What is creativity? The only way to say is to examine those times in our lives during which we are most creative. There may tend to be times during which the mind never ceases to lose its faith in rearrangement: one character can become another, one part in a machine substitute for another. One element substitute for another. From one side of thought, this turns the entire universe into a forest of illusion. And that is not the strain of thought that the ace of sticks represents. In fact, this archetype represents a chessplayer-like ability to scan trees of possible outcomes; to command the different mental aliases involved in creative thought. Instead of never seeing the forest of illusion for the trees of creative dilation, it never ceases to somehow seek those most fertile trees from among the entire forest. The ace of sticks is not simply a forest explorer, but a taxonomist and an avid note-taker. Sketchbook in hand, the ace cuts through a thicket of ordinary results with ordinary tools, carefully cataloguing every brilliantly-dilated tree. This act of record-taking on top of the data ensures that the ace will be able to sum together subjective aspects of The Eternity according to a certain objective. Those most fertile time trees, in which infinities of infinities are contained, can almost never truly be found; but in rearranging the elements of infinity taken as records, the ace circumambulates a goal: an invention. The most fertile time trees, like the inventions that will never go away in civilization, almost don't want to be found, due to the permanence of their effects. History would have a different shape if this were not the case -- and this is an unfortunate truth: that, in other words, the ace often gets lost in the forest of illusion and fails to even classify the situations encountered, not thinking that proper classification is the root of further discovery. Perhaps it is best to define classification as the result of the process of at least answering every single one of the questions who, what, where, when, why, and how, so that anything not extraneous to that information seems irrelevant. Every single rearrangement of elements, in terms of a creative process, must be classified and documented in some sense. The benefits of this are not immediately obvious, nor is the proper scale for documentation ever obvious. And so the ace continues to wonder through the forest of illusion, and the simple idea that there might be some level of linguistic encoding, down to even basic imitation, that would illuminate the search remains un-thought.
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