Lullaby (2009)

We all have our private lullabies, the things we think and say to ourselves to calm us and set ourselves on the path to sleep. I tell stories to myself of made-up people who talk, argue, dance, fight and explore as they fall in and out of love. I know their entire lives, the fears and happiness of their childhoods, the tragedy of their trials, the suffering of their deaths and of the joys that make the rest worth it.

We all have thoughts of our own that are of our own, quiet times of the mind that form a large part of the intrinsic mechanisms that lie behind our outward personalities.

Economic activities lie in the outward, the intersections between people and the exchange of value, while creative activities lie in the codification of inward interactions, internal conflict and private forms of reasoning that cannot be structured as a rational objective argument. (This is, for the most part, Tolstoy’s definition of art from his excellent What is Art?, not mine. Me, I’m not that clever.)

The relationship between the two cannot be explained simply, neatly or elegantly, as they are of two different worlds and share no context. The terms of one cannot be used to explain the other, and yet, because we are animals of great joy, irrepressible imagination and coursing passion, what we might call art and creativity will always be an unavoidable part of all human activity. So, economic activity forms around the creative, surrounds it and congeals it at the points of intersection, like oxygen clotting the blood that oozes from a wound.

We can, and must, analyse and understand economics and creativity at these ‘clots’ of ‘monetised’ creativity, but as we pore over the data, form our laws and institutions, we must not forget which of the two is spurious, fleeting context and which is the lifeblood of our souls and the basis of our very minds.