A post by Julia Langkau

I’m interested in the process of creating, or in how we come up with things.  

Together with two musicians, I decided to produce an audio play, broadly on the topic of the pandemic. My part was to come up with the idea for the story, and to write it. In this post, I will talk about some aspects of the process of coming up with the story, and compare it to some aspects of the process of coming up with a philosophical idea. Here is the plot of the story.

During lockdown, elderly Renate is thinking about how her day would have played out if not for the pandemic, when the doorbell rings. The mailman delivers a shoebox. She brings it in and puts it on the table. When she takes a closer look, Renate sees a tiny door on one of the sides, and stuck under the door is a tiny note. She gets some tweezers to carefully open and unfold the note, and the note says: "the world in one room”. She opens the tiny door with her finger, and while she is peeking through it with one eye, she suddenly feels drawn into the shoebox and starts shrinking until she is able to squeeze through the door. Inside, she is able to access the whole world. – At this point in the story, the music will take Renate on a trip and will somehow represent her becoming more and more restless, and her days passing faster and faster. – When her closest friends and family call her on the phone, she is too busy to engage in meaningful conversations. Renate begins to feel anxious, and as her rheumatism worsens, she feels as though she is separating more and more from her body. Suddenly, she feels a tickling on her big toe, and her foot starts growing bigger and bigger until her toe is poking through the ceiling of the box. Renate wakes up and finds herself in a hospital bed, her granddaughter tickling her foot, smiling at her, and welcoming her back to life after a long illness. 

This story wasn’t just suddenly in my head. It came in many pieces, and these pieces came together in various ways. I had a couple of constraints to work with, some of them self-imposed. I wanted to write about social isolation. The story had to be dynamic, something simple but effective had to happen, so that the planned acoustic elements could add substantially to it. Initially, I imagined Renate separating from her body and fading out, but I needed the story to have a somewhat hopeful ending. 

I was interested in the contrast between physical isolation and the fact that thanks to the pandemic, we have access to many things which weren’t accessible before: museums, art performances, far away conferences … Our bodies are isolating, but at the same time, a lot more of the world has come into our houses. As I was thinking about this, I happened to look at a box not far from me on the table. The box had been shipped; it had contained some art project I had just finished with my son. I looked away from it and suddenly imagined a very small elderly lady sitting on a chair in one of the corners of the box, with skinny legs, holding her head in both hands. The floor was slanted, she was sitting close to the ceiling, almost touching the ceiling, and further away from her towards the middle, a bell was hanging from the ceiling, on a red rope – much like the bell that comes with a Lindt chocolate bunny. The rest of the box was dark. I thought: what if that lady lived in this box? What if she travelled the world in this box, but somehow without her body?

I told my friends I had the basic idea, the story would be about the world in a box, and that I needed a name for the lady who would be traveling that world. That’s when she became ‘Renate’ (a common European name). Then I thought it would be nice if traveling the world was an opportunity for Renate that she hadn’t had in a long time, so I gave her rheumatism. This would make it more exciting for her, would convince her to squeeze through the door. Her physical condition could worsen over time and would give the musicians an opportunity to somehow show a process in social isolation. The bell became the doorbell the mailman would be ringing when delivering the box. I first imagined Renate sitting in her armchair, reading the book. But when her body became stiffer and stiffer, I moved her to the bed. I had a very faint image of Van Gogh’s picture "Bedroom in Arles” in my mind – somebody had used it as a Zoom call background recently. But Renate’s room is not yellow, she is lying on a crocheted, light blue and purple bed cover, and I’m looking at her body from above her head.

I didn’t know how the story would end, so I went for a run, waiting for something to happen, so I would be able to continue. This is when I saw Renate’s toe sticking out under a hospital sheet, and behind the toe was a little face, and when I think about this image now, I still see the yellow leaves of the trees I was looking at while running. I thought: if this is how it ends, it seems like it was all just a dream. So I needed a way to get Renate into the hospital. That’s when I decided her foot would grow and poke through the lid of the box, and the little face of course was somebody tickling her, waking her up, bringing her back to the social world. When I now imagine Renate lying on her bed, I see her huge foot touching the ceiling of the box, and sometimes I see it from above, poking through the box. But Renate really is in her living room when the doorbell rings, so it’s not just a dream.

While thinking about the story, I imagined almost no moving pictures. The only one is a close-up of Renate’s feet in fluffy white slippers, slowly shuffling along the floor. I mostly imagined still pictures and heard sounds and noises. For instance, I imagined hearing the toilet flush, Renate eating, and an espresso machine, repeating over and over as Renate travels the world virtually. I imagined my friends making those noises in their own home – knowing that the noises they will actually choose will be much different.

A couple of things strike me as interesting. First, the randomness of how the story came together. I randomly saw or imagined various things that then became central. For instance, the cardboard box in front of me, which nicely stands for the lockdown situation. I also imagined many things that are not part of the story: the close-up of the fluffy slippers, for instance. I don’t know why I still see them when I think about Renate, and I don’t like those slippers. Second, I got obsessed with this little story; my thinking and imagining was accompanied by a constant, excited attention to my images, to the idea, and to what I could do with this idea. At the same time, I knew I was obsessing about something that wasn’t accessible to anyone else, hence nobody except me cared for it, I was not responding to anybody’s argument, I was not disagreeing with anybody, didn’t try to solve a problem or convince anybody, etc. When I was done, I needed a break before I was able to start writing. Imagining and thinking about this story was exhausting in a much more physical way than writing philosophy is.

Here is a common assumption on creating that I think is misguided: Using imagination, the agent considers a number of possibilities and then comes up with a new possibility, or a possibility they experience as different from all the possibilities they have considered (e.g., Hills and Bird 2019, Nanay 2014). This is exactly what I often do in philosophy, but it is quite obviously not how I came up with Renate’s story. It was a very conscious and active process, but at no point was it about different possibilities or novelty. I did consider several things that didn’t make it into the story, but I dismissed them because of my constraints (Renate couldn’t die) or because I simply didn’t like them (the slippers). The only time novelty occurred was when I suddenly got worried about too much similarity with a short I had re-watched recently, but I realized quickly that my story was at most inspired by it. Coming up with my story was above all: picking up on random perceptions and mental images and connecting them to my topic, obsessing about something nobody else cares about and taking it to be important when I know it really isn’t, and waiting for new images to appear in my mind, seemingly without being prompted.

In philosophy, it feels like I’m always in public territory, and I have to behave a certain way while thinking, as if somebody is watching me. Not everything I think about while developing a paper makes it into a paper, but it feels much less random, and there are almost no ‘philosophical left-overs’ – such as the moving image of the slippers in the case of my story. I wonder if for some, coming up with a philosophical point or argument feels more like what coming up with a story feels like to me. I’m sure some of you are obsessing about philosophical ideas? But do you get this kind of physically exhausting excitement when you think about philosophy? And do you get ‘philosophical left-overs’ at all, or do your bad ideas just disappear? 

Thanks to Michael De and Michael Stuart.

References:

Hills, A. and Bird, A., Against Creativity, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (3), 2019, 694–713.

Nanay, B., An Experiential Account of Creativity. In The Philosophy of Creativity, E. S. Paul and S. B. Kaufman (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2014, 17–23.