ON THE ROAD IN MY MIND

Those who have shared my DeClutter Your Creativity classes or groups know that I often say that all clutter is mental or emotional, and that it's often an inevitable outgrowth of creativity and curiosity. Here's a funny example, brought to you by the constantly (and erratically?) firing cortex of my brain.

The architectural details of the little rolling house I saw on the Bohemian Hellhole blog and discussed in my previous post reminded me of something. That house  is clearly American (Alice says it's part of the Burning Man Festival), but its shape and details evoked something else.

After a bit of thought I realized that the image I was thinking of was the (fictional) Ural Mountain estate called Varykino, as recreated in David Lean's film of Doctor Zhivago. I loved the houses of that film; in fact, I wrote an essay on them in my memoir Home Life, where I waxed lyrical about the beauty of the Varykino house when Zhivago returns it and finds its interiors muffled in snow and ice. So, being on line already, I had to find an image of that wonderful interior, which I now offer here.

But of course, I am committed to proper respect for copyright, so I then had to figure out who owns the copyright to screen captures/still photos from films. I'm sad to say I don't know. The image shown here is all over the web, but no one seems to credit the original source, or even identify who the copyright holder might be. For what it's worth, the film was made by Warner Brothers.

I did find out, however, that the Varykino scenes were shot in Spain...in the summer.

And then, having written in the draft of this post the phrase "firing neurons," I had to find out if it's actually neurons that fire when we have an idea or association. This search led me to a New Yorker Annals of Science article by Jonah Lehrer ("The Eureka Hunt," July 27, 2008) which guided me to change "neurons" to "cortex" and gave me the following quote, so lovely and so apt: the insight process is an act of cognitive deliberation transformed by accidental, serendipitous connections.

So there you go. From Nevada to Spain, with a detour through imaginary Russia and a dogleg through the idea-generating centers of the human brain, all in twenty-seven deeply enjoyable if totally unproductive minutes.
Clutter...or creativity? Creative...or just plain crazy?

Your call.