Portrait of the Artist in Quarantine: Waste Books

The scene

I have a confession that may help you. As you know, we Lichtenbergians carry with us at all times some way to record our random thoughts, our WASTE BOOKS. The concept is that you dump everything into the WASTE BOOK so that you don’t have to keep nagging your brain to remember it. That would be exhausting.

My problem has been that since the Captivity, my brain has pretty much shut down. I am barely motivated to blog or tweet most days, and as for coming up with new ideas for MAKING THE THING THAT IS NOT, well, except for GALAXY, I’m out of the game.

And so I got out of the habit of carrying my WASTE BOOK around. What’s the point, right?

Here’s the point. A couple of days ago I went out to my labyrinth to sit quietly, write a letter, think calm comforting things, and I decided to pick up my WASTE BOOK and take it with me — and before I knew it, there were ideas rattling in my head, clamoring to be written down.

In other words, just having the book with me triggered the generation of ideas and thoughts. Because they could be written down, they arrived more freely. Ideas that before might have flashed a little brightly before vanishing — leaving me with only a feeling that the things I was not doing were getting more and more out of hand — were captured and scribbled down so that I could at least say, “I have a list of things…”

So once again I am forced to confess that had I followed my own Lichtenbergian advice I would have been in a better creative state all this time. Here endeth the lesson.

For more of my thoughts on WASTE BOOKS, see here.