When I was in 2nd grade, a teacher handed me the book A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. What a joy for me to read! In the book, L’Engle posits the existence of something called a tesseract. As the image above demonstrates, a tesseract is the act of bringing together two distinct points to make the distance between them nearly zero. In other words, the shortest distance between two points is no longer a straight line, but a tesseract.
Call it a complex mathematical concept, an intuitive leap, a wormhole, or something else – tesseracts exist. In A Wrinkle in Time, the children use the tesseract to travel to a far distant planet where they have an incredible adventure.
My Own Experience with Tesseracts
When I was studying for my theater degree, we were doing a guided visualization in one of my movement classes. In that meditation, we were supposed to be climbing a cliff. The teacher told us that we could use any means possible to climb the cliff. As I sat there with my eyes closed, I heard my class mates’ voices express their exertion and frustration as they mentally climbed this cliff. Some of them were really pushing themselves to the brink in order to make it up this cliff.
In my mind, I looked at the cliff and thought, “Hey, I can just levitate up!” So I did.
It took about a minute, and I felt profoundly peaceful and calm as I did so. At the top of the cliff, I looked around, taking in the beautiful vista, imagining a sunrise over the valley and a cool breeze. I also felt a small sense of victory at finding such a clever way to climb the cliff.
The only problem was that I could still hear my class mates struggling. They were struggling to lift themselves up, screaming in frustration, or whimpering in terror. They were deep into their own visualizations of struggle, and I guiltily thought, “Am I doing this wrong?”
So in my mind, I started over. I forced myself to climb the cliff by hand, putting forth more effort so that I could be like all of the others around me who were struggling.
At the end of the exercise we sat in a circle discussing the experience of the guided visualization. I shared my experience of going back down and starting over and the teacher, who to this day remains an incredible influence on me, looked at me in confusion and asked, “Why would you do that?”
It was a great question. Why did I intentionally force myself to do it again in a more difficult way? Why did I allow myself to feel bad because I had done something that those around me hadn’t thought to do? In that moment, I learned about myself. I learned that I can be made to change what I do because of shame. I learned that I really want to fit in with those around me.
I also learned that I can be profoundly creative, and powerful.
Why Tesseracts Matter
My math geek friends will tell me that a tesseract as L’Engle explains it is not actually possible. A tesseract is simply an interesting math oddity. But here’s the thing – L’Engle’s concept of the tesseract set my imagination on fire. I’ve had tesseract moments in my life, where my creative intuition simply made a leap that my logical mind would not have.
If you are reading The Abundant Artist, you have probably had similar experiences. Whether it was a creative leap in your art or personal life, you believe in the power of intuition, spirit, or simply the creative unconscious.
Tesseracts matter because while there is a terrific focus on math, science, and engineering at the secondary school level, art and creativity are being relegated to secondary importance. Where I live, a local public school district has cut all funding for the arts at the elementary level. Think about that. There is literally zero funding for the arts. Children will not learn about painting, theater, or sculpture while they are in school.
Those who run our education systems bemoan the fact that we don’t have enough engineers and mathematicians. They compare the USA to China or India, where there are millions of new engineers graduating each year. Software and Asian countries are taking over the knowledge economy.We don’t have enough software engineers to fill the ranks in software startups. I don’t know if we ever will in the USA. Our population is just to small to compete with that kind of overwhelming efficiency.
At the same time, the business world is focusing on creativity as a means of separation. Fast Company magazine publishes lists of the most creative people in business. Books like Drive, Steal Like An Artist, and Imagine are gaining cache in business circles everywhere. PH.D’s are talking about the power of vulnerability.
You know that that sounds like to me? It sounds like the wider world is starting to re-discover that the skills of an artist are incredibly important.
The people who are teaching others about creativity on a large scale are business leaders and scientists. For all of our vaunted creativity, it seems that we who spend most of our time in the arts have somehow missed out on an opportunity to reach the wider world. It seems to me that the artists of the world are spending so much time commiserating with other artists about how hard it is to make it as an artist, that we fail to see the opportunity to play a bigger game.
Just like I held myself back. Because I was afraid I wasn’t doing what everyone else was doing.
