The Unfathomable Nature Of Creativity

I hadn't gone there with the intention of emerging with a story of my own. I'd gone to support and hear a friend of mine's poetry. Poetry is like cinema for me, an artistic medium a milllion miles removed from the prose fiction I write, so I can actually enjoy it on its own merits, unlike reading a novel which I always have half a professional eye when reading.

I sat through the first couple of poets and then my friend came on and immediately sucked me into her words and delivery, transporting me away from my surroundings in the small venue. But then she uttered the word 'fuselage' and my creating brain kicked me back into the moment. 'Fuselage' is rather a fine word in that there is no ambiguity to it. It can only conjure up the notion of an aircraft. Unlike other words which have several shades of different meanings. And yet it's also a slightly unusual word that doesn't tend to crop up everyday. Its poetic qualities had been deliciously employed by my poet friend. To dsiasterous effect on me as it turned out.

Since the word had set off a cascade of associations and images in my head that took me out of her recital. The notion of aircraft resonated in my head with 9/11, a perhaps non-too surprising association. Yet in my mind, it had already become mutated to a toy airplane built out of Lego. Don't ask me how or why. It wasn't an image I'd been playing with prior to this. The human mind makes links and affinities so rapidly, there is simply no keeping up with, or grasping of it.

The word 'fuselage' resonated in my head as a plane without wings. Wings that had been stripped off. Somehow the alchemical processes of the mind mutated this into a Lego plane. Not one of those intricate Lego designs either. Merely an 8 block piece with another perpendicular 8 block serving as wings. It wasn't even clear to me if there was a tail on this most primitive of forms. No cockpit, pilot or wheels. But it manifested as an image of a Lego plane crashed into a Lego tower building.

There was my central image and immediately the lines started flowing to flesh it out. Again I had no notion of this theme, of Lego play, crashed airplanes or anything buzzing around my head in the lead up to this. I played some of the lines over in my head to reinforce them and make sure they 'set' in my memory like wet concrete. Then I sat through the last poet before the interval struggling to even listen to his words above the clamour of the sentences taking shape in my own head and proceeded to go off for some noodles and small talk with my poet friend.

I managed to not get distracted by the seething crucible of words and ideas for the duration of the meal, but once we'd parted and I was back on the London Underground, I proceeded to take out my Moleskine notebook and write the whole story straight through, or at least 90% of it anyway.

In the interim, my creative processing mind had moved the plot on to the notion of a little boy building a Lego tower and experimenting and learning about the fundamentals of construction as this was his first concerted effort to master the task and his tools. That conflated into him also being an architect, that god-like creative power young children have when they are at play and weilding their imaginations to transform their toys into whatever they make of them. The conception of raising a tower gave the peice its form and rhythm. This wasn't to be in paragraph form, but line strata upon strata, rising and accumulating. The notion of a tower and a pre-lingual child also allowed me to insert a little bit about Babel and language. Then that slotted into the destructiveness of little boys as he crashes and razes his own towering creation and provided me with the conclusion and the final line bringing it back to the Twin Towers as something he possibly saw on TV and was re-enacting here.

All of that sprung from god knows where on the back of a single word uttered in the midst of a poetry recital. If I hadn't have been paying rapt attention and somehow missed that word, would the story have ever emerged and existed? I have no idea, maybe something else might have prompted it, but I doubt it. I am none the wiser that even with the catalyst of the word, where all the things about a child buildinbg a toy tower and crashing a plane into it emerged from. It wasn't something I was ever consciously thinking about and yet it must have been there somewhere in my mind, even as a set of disparate thoughts that this one word 'fuselage' was able to knit together into a coherent image.

I remain completely baffled but unutterably thankful that this is how creativity often seems to work.
You can read the finished product below. It made its way into my first collection of flash fiction pieces as the final one of 52 flash stories that I wrote. And was possibly the quickest of them all to pen.

Basic Geometry

The boy is playing with his Lego bricks.

A grand architect working his dinky fingers

Thinner than the plastic parallelograms he manipulates

He mounts one atop another

Feeling, friction rubbing the bulbous tips

Searching for the hidden holes beneath till they snap home

In timeworn Euclidean geometry

Mortise and tenon, interlocking and binding

The colours are charmingly brightly random

Yellow crests red underscores blue fades into black

All perched on a thin flat base

Manufactured green to suggest the verdant

When where he lives is submersed in grey concrete.

He's building upwards now.

Modestly ascending for the heavens in small steps

Lips pursed, tongue just extruding with rapt concentration

The master builder with no picture in his head.

Virtually pre-lingual he knows words

But cannot yet assemble sentences into the air

He likes the word 'sky', unknowingly fumbling towards its suffix

As he scrapes the plastic bucket of seemingly limitless bricks

Across the floor towards closer reach

The intelligent designer just happened on some more axioms of geometry

The reach of his arm, the length of a cubit

The boxer's tale of the tape.

Resolute now, fabricating vertically brick upon brick

One block in width only

A coloured DNA map of his unformed, boundless mind

A Tower of Babel beyond the forfeit of language.

He has an innate discomfort of unaesthetic asymmetry

When an eight stud block gets bound against studs five and six of its overlooker

He cannot abide the overhang

His jaw set firm as he repairs the lip hanging over the void...

Elevating higher, yet higher towards the unfocused notion of heaven

He is amused that it sways

A basic fundamental about foundational and spreading the load

Yet the plastic edifice holds its stability

He stays his creative hand

Perhaps his pinched fingers ache from the sustained production

He pads backwards on his posterior

To view his erection with perspective

Is he proud? Is he awe-struck?

We cannot yet be certain of his fledgeling emotional range.

Now he grasps two longitudinal pieces, twelve spots both

He crosses one over the other and locks them in perpendicularly

His building soars, but now he can fly

He rams the plane into his tower

The high rise collapses beneath the assault

Just like the Jenga game his sister plays.

The plane breaks apart at its fulcrum

A lesson in physics, but one beyond his tender ken

He sifts among the rubble

Apparently delighted with something about the outcome

He sets about rebuilding the structure

Assimilating what he has learned about breadth

This time he deliberately courts overhang as he fashions gaps

For he has plumped for glassless windows

Holes he has recalled from watching the Jenga unfold

Though his are sightless, giving on only to the interior of his tower

But all in all, this construction is smoother, more practiced

The tower is hoisted up in double quick time

He recasts the plane

Declines to put a tail on it, maybe because he has never been on one

Pincered between his fingers, he flies it in the airspace above the column

He increases the imaginary throttle

And drives it hard into the heart of the tower.

The wing-piece is stripped off, but the fuselage stays lodged

In the finally calibrated inbuilt window

The tower wobbles, but stays standing

Yet the slow fuse of combustion has been lit within him

He skips out the room for some refreshment to slake his thirst.

What have we learned here today in the living room?

Some geometry, some physics, a love of destruction and aesthetic ambiguity

Thus is the groundplan of hell laid down in his mind

In The Nursery - #fridayflash

The nursery is full of toys. Toys that like many all over the world lie shunned and unloved. Empty-armed huggable animals, with their faux fur bleached by the fierce embrace of the sun; pedal cars slew parked and collecting dust rather than imaginary tickets; games gutted for their batteries so as to muzzle their dissonant blare. But in this particular rumpus room, it isn't because the tots have grown weary of them.

The walls are brightly, nay gaily decorated with jungle beasts in primary colours. The hues of hope and innocence, somehow swallowed by the pall of malevolent gloom that hangs in the air.

Sucking in its walls like cheeks holding breath, the Wendy house, ideally a place of nesting, furnishing, empire building, has now become a bolt-hole. A place to disappear from view. To fold up on oneself or to begin the covert tunnel to freedom. Collapsed through unyielding concrete.

And overseeing it all, me. A giant, life-size (to a child) cuddly panda bear. Doleful black eyes by stitched design and in flayed tissue; being a constant locus of stubby-fingered gouges and small-fisted punches. One of my ears has been torn off and cannibalised to thwart restoration or any semblance of wholeness. My white pelt has been dulled by blood transference. Not from within, since I'm laced only with cotton padding, but from the multifarious child protagonists who assault themselves with one hand, even as they slam and cuff my fluffy abdomen with the other.

For I preside over a nursery for troubled children. Children observed in their behaviour behind one-way mirrors. Children who have to be taught how to play. Boy, could I tell the Docs a thing or two. Since behind their glass partition, they can't hear what's whispered into both my good and my missing ear. The inner tormentors of these biddable kids, who let slip their visors and announce themselves to me with persecutory menace. The child's identity bartered away for beans at the slave auction that is this therapy room. So it remains my burden to bear all the stigmata of these benighted young souls, just like the priest in his Confessional.

Save the panda. Save the children.

Morning Assembly #fridayflash 480 words

He'd never any toys when he was a child. Well, when he was younger than he is now. Left to peck with his fingers in the dust alongside the chickens. He didn't even know he was draughting imaginary maps and coastlines that now he was surveying for real.

There was no instruction guide for this kit. No box with a picture on it for comparison. It was however made in China, more coastlines away from his home than he could ever limn.

The flat curved box with the grooves was easy. He knew where that went, but it was ever the last piece of the jigsaw. The other chunky part, the wooden one which vaguely echoed the shape of a hobbyhorse, not that he had ever seen one of course, well that too was relatively straightforward. Though it was the one that posed him the greatest trial, forever slapping his shoulder with tremendous vigour. More so even than his father, or the man presiding over him here.

No, what caught him were all the fiddly bits. The bits that actually looked like fun. First there was the spring and a metal gulley you could make it slide across. Push the spring back with your fingers, then release it and watch the spring dart across its cradling runway and fly out like an arrow. Then there was the bolt. You could wedge it into the ground and then roll or throw miracle fruit towards it and see which gets the closest. Of course he would never be allowed to stick the bolt in the ground and get it covered in smut. Then he would most likely feel someone's hobbyhorse smashed over his head by the man in charge.

The thin tube, my how fine a blowpipe might that make, for going hunting bush monkey or birds. A silent and deadly weapon, like the old ways. Though he knew if he brought this tube to his mouth, it would taste of oil and make him retch. But he knew metal toys needed oil to keep all their parts working. And finally, the strange little drum. That seemed to do nothing at all. Yet if he held it to his ear and shut his eyes tight enough to block out the world, if he then shook it he could just hear the sea moving about inside it. Like listening through a conch shell, but so far more distant. All the way from China perhaps. Did China have a sea of its own? The man had told them that the drum contained a gas, not water. But to him it sounded only like the waves. Alas there was never sufficient hush around in the camp for him truly to be able to hear it quite enough and prove the man wrong.

"Okay boys. Thirty seconds only to assemble this AK47. Or I shoot you".

The Invisible Hand

Your father would show you no such consideration. There would be no chivalrous downplaying of his competitive instincts. He had this notion – well I say it was his, but actually we were both pretty much in accord as to the broad principle – of inculcating an understanding of money and an appreciation of its value from in you from an early age. What agonised deliberations that ensued, (in those balmy days when we still sat down to discuss parenting strategies and our mouths didn’t just gape uselessly, infected with the muteness we’ve contracted from you), occurred around the methodology. The plan of attack. The invisible guiding hand. You were to be given regular pocket money, but then we assume no further responsibility for buying you any toys or games outside of birthday and Christmas. Save for books, which as with Value Added Tax, were deserving of special exemption. An allowance, incidentally, you have scarcely bothered to dip into. Nor were you expected to pay for your own clothes, Child Benefit supposedly went to defray that. Ha ! Have you seen the price of trainers these days ? And I don’t mean the ones from Supermarkets that fall apart within six weeks. Well what am I saying, obviously you’re fully au fait, since I didn’t buy you those. How exactly did you come by the sizeable finances required to obtain them yourself ? And then to go and denature them with scissors ? No, that’s an inquest for another occasion. Sticking with this one, back at that time, I registered my disquiet over the possible subversion of your carefully regulated dietary thresholds. Should you elect to augment the weekly treat trove of one fizzy drink, one chocolate bar and one packet of crisps sanctioned by the household shopping budget. Wasn’t that in of itself, enough of a disciplined self-management in action ? Delayed gratification and the like. Craig remained unswayed and calmly shot me down in flames. Positing that this formed an integral part of the very learning process itself. If you wanted to dissipate your finances on such fripperies, then your toy fighting fund would never amount to much. The carrot and cattle prod of the free market. In such a way he postulated, you would not be indulged and spoiled like so many of your peers. And the clincher, if you truly had to scrimp, how much more treasured would be the purchases you finally elected to invest in ?


Or so went the theory at least. Since what we failed to account for, was that we were also buying into other nefarious aspects of the free market. That the culmination could never quite match the expectation. The contents of a box sempiternally failed to live up to the overweening aggrandizement of its cover. Whereby the dark arts of the graphics department, had been lavished on the surface depiction, rather than the features contained within. Toy helicopters never bested gravity. Fire-engine hoses failed to stream jets of water. The blue shag sea beneath a pirate ship Plank, contained no salt to sustain a hovering shark. Lukewarm ribena approximations of boiling oil, poured over the castle battlements, could only kindle an ogress’ shrill reproach against staining her carpet. And try manfully (childfully ?) as you might, your fertile imagination was further thwarted by human anatomy. Though blessed with reversible thumbs, we still only possess two of them. So unless you had a friend round to play – something else that seems to have been extirpated and consigned to history, long before we tear off each unmarked month from the calendar – being an only child you were forced to enact both parties in a duel, or mobilise each of the bodies in a pursuit. Either you were forced to hold them rigidly in their ramrod pose, or put one of the antagonists down, in order to manipulate the other’s cutlass-bearing arm; to seat the rider on his motorcycle; or hitch legs to straddle some rigging. It made for a very stilted joust. Any and every chase was more akin to a three-legged race. Time-lapse in place of speed cam. Your misfortune, to be born both with fully functioning and the correct quantity of limbs. The more drastic birthright, was to be born to a father far too busy earning a crust seeding you this toy fund and then seeking release from the stress of his labours, for him to muck in and play. Added to a mother who also shirked getting down on the floor and help play your boy toys, with their bewilderingly implicit violence. Well, I’m on the floor now aren’t I ?


If a parent delivers such a deficit of unfulfilled promise, it is just another mark against us in the column of shrinkage. That we are no longer all-powerful demigods. (A stretch at the best of times, right from the outset of your birth). But when the child is forced to confront such disenchantment at their own hand, their own miscarriage of the moral law, a paradigm of the way of the world is rammed home alright. I reckon you drew your conclusions pretty sharpish – or bluntish as the case was. For I eventually observed you crashing, rather than racing miniature cars. Solving the incapacitating laws of physics, by hurling the deformable object right at the immaterial force. You smashed your helicopter into the Medieval castle walls and didn’t even scramble your emergency rescue team, which you faithfully used to do with great tenderness. And who can blame you ? For in all that time, I never discerned you wide eyed on opening up any packaging. Gradually your eyes became slits, narrower even than the embrasures in your model castle and they were too small to fire your toy archers’ arrows out from in the first place. In disillusion, you backed away from such fraught investment decisions. You renounced toys and games entirely, as part of your self-annealing. Covering up against exposure. (Opting instead for the interinactivity of computer games that spoon feeds the imagination. Or ladles might be more fitting).