p.5 This book is directed toward people in any field who want to contact
and strengthen their own creative powers. [JLJ - Ok, I'm listening...]
p.21 Improvisation... We know what might happen in the next day
or minute, but we cannot know what will happen.
p.22 An empirical fact about our lives is that we do not and cannot
know what will happen a day or a moment in advance. The unexpected awaits us at every turn and every breath. The future is
a vast, perpetually regenerated mystery... We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
And a perpetual invitation to create.
p.39 The muse is the living voice, as each of us experiences it, of intuition.
p.42 The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect
but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. CARL JUNG
p.43 In play we manifest fresh, interactive ways of relating
with people, animals, things, ideas, images, ourselves... We toss together elements that were formerly separate.
Our actions take on novel sequences. To play is to free ourselves from arbitrary restrictions and expand our field of action.
Our play fosters richness of response and adaptive flexibility. This is the evolutionary value of play - play makes
us flexible.
p.45 A creature that plays is more readily adaptable to changing contexts and conditions.
Play as free improvisation sharpens our capacity to deal with a changing world.
p.46 writing is art only when you adore language itself, when you revel in the play of imagination, not
when you regard it as mere instrumentality for conveying your ideas. The purpose of literary writing is not to "make a point";
it is to provoke imaginative states.
p.47 The most potent muse of all is our own inner child. The poet, musician, artist continues
throughout life to contact this child, the self who still knows how to play... Improvisation, as playful experiment, is the
recovery in each of us of the savage mind, our original child-mind.
p.48 Full-blown artistic creativity takes place when a trained and skilled grown-up is able to tap the source
of clear, unbroken play-consciousness of the small child within.
p.50 psychiatrist Donald Winnicott came to clarify the aim of psychological healing as "bringing the patient
from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able to play... It is in playing and only in playing
that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality..."
p.86 There is a French word, bricolage, which means making do with the material at hand;
a bricoler is a kind of jack-of-all-trades or handyman who can fix anything. In popular movies, the power
of bricolage is symbolized by the resourceful hero who saves the world with a Swiss army knife and a couple of clever
tricks. [JLJ - MacGyver perhaps...]
p.87 In bricolage, we take the ordinary materials in our hands and turn them into new living
matter - the "green gold" of the alchemists. The fulcrum of the transformation is mind-at-play... working
and playing around the limits and resistances of the tools we hold in our hands.
p.129 In a healthy feedback system, trial and error have an easy, flowing relationship, and we correct ourselves
without a thought. Most of the body's feedback loops are unconscious, for the very good reason that continuous judgments
of value must take effect without delay, interference, or clenching caused by ego attachment.
p.133 The creative person can be seen as embodying or acting as two characters, a muse and an editor...
the muse proposes, the editor disposes. The editor criticizes, shapes, and organizes the raw material that
the free play of the muse has generated. If, however, the editor precedes rather than follows the muse, we have trouble.
The artist judges his work before there is yet anything to judge, and this produces a blockage or paralysis. The muse gets
edited right out of existence.
p.134 The feedback between constructive judgment and the ongoing creative work goes back and forth at more
than lightning speed: it goes on in no-time (eternity). The partners, muse and editor, are always in synchrony,
like a pair of dancers who have known each other for a long time.
p.135 The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with
it.
p.137 What can save us is our knowledge that true creativity arises from bricolage, from
working with whatever odd assortment of funny-shaped materials we have at hand
[Back cover] "Free Play is a superb guide for anyone who aspires to create, whatever the medium." New
Woman
