Chapter 4: The Laws of Creation [Part II]
I twist the pithy core of a yellow pepper out over the sink and watch its tiny seeds skitter across the gleaming stainless steel. Sunlight streams through the open kitchen windows. Bare feet on the cool linoleum floor, I’m singing along to an indie band called Pomplamoose — a mashup of pop songs from different decades, mixed together in a way that feels somehow fresh and familiar all at once.
Nostalgia on top of nostalgia.
I place half the yellow pepper, waxy side up, on the wooden chopping board and begin to slice. The blade goes through with a satisfying crunch. I stack the ribbons neatly: bright yellow beside the orange of carrot and the red of halved cherry tomatoes. A rainbow of warm tones. I pop a ribbon of yellow into my mouth and bite down — cold, juicy, and sweet — then tilt the board over the salad bowl and use my knife to gently scrape them in, the bright colours tumbling into a bed of greens.
It’s one of the first truly warm days of spring. Carl and I have just come back from the Sunday market in town, paper bags bursting with fresh produce.
As I start peeling an apple, I’m thinking of my mother. I can still hear her calling out from the kitchen of my childhood home “I’m peeling an apple for the salad!” and here we come, my brother, Ryan and I, running down the narrow passage in our socked little feet, tipping the oversized chairs, dragging them up to the kitchen counter, climbing up and propping our little elbows on the table, expectant. Ryan is six years old, full of tales about the classroom hamster. I am older by five years, a gap-toothed eleven.
Our mother has peeled the apple carefully, in one unbroken wavy spiral. She lifts it like a prize, then divides it between two small plates — just fleshy apple skins, but she is sliding them across the counter toward us like two tiny Michelin-star dishes. We linger long after, negotiating for salad scraps — a corner of carrot, a bit of cheese. It was the variety, the novelty, that we relished with a kind of pure joy.
I smile at the memory, wishing that my family was here in New Zealand and not halfway across the world. I get a third of the way through the apple peel spiral before it breaks. Mom still holds the record.
Before putting the salad into the fridge to cool, I build a forkful with a bit of everything — a cube of cucumber, a slice of avocado, a crumble of feta, a sliver of walnut perched on top. It towers precariously — brightness, crunch, and sweetness in one perfect bite.
I hear Carl approaching the kitchen. “I hope you’re leaving some for me,” he teases. I smile, caught — mouth full and trying not to laugh. I slide the carton of cherry tomatoes toward him, an offering. He takes one, tosses it into the air, catching it easily and pops it into his mouth.
Most nights, I leave my imagination at the kitchen door and just get the dinner done as quickly as possible.
But there are days when I pick from the vegetables before me as if from a painter’s palette — balancing the textures, colours, and flavours. And just like that, the line between art and sustenance dissolves like watermelon on the tongue, and I am fully absorbed in the making.
There are patterns that stretch across, not just art, but all things artfully done. Whether it’s a moving piece of music, a memorable speech, or an outfit that just works, you can feel when it lands — when it hits the senses just right.
You just know.
Intuition is a strange, impulsive creature. In one hand she grips a fistful of spears, ever ready to jab when you least expect it. In the other, she holds the ropes and pulleys that wrap around your heart, a sudden little tug.
I’m reading at my usual slow pace, my brain still wrapping around the words, and already I feel her grip on my heart.
“Wait,” I whisper. “Wait until I’ve reached the end of the sentence.”
But she does not wait, and as she tightens her hold, the words on the page begin to blur, and already the ink is slipping.
“Wait,” I plead, “I don’t even understand what it means yet.
I haven’t figured out whether it’s an analogy or —”
But the words are already gone, dissolved into salt water, and my heart doesn’t care. She has caught the writer’s meaning, and left my brain gasping to catch up.
I think this is how the artist is born: you are seeking out language for what you already feel. Because it’s not enough to be moved. When every light is flashing red — you must know what it was that reached through the words, the notes, the paint strokes and took hold of you.
You begin to take apart every beautiful thing, like a graverobber studying how the tendons connect to the muscle — until you think you understand what makes one thing stir butterflies in the belly, while another, nearly identical thing, feels dull and flat and lifeless.
And little by little, what was once intuitive becomes intentional.
Over time, you gather ideas. Little tricks, rules, observations. Some fall apart on closer inspection. Many drift dangerously into superstition. But a few ideas stay with you, becoming a kind of compass that guides you across art forms, and disciplines.
My father parks outside of City Hall. The noisy rumble of the dusty red Volkswagen van settles into silence as he cuts the engine and we get out. Behind the old clock tower, Table Mountain looms — its thick cloud cover forming a blanket that spills out over the flat summit of the mountain, dissolving as it descends.
We’re early. Only a handful of people are already here. The foyer is cool and quiet, soft voices, shuffling footsteps, a muffled cough, and then a stooped man with a greying beard is tearing my ticket. We find our seats in the third row from the stage, almost in line with the centre, the seats are velvety red, worn from years of use. My feet dangle above the floor but I can see everything from here.
I look around. The walls are pale cream, edged with ornate mouldings that top each pillar and curve around every arch.
On stage, the chairs form a wide semicircle and at intervals, music stands wait with their sheet music already open. A tall man walks out from the wings and takes his place behind a great double bass. He sits, shifting his position a few times before drawing his bow across the strings. A deep, resonant groan rolls out.
Behind him, the organ rises up in a wall of tall brass and mahogany pipes.
More players arrive, chatting softly as one carries a flute, two carry violins, a French horn, a clarinet. As they settle in their places, the sound gradually builds. An oboe holds a long note, the strings begin humming in their honeyed tones, warm against the clean woodwinds trilling brightly, the horns in their muted brass and the sharp burst of trumpets.
This is my favourite sound in the world — the sound of an orchestra warming up.
The music hasn’t been pulled tight yet — so it's like listening to a vast cloud of sound that the ear can drift through, wandering towards this instrument and that as each player is turned inward, listening each to their own instrument.
A beautiful cacophony, so full of anticipation.
Just then, the conductor strides onto the stage in his coat tails. He scans the orchestra, his movements stiff and abrupt. He nods once to the group, then turns to face the audience. He says a few words that I don’t remember, and then announces that they are about to play the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth symphony.
The conductor raises his baton. It hangs in the air, a moment stretched in silence.
And then, those four notes, the echo of which I can still hear today.
Da-da-da-DUM
I was nine years old, feet dangling off a velvet seat, thinking mostly about the size of that double bass and whether the conductor was standing too close to the edge of the stage.
That’s the strange thing about memory — what slips past unnoticed at the time can return years later, pulling taut, revealing what it was connected to all along.
Now I remember that day, as if Beethoven himself were giving me a lesson in form with the orchestra as his translator.
And now I will do my best to share that lesson with you.
One — It starts with a simple idea.
You don’t need a grand idea. The best one is like a marble in your pocket or something you’d whistle while mopping the kitchen floor.
In music we call this a motif.
In Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony those four opening notes, are our star ingredient. So tiny — just four notes — but so potent that we had to name them: ’Fate, knocking at the door.’
Da-da-da-DUM
The piece opens with our idea standing alone. Fate, stark and unaccompanied. It’s the silence around her that makes her powerful. Her shadow fills your doorstep.
I imagine a person approaching a lectern, stepping into the spotlight to deliver a powerful speech. They start with one short, perfect sentence — something they’ve spent time refining and rehearsing, because they know it holds the seed of everything to come. And they pause just then1.
They let it land, watching as it settles over the crowd.
It’s the same with Beethoven’s Fifth.
Two — Repetition.
Da-da-da-DUM
Our four notes are repeated for emphasis, this time a little lower and more ominous, as if Fate is saying. “I can see your car in the driveway and I know you’re actually home.”
You wouldn’t add just one cherry tomato to your salad — you want its pop of sweetness to return. And you wouldn’t want to forget that Fate was standing at your door. That’s why, in Beethoven’s Fifth, the sense that all of this unfolds from just four notes is never lost. The motif reverberates throughout the piece, never straying far. It returns. It insists. She knocks again.
There really is no escaping her.
Repetition ties a ribbon through an idea, making it stick in your mind — and stay there.
Three — Development
This is where the pattern begins to reveal itself. The wind section stirs, as if waking up, rippling upward in playful fragments, and building energy. Twisting and inverting, the music turns this way and that, chattering and questioning. Fate? Who is she? Where is she? She’s here? What could she possibly want with us?
We develop our idea. We turn it over and break it apart. We put it back together wrong on purpose, just to see what happens.
Development is a kind of interrogation. It asks: what else could this be? What happens if I stretch it, reverse it, or flip it upside down?
It’s where the original idea gets tested, pulled in directions it didn’t ask for, sometimes fighting back. Sometimes it surprises you and grows in ways that you didn’t expect.
Development takes a tiny seed and uses it to build a mighty oak, it’s branches twisting into the sky, even as every branch remembers where it began.
Four — But we also need contrast.
A speaker must outline the opposing view to let you feel the tension between opposites. Without contrast, there are no stakes — no reason to follow where his argument leads.
The cello’s voice feels even more sonorous beside the airy brightness of the woodwinds, and the woodwinds must make us imagine the bright sunshine that shone on us before Fate’s dark shadow ever darkened our doorstep, lest, we become numb to the darkness.
The brightness of lemon is set against a hint of chili, the soft bite of avocado against the warm crunch of toasted walnuts.
It’s the movement between extremes that creates energy.
On a rollercoaster, all that height — all the anticipation in the slow, click-clack to the top — only works if the drop comes right after. If you don’t place the high point next to the low, every additional inch of metal is nothing but wasted engineering.
The thrill is in the falling. Contrast is how you feel the depth of the form.
And finally — Five — the return:
The speechwriter will return to his original words, but not to the same place — he never could.
Because the first time he spoke them, those words echoed through the room without context. But if he’s done his job well, building upon his idea — turning it over, and letting it unfold — then when he speaks them again, they will land differently.
Maybe they’re the same words. Maybe a variation. But now they’re heavy with meaning.
We don’t come full circle because we return to the beginning, changed.
I think of Beethoven — the man — the way we often picture him: bushy eyebrows, furious scowl. Unruly, wild, and defiant.
He lived in a time when composers were expected to serve wealthy patrons, but Beethoven increasingly refused to be owned. He wrote for public audiences, for himself, and for the sake of the art.
He admired Napoleon, at first. When he began work on his ambitious Eroica Symphony, he titled it Bonaparte, dedicating the piece to a great man who had risen to power by merit, not by bloodline.
Then came 1804, when Napoleon dared to crown himself emperor, placing the laurel on his own head. For Beethoven, this was a betrayal. “Now he too will trample on all human rights,” he was said to have shouted.
In a fury, he marched to the title page and scratched out Bonaparte’s name so violently that he tore the manuscript, and renamed it:
Sinfonia Eroica — composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.
Not a great man, but the memory of one.
But listen to the music, and you’ll hear that for all that passion and fire, Beethoven was a master of structure, taking apart a small idea and turning it over in a hundred inventive ways.
It’s the shape that lets the wildness sing.
The shape of a spiral.
With it you can build anything: a symphony or a clay vase.
But there’s a danger, too. Push the development too far, too soon — or stretch it before it is ready, and the shape cannot hold. It collapses under it’s own weight.
Image Credit:
Edgar Degas, 1878, ‘L'Etoile’ - Musée d'Orsay
I never trust a speaker who rushes their premise and dives straight into the defense — my suspicion is always that what they’re planting might be a weed.
Wow, that’s a deep dive and a masterpiece ❤️…. I will have to read it again 🙏