A thought experiment: Bring to mind your favorite symphony. Play it to yourself in your mind. What are you hearing?

Are you able to actually recreate the sound of each instrument and combine them into a sum? Or are you recalling an effect of a mass of instruments that somehow represents the whole without representing all the parts? Pay close attention: do you notice anything missing from your imagined symphony? Or is the effect complete, despite the unrepresented individual parts?

When I try this experiment, what I recall is a sonic form that resembles the symphony. Nothing essential seems to be missing. However, if I put this apparent completeness to the test (for instance by trying to hum the first violin part out loud) it becomes obvious that this totality doesn’t come apart into individual instruments. I can hum the major theme, and “hear” it as the symphonic whole, and I can hum some of the standout solo parts, but most of the music is mysterious abbreviated into a sense of the whole.

However, there is more to my memory than the things I can recall at will. I experience this when I hear an actual performance. As I listen I recognize the recalled form in what I hear. But beyond that, I also detect with surprising subtlety and detail, the degree of conformity and deviation. None of this can be conjured up by the imagination, only recognized.

I find that when I do recall a musical piece in that incomplete gisty way, it arises with a desire to actually hear a performance of it.

The ideal seems to crave completion in concrete phenomena. And, of course, concrete phenomena, too, need the ideal — because without the ideal, phenomena is chaos.

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In creativity, the ideal and the phenomenal play similar roles and have similar characteristics as they do in memory.

Just like imagined music wants to be heard, newly conceived and undeveloped ideas wants to be actualized and experienced in reality.

Just like imagined music wants to be heard, newly conceived and undeveloped ideas are perceived only in mysterious abbreviation, which can only be described in a combination of broad outline and very specific highlight details.

And like remembered music, the ideal is much more than what is imagined. It seeks itself in the concrete world and can distinguish whether what it sees matches the ideal or strays from it.