I Have an Idea
This is an essay about ideas: whence they come, in what form, how quickly they disappear, and why I always feel like I'm getting behind on things.
I had this idea — to write this essay — nearly an hour ago, but it took me this long to finish what I was doing then, do a couple of other necessary things, and then get myself to the computer (the first available means of writing, in this case) and put pixels to screen. During that time I was thinking of various phrases I might use, words and bits of language to explain my thought, and came up with a dozen interesting observations I wanted to be sure to mention, half of which I've now forgotten.
One might naively imagine that ideas arrive at the speed of language, that they come walking leisurely along at about the same rate that one might read the words that describes them. Is this true for anyone? It certainly isn't true for me.
Ideas for me arrive whole — thump! — like a 16-ton weight dropping in front of me. But maybe that's a bad metaphor, because ideas, when they arrive, seem much more delicate than that; not necessarily fragile, but easily dispersed. Imagine, then, that they arrive like a dandelion blooming, suddenly and unexpectedly and then almost instantly changing to a fluffy seed-head that threatens to disperse irrevocably, forever denying one a chance for closer observation, should a small puff of wind come along.
An idea, as I said, arrives whole, but it is the idea that is whole and not the thing for which it is the idea that is complete, which hardly sounds like it makes sense as I type it. The idea is whole as a seed is whole (the dandelion provides another metaphor!) but far from being the entire plant; before the idea becomes the thing, there's a lot of growing and nurturing to take place. Nevertheless, it seems as thought the seed of an idea contains the germ of all that will eventually emerge. However, nurturing and growing the idea takes work and time — which, I suspect, contributes to that feeling I have of always getting behind on doing the things I want to get done. This is particularly vivid in working out a fiction idea: I might imagine the situation, some plot events, and characters complete with their histories, but until I let the characters lose into that situation I can't imagine everything that they're going to say or do. There's always room for the unexpected in working out an idea.
A picture comes to mind, a scene from a favorite movie: Brazil. Our hapless hero has been plunged into a multi-storied corporate beehive. He's standing outside his office and sees nothing but endless corridors stretching identically in all directions. In the distance he hears a buzz of activity — it's the boss, on the move, weaving a patter through the corridors as though he actually knows where he's going. And when the boss moves, it seems that all of his yes-men, supernumeraries, and brown-nosed toadies move with him, hovering about shouting questions and taking down answers. What a racket!
This is often how ideas arrive, not as pristine, shining objects on a cloud with a celestial choir singing gently in the background, but with a confused, noisy clump of words and thoughts and phrases and images that swirl around the idea and jostle for attention. Sometimes it's easier just to go back to sleep.
Fine, so there's the idea and all those bits of sentences and metaphors and imagery, just waiting to be noted down. What could be easier? But when it all comes along much faster than one can write it down — provided one is in a place where there is even the means to write — it's impossible to capture all the bits, particularly since they don't organize themselves in any sensible way. Instead you have to waste time getting all the subordinate thoughts to line up by height so you can even begin to make sense of them, and then you discover that one or two have disappeared to go to the bathroom and another is off chasing butterflies.
These ideas, for me, arrive in a fashion rather like déjà vu, which always resolves itself into a moment for me, a particular instant, like a snapshot, that gives the uncanny feeling of having happened before. What has always seemed odd to me, though, is that I can feel it coming. I get a sensation that lasts for maybe half a minute, maybe a minute or two, that a moment of déjà vu is about to happen … then … boom! … it does. That was it right there, not a moment before, not a moment after.
In similar fashion, I might be reading and start having the sensation that two or three trains of thought are speeding towards each other and that in a moment — boom! — they collide and there's an idea lying there in their wreckage. That twisted and mangled thing is the idea, not all the stuff that was leading up to it. An idea sometimes seems like a surprisingly coherent, identifiable entity.
Then the trouble comes in expressing the idea. The more the delay — and some is inevitable — the more the mind keeps churning and coming up with further thoughts and images. Are these thoughts related? Are the images meant as metaphors? Or, as seems equally plausible, are the thoughts and images just random firings of the brain that, because of their proximity to the nascent idea, get dragged in as enhancement and metaphor? Maybe it's this happenstance that finds new connections between ideas and I should welcome it. The bit about the dandelion and the scene from Brazil, for instance, both arrived some time after the idea to write about ideas arrived, but now they seem organically connected to me.
And so, there's the idea, and then before one can even express the idea it becomes laden, perhaps burdened or overburdened, with unrelated thoughts that become related thoughts. It starts to seem like the rarest of things to me that any idea can get out with any of its identity intact amidst all that mental chaos.
Ah, chaos. Now, there's an idea I could go on about for awhile!
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on Sunday, 15 April 2007 at 19.35
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Much of the time, I'll have something trigger my thoughts, starting a sort of brewing process. Only now and then do thoughts spring up full blown and in readily usable form.
But oh, can I relate to how things can get in the way of getting ideas down, of putting them into a coherent, presentable form. I can also relate to how ideas can be delicate and fleeting, can become dispersed or morph into a bunch of related things to be thought about, almost like a changing kaleidoscope image.
It's an interesting topic, but one I don't want to think about too much. That's because thinking about thoughts and thought processes tends, for me at least, to get in the way of thinking through things I need to think through.