The I dea - Short Story

Many years ago, I worked as the chief engineer for one of Sri Lanka's biggest hydropower projects. It was in the Hill Country, the picturesque central mountainous area, where tea is grown so abundantly that almost all the mountains are entirely covered by perfectly trimmed tea bushes, making it look more like a fairytale painting than an actual mountain. I was one of the “foreign experts” who would make Sri Lanka's ambition of becoming self sufficient in energy a reality. Life here was good with it’s slow pace and laid back attitude and a cup of Sri Lankan tea is just what you need in the cool Hill Country. 

But one day a strange man approached me, he was one of the minor employees, who I sometimes suspected had something a little wrong with his head. He was not educated but had a strange grand way of talking. A man with big ideas, R wasn’t educated but considered himself a practical man and “a man of the world.” It was obvious that the Hydropower project had caught R's imagination. But I was surprised when he came up to me and said that he had an idea which would make him rich, but he wanted to try it in his hometown of  Trincomalee first. He said he wanted to use the movement of the sea waves, to pump water to a nearby cliff which he said was called the Koneswaram mountain. From this cliff would flow water through a pipeline downwards which would be used to turn a Generator, from which he would get electricity for the entire town. At first I could not decide whether he was extremely intelligent or a little too simple minded, but I soon realized that it would never work, for it seemed to go against all the laws of physics, particularly lord Kelvins First Law of Thermodynamics. But to my utter disbelief he wouldn’t listen, he was convinced that it would work and nothing I said could convince him to give up his idea.

A year or so later I heard he had tried to implement his idea by collecting money from the villagers, had lost a lot of money on it, had been beaten up by the villagers and put in prison; I blamed myself for not having convinced this madman to give up his idea. Many years later I visited  Sri Lanka as a tourist, and was walking in the dusty streets of Colombo with my son; memories of my earlier days on this adventurous island came flooding back, when all of a sudden a Limousine stopped in front of us. The man who got down from it had the appearance of an important politician, but then I realised that it was none other than R. “Don’t tell me you made it on the Koneswaram mountain idea” said I. “No” said R in his thick accent “But while I was in prison I improved my idea, got a patent on it, and sold the patent for which I got 100 million dollars. “That’s unbelievable” said I not knowing what else to say. But in a way it wasn’t unbelievable because R had always had ideas, most of them bad, but he had so many bad ideas that one of them turned into a good idea with experience. And that’s more than you could say about most people in this world, they do not have any ideas either good or at least Bad.

Surrealism

I didn't study art so when I first saw Salvador Dali's paintings it really got me interested. Surrealism was an art and literary movement that began in the 1920's. It's leader Andre Breton had earlier worked in a mental hospital and had even met Sigmund Freud, perhaps it was this meeting that got him interested in the study of the unconscious for he founded the surrealist movement, which he considered a revolutionary movement. Surrealism seeks to free the unconscious to express itself. The first technique was automatic writing which Breton expressed in 1924 as pure psychic automatism - by which the real processes of thought could be expressed. It is the dictation of thought free from control from reason and any aesthetic or moral considerations. If this seems odd it gets odder still when we view the surrealist paintings. 

A few years ago I read a book by a famous scientist that someone had left behind by mistake, and in it he says that while fields like physics were truly profound, artist pretend to have done something great by describing their work in a profound way, even going to the extent of using extravagant names, while in reality it is nonsense. I think that you will agree this is an unkind way to describe an artist. Some artists work sells at hundreds of millions of dollars while this scientist books fetch him a relatively small amount. The reason for this is that there are at least some instances when an artist can capture our imagination far more than famous physicist can and when this happens its not called nonsense, its called magic........