Going away provides you with all sorts of good things at the time – rest, recharging of batteries, change of scene, a different pattern to your day. It can also have a more lasting effect over the days, weeks and even years that follow. I still think of my trip to Afghanistan/Pakistan forty years ago, perhaps reminded daily by the news. And I often remember Machu Picchu in Peru six years after visiting.
Perhaps Granada and Cordoba will be other places that linger. Last week I was having lunch with a former client now friend called David Croom. When David was MD of publishers Routledge in the early 90s, I led the Newell and Sorrell team that created the Routledge identity. The most distinctive feature of the identity was the use of pattern – adapted from a book of Islamic art that David showed us.
This reminded me that the Alhambra in Granada and the Mezquita in Cordoba appealed to me particularly because of their beautiful use of pattern. Why did the Arabic peoples come up with all these patterns? There is a strong strain of Islamic thinking, not necessarily endorsed by the Quran, that images of people and life should not be created and displayed. This does not apply in every Islamic culture but certainly there aren’t pictures of people or animals in the Alhambra. There are many beautiful graphic patterns.
This interested me afresh because, of course, it’s another example of constraints leading to creativity. Denied the opportunity to paint representational pictures, Islamic artists came up with patterns. Rather beautiful ones.
It’s harder to see patterns in writing in quite the same visual way. But as readers and writers we enjoy patterns made with words. The balancing of words and phrases in a paragraph, the sense of structure even when it’s not visible, the seeking of aesthetic appeal in the look and sounds of words, poetic techniques such as rhyme and alliteration, the choice of first words and last words – all these are patterns of a verbal kind. Rather beautiful too.
And so it goes.
