On Epiphanies and Lost Ideas
Lost Ideas
Naples, 2016Desk Notes explores writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.Nearly everyone notices that epiphanies have a propensity to strike during hot showers, though they also seem to favor mid-morning strolls, or quiet moments when the sun illuminates the sky, because that’s when you’re preoccupied, a bit distracted, and that’s just perfect for a flash of inspiration. What startles me is that these flashes—a desire to write, an impulse about tomorrow, a retort for yesterday’s argument—almost always emerge at the oddest of times, in those moments when my attention is elsewhere. On these occasions a specific and fully-formed idea hits me with a jolt, although, almost instantly, the new idea feels like mine, as if I have planned its birth. And this sensation encourages me to believe that I selected the idea and planned its arrival—despite my knowledge that the source is far below my conscious awareness. However much I strain, I can’t quite pinpoint that origin, nor the impetus, as the trigger comes from a spot too elusive and mysterious for even my most focused moments. My experience of epiphany more accurately resembles the experience of a witness rather than an author, as I discover new ideas that, so to speak, I never decided to create.Of course the causality isn’t questioned when it comes to more primal impulses: your need for food is explained with grumpy, urgent words, but the impulse that you’ve put into sentences comes only after your stomach has sent a complaint. Your conscious mind responds to but doesn’t propose the complaint. You don’t even have access to the message’s origin—it arises, comes to your attention, but you miss the beginning. Awareness always comes long after the point of departure—for your most primal impulses, with those epiphanies, when you feel most creative.And one way in which I’ve changed is that I now discount the role of logic or strategy or design in moments of creativity. Perhaps a part of me has always considered this true, but the mixture has certainly changed in recent years. Obviously there are no absolutes, or clear recipes for innovation—to believe otherwise is to assume that creativity is a mere consequence of labor, which would imply that all the greatest writers and painters and musicians are simply the hardest workers. Industriousness is quite obviously a necessary component, yet the best results still contain at least a tinge of mystery. The spark, I now believe, comes from balancing just the right combination of labor and mystery.So we can influence the potential for creativity, by following routines and processes and by maintaining a discipline that serves to make epiphanies more likely, but that doesn’t mean that the final step is within our control. A line from an 1876 letter from Gustave Flaubert seems to hit just the right note on this subject: “Be regular and orderly in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Over time I’ve tried to develop a practice that might be considered analogous to that principle—with at least a bit of order to help prompt results that are novel, unforeseeable, even haphazard. Thus I have notebooks and lists and what is now a ridiculous amount of folders, which I maintain with, I admit, a rather peculiar diligence. But I also attempt to keep some open, aimless space in my day without the chains of a clock or schedule, and I ensure that each page of writing has plenty of space for the fortuitous.Unfortunately, there are stumbles when it comes to fulfilling this basic discipline. Just yesterday, for example, I watched the early-morning sun chase the night away, thinking about nothing in particular, my mind calm underneath the orange glow, without any hurry or intent, when an idea struck me. Something intriguing. Original. Absolutely worth exploring in an essay. But in a moment of weakness that feels unforgivable and excruciating to anybody that relishes playing with ideas, the thought somehow slipped away, its departure as quick as its arrival, the unwritten essay to remain forever unexplored, so that, instead, I wrote what you just read.