Once upon a time there was a centipede that was amazingly good at dancing with all four hundred and eighty legs. All the creatures of the forest gathered to watch everytime the centipede danced, and they were all impressed by the exquisite dance. But there was one creature that didn’t like watching the centipede dance-that was a tortoise. He couldn’t just say he didn’t like the dance. Neither could he say he danced better himself, that would obviously be untrue. So he devised a fiendish plan.
He sat down and wrote a letter to the centipede. “O incomparable centipede,” he wrote, “I am a devoted admirer of your exquisite dancing. I must know how you go about it when you dance. Is it that you lift leg number 28 and then your right leg number 39? Or do you begin by lifting your right leg number 17 before you lift your left leg number 44?
I await your reply in breathless anticipation. Yours truly, Tortoise”
When the centipede read the letter, she immediately began to think about what she actually did when she danced. Which leg did she lift first? And which leg next? In the end the centipede never danced again.
A story where imagination gets strangled by reasoned deliberation.
So it is important for an artist not to let reason and reflection control a more or less unconscious expression
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