Twyla Tharp — The Creative HabitMemory, as we most frequently think of it, encompasses every fact and experience that we can call up at will from our cranial hard drives. We all have this in varying abundance. It’s the skill that lets us store away the vital and seemingly trivial data and images and experiences of our lives. […]
But thinking of memory only in this way is simplistic. It shrinks our minds down to the size and sophistication of a personal computer—a machine defined and priced by how much it can remember and how quickly it can retrieve information. Creativity has little to do with this kind of memory. If it did, the most creative people people would have hair-trigger memories of photographic proportions, and our artists would all be found slaughtering the competition on Jeopardy! Just because you can recite Shakespeare’s sonnets from memory doesn’t mean you have the poetic spark to write a sonnet of your own.
Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we’re talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It’s not only how we express what we remember, it’s how we interpret it—for ourselves and others.