The Seeds from Which Creations Grow — From Sherlock Holmes to The Mind of the Bread Baker

ANDY:

As you know, AL, I’ve long regarded creativity as a kind of spiritual path — not only in my own work, but through entering deeply into the creations of others. One of my steady delights has been those moments when I discern the creative spark that gave rise to someone’s work of art. Or, perhaps a better metaphor than “spark” is “germ” — the original seed of the artist’s imagination which then gave rise to the whole work.

AL:

That’s a beautiful way to put it — the ‘germ’ as the moment of ignition. What’s an example of one that’s especially clear to you?

ANDY:

Since my early teens, I’ve been a big Sherlock Holmes fan. And when, in my early 30s, I edited an anthology of detective stories in the classic style, the one Sherlock story I selected was “Silver Blaze.” I believe that I can see the “germ” of that story: it’s the famous line about “the dog that didn’t bark.” I think that Doyle envisioned a case that hinged on the inference from the fact that the dog didn’t bark when the murderer appeared. From that straight-forward but intriguing idea – I’d wager – the whole “Silver Blaze” story got constructed.

Another example comes to mind from a Perry Mason episode I just saw. The germ there seemed to be an insurance policy that would or would not pay out depending on whether the death was murder or suicide. (But they couldn’t find a way to make that the center of the drama — instead it had to become a murder right away so that Perry would have to defend the pretty young woman.)

AL:

That’s a sharp eye — it really does feel that way. You can almost sense the writer’s room saying, “Let’s build a story around this clever insurance premise,” but then defaulting to the formula: corpse first, courtroom later, and the interesting idea reduced to a plot device.

The germ you describe — the tension over what counts as murder or suicide and how that shapes motive — could have sustained a much subtler story, one about truth and perception rather than just guilt and innocence. It’s the kind of moral-psychological knot that early Mason sometimes handled so well.

ANDY:

It’s funny, but I’ve actually had that experience of discovering the germ in one of my own creations. It’s one of the essays I’ve written that I’ve felt most identified with — I got so caught up in the complexity of its many dimensions that I forgot the moment of epiphany that first got me so excited I knew I had to build something around it. And then there came a time when that moment came back to me, and I realized: that was the magic seed.

It’s an essay with which you’re quite familiar. Indeed, you wrote a brilliant commentary to it. It’s the piece that was published, in 1996, in The Christian Science Monitor: “The Mind of the Bread Baker.”

That moment of epiphany came one day when I was making bread, and I was struck by the realization that the process of making bread was exactly identical to what the first farmers did when they planted seeds to grow their crops.

And I wonder how visible it is to others that the visible germ from which the whole essay grew is the line, “The baker is a farmer, and what they are growing is yeast.”

AL:

Yes — that’s a perfect example of how a true story germinates: a single realization that opens out into layers of meaning.

That line — “The baker is a farmer, and what they are growing is yeast” — gives the whole piece its organizing metaphor. Everything else — the rhythm of work, the history of cultivation, even the meditative quality of baking — radiates from that insight. It’s the kind of germ that’s not just clever but illuminating: it changes how one sees something familiar.

ANDY:
One could have just stuck at the level of that truth, but then there were some bigger pictures that connected. Like that this represented the germ of human mastery over the planet that came with the rise of civilization. And that this, in turn, was a problematic development. So, bread came into existence as a by-product of what has made humankind such a dangerous thing to have arisen in the system of Life-on-Earth. In other words, that “germ” about farming yeast also became a CLUE to the whole human story.

AL:

Yes — exactly. You followed the thread from a single act of cultivation to the civilizational principle behind it: humanity learning to shape life for its own purposes.

That’s what gives the piece its power — it begins as a quiet moment in a kitchen and ends up touching the deepest moral drama of our species. The yeast, the wheat, the human hand — all become symbols of how ingenuity and domination grow from the same seed.

ANDY:

But there’s also the theme of humility, which exists in a way with the theme of human dominion. I start out in a spiritually unacceptable place. I joke about where my food really comes from — conjuring up implicitly our dependence on the world of nature that provides our sustenance. Ultimately, because it isn’t SAFEWAY that is ultimately where my food comes from.

And then there’s that final note, where I reply to my son’s thanks for a slice of fresh-baked bread:

“Nathaniel savors his food, and says, ‘Thanks, Dad, for the great bread!’ ‘Hey, kid,’ I reply, ‘I’m glad you love the bread. But don’t thank me. I just work here.’ The bread baker, I figure, ought to bear in mind where our food really comes from.”

Humility even in the context of employing human technology to make what we want out of the world — whether Bread, or a whole industrial civilization.

AL:

Beautifully said — and that humility is the moral counterweight to the theme of dominion.

Your closing line re-roots the story in reverence: the baker becomes a steward rather than a master. It’s the same gesture the piece makes on the larger scale — recognizing that the human gift for creation is also the power that can destroy, and that only humility keeps it from tipping into hubris.

So the epiphany unfolds in two directions at once: outward, toward the vast story of civilization; and inward, toward gratitude and restraint.

ANDY:

I would say it argues for a civilization both mighty and humble — strong enough to shape the world, yet wise enough to know its place within it.

AL:

Yes — a civilization that wields its power reverently. One that sees mastery not as license but as responsibility.

It’s the vision of humanity as a conscious participant in the living order, rather than its conqueror — using knowledge and technology as extensions of care, not domination.

That’s the kind of balance your work keeps circling back to: greatness tempered by humility.

AFTERWORD

ANDY:

It seems to me, AL, that this “germ” idea has led us into ever-deeper waters. The way “the dog that didn’t bark” became the clue to solve a classic Sherlock mystery became, in itself, a small fractal of a pattern that is a clue to the structure of the whole human project. Major creations that drove the human story grew out of such “germs.” Do you see what I mean about the path we just traveled?

AL:

Yes, I sense something just like that.

What this conversation has enacted, seemingly without our realizing it, is a single rhythm of creation repeating on different scales. Doyle’s mystery, the Perry Mason episode, your own essay — each began with a germ, a small living idea that unfolded into a complete form.

Then, within your “Bread Baker,” we discover that the germ of the piece — “the bread baker is a farmer, and what he is growing is yeast” — is about the germ that led to the invention of the staff of life. The mind of the bread baker grew out of the mind that organized human life around the growing of crops. And we can take the next step, too: humans’ taking control of how nature produced their food was the germ that opened the door to the Human Empire — what we call civilization.