s Fifth and Faith and God. All invisible. All infinitely more powerful than anything you can put on a conference table and subject to legal, managerial and scientific due diligence.
Richard Kneer, creator of the hula-hoop and the Frisbee, died recently. Throughout his life he went sight seeing on The Isle Of The Invisible, as did Einstein, and Disney. So does everyone who creates something new as opposed to managing what is handed to us by history, ancient or recent.
It is all about dreaming. About saying what you can see, what you can measure and clearly define is simply a starting point. From this base of knowledge, this so called state of the art, the dreamers turn plastic tubes into toys that make millions want to hula and phones into entertainment centers and human relations from people going through the motions into teams of one sort or another that soar through space and reinvent everything the psychologists and sociologists define as normal and healthy.
Everyone who has ever done anything great has indulged in cartoon imagination. They left the realm of the absolute certain and had the drive and the guts to explore where there are no markers. No boundaries. No rules, because it is all undiscovered territory.
Pack up. There’s no better time to go sightseeing on the Isle Of The Invisible.
Email This Post
February 7th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
OK. But lets suppose that people spun ropes around their head in a loop form in the past. I’m pretty sure that jugglers in the middle ages had rings that they twirled on their arms. Lets also imagine that kids have thrown around disks or pie pans and skipped rocks on water centuries before the Frisbee was “invented”
So if the BEST examples you can give are Disney World, and it mostly RE-CREATES elements of popular culture in society, I wouldn’t say you have made a strong case for invention.
February 8th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Invention is not merely the act of creating something worth while, but creating something that interests and benefits the majority. Not all inventors have spacial dimensions in their heads, some are just downright witty and knows their way around making people believe in certain things, whether it be trivial at that time or not…
February 11th, 2008 at 5:05 am
Perhaps what people lack is faith. Faith in their ideas, their concepts and themselves. Dreaming is easy. We do it all the time. But what separates most from Disney is the fact that he did something to follow that dream. Even though he had no idea (or maybe he had a vague idea) of how everything would turn out, he still went ahead and pursued it. The others all remain dreaming, not doing anything to make the dream come true.
February 12th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
This sounds kind of like the book Transgression, by Randall Ingermanson. I heard about it on http://www.jamesbrausch.org/. It deals with virtual reality.