The end of the 18^th century marks the beginning of the long, modern fertile period. Between 1750 and 1800 ideas flowered in a spring so rich that it has many names: Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, Romanticism.

Some of the ideas (liberty, fraternity, equality, for example) spilled over into the world of action and changed history. Others (irony, for one) were subtler but no less powerful and would have a long-range effect right up to the present.

It fell to that bane of high school English students, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to give perfect voice to one of these ideas:

His original turn of the phrase was in reference to the reader's response to poetry, but everyone immediately realized he had summarized most of the human experience of art generally. So the phrase—and the idea—entered world culture. Where it still resides as one of those handy terms. Whether you’re talking about a Spielberg movie, a Stephen King novel, a twitch-em-up video game, a multi-decibel rave, or a simple TV sitcom, they all require the same thing of spectators/ participants: a willing suspension of disbelief. That is if the spectator/participant wants to enjoy the experience.

It’s why we’re so happy to pay for such experiences, why we seek them out. They can take us away from ourselves for a while. Escape. We forget our life and become contented, immersed observers of another world.

The world we enter may be great (Hamlet) or small (South Park), grandiose (Wagner) or trivial (Goldilocks). No matter. Our minds are for a while set free and we enjoy a dream created by others for our pleasure.

Two centuries have passed since Coleridge nailed the idea. He got it as surely and neatly as Michael Jordan got a slam-dunk.

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But the times, they are achanging.

That world of art and entertainment which Coleridge was talking about is still very much with us, vaster than ever.

But what are these shadows, now lengthening, which if you look carefully have been there all the time? Shadows of doubt which if examined more closely seem to conceal abysses of ignorance and despair.

Consider, please, the pickle that quantum physics has now got itself into: dividing the measured world into such tiny portions that now the portions are beyond measuring, formulating constructs to describe heads of pins on which wholly imaginary angels may dance just so that the numbers come out right.

Or observe the quandary of cosmologists: quasars belching energies that can only be described using impossibly large orders of magnitude, red shifts that don’t shift the way they’re supposed to, which throws off all kinds of previously tidy calculations (the "age" of the universe, among others).

Closer to Coleridge’s old home base, there’s the problem of lit crit/ art crit and philosophy generally. As one prominent figure wading through the bog recently put if: If objectivity is dead, then there’s no longer any question of who’s right; all that matters is who’s interesting.

A fine kettle of Fish, isn’t it?

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Not surprising, really.

Wittgenstein saw it coming decades ago, this miasma of meretricious moaning that now passes for theories of science and art. He used the metaphor of a fly-bottle, that is a specimen jar in which a zoologist might keep an insect.

Wittgenstein concluded that we’re flies trapped in the fly-bottle of language. As long as we keep restricting ourselves to interacting with the world and experience through the symbols of language (including of course numbers), there’s no way out. We define the bottle and the bottle defines us.

The world we inhabit, the world we believe, is the world of our senses—and of our languages.

But look what happens if we turn Coleridge upside down.

We say, sure, Sam, you’re right, but you’re right only inside the bottle.

And Sam, along with everybody else, comes back with: but there’s no way out of the bottle.

Ah, Sam, Sam. What a provincial you are, in spite of all your wit and erudition. Let me adjust your little dictum, please, so that it reads:

And Sam would say, it’s nonsense.

And I say, au contraire, my compulsively talkative friend. It is your very immersion, your complete immersion in language that makes it impossible for you to see that other forms of human experience, perception, and consideration surround us constantly. All you have to do is stop believing that language is the only way to be. Just drop the alphanumerics, and you’re home free.

In other words:

Suspend belief in belief.

Or, as a certain Chinese person said 1500 years ago: Don’t search for the truth, just cease to cherish opinions.

Do that, Sam, my boy, and the bottle vanishes and worlds undreamt of in your tidy philosophy open up to you.

The only thing is, you have to decide to do it. It ain’t gonna happen by itself. So, to be more accurate in our reformulation of your marvelous old idea, we should begin to speak of the creative life as: