Recently I stumbled on artist Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains, with its fluorescently-painted totems of large, car-size stones stacked 32 feet high in the desert outside Las Vegas.

From a distance, it makes for a wildly joyful vision, as though some brightly-colored giants were heading my way across the arid desert-scape. It reminded me a bit of poet Gary Snyder’s description of how poetry comes to him:

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the 
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light.

Rondinone’s big bold ideas are happily and forthrightly presenting themselves, yet are still needing to be met…

I asked David Saltman of The Houdini File what Rondinone’s totems made him think of. In a riff of perfect free association he said:  Lollypop… Menorah  

It made me laugh for reasons unknown, and strangely in tune with the holidays.

Free associating, expressing without censorship to access to unconscious information, is a practice we can employ anywhere with always-interesting, reliably-unpredictable results: fertile ground for creative ideas. (It is also an illuminating way to enjoy a work of art.)

So say whatever goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views you see outside. 

― Sigmund Freud, On Beginning the Treatment (1913)