What's the big idea?

Or rather, what’s your big idea? Not trusting great ideas to conscious memory, I dutifully transcribe them. Some capture the wild beast in few words:

‘You cannot see the red-hot knitting needles spirted [sic] out by that red-faced trumpeter... which needles aforesaid penetrating the tympanum, pierce through and through your brain without remorse.’
Subversive Sounds, Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Some hold kernels of truth, ancient and modern:

‘All down history nine-tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining tenth and have been paid with husks and bidden to thank god they had the husks.’
David Lloyd George

Others suggest seeds of change:

‘It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old Southern boy’s seeing genius for the first time in a black. We literally never saw a black then in any but a servant’s capacity. It had simply never entered my mind - that I would see this for the first time in a black man. But Louis [Armstrong] opened my eyes wide, and put me to a choice. Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place.’ What was the ‘place’ of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?’
The Louis Armstrong Companion, Joshua Barrett

Excellent ideas can be complex:

'Jazz was not simply the free expression of individuals who happened to be black, Creole, or white. Race shaped the music, but the effect of race goes beyond the race of the musicians. A political analysis of the music must take into account the multifaceted interactions among musicians, audience members, and opponents of the music.’
Subversive Sounds, Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Big ideas can hit you in the gut:

‘The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours. The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.’
Ignore Everybody

So what’s the big idea, writing about creativity? All these quotation marks are like chicken feet, poised outside the great ah-ha.

Cluck cluck. Time to brave honest thought, from inside out.

Public domain image, Stamp of the Faroe Islands