Where ideas go to die: in praise of incomplete ideas

I was listening to a conference at Creative Bangkok when one of the speakers mentioned the fact that creatives tend not to write things down, and then forget some of their greatest ideas.

“Amnesia Tax”, he called it.

It made me chuckle.

Quite ironically, I cannot remember who it was…

Like many friends and colleagues, I spent the vast majority of my free time, on holidays or in planes, doing a lot of reading. From Elon Musk’s biography, to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ take on the ongoing American racial crisis, to my newly found passion for the work of Jonathan Franzen, or my lasting relationship to Salman Rushdie, and French authors like Emmanuel Carrère,

I read a lot. Throughout the year, this amounts to three to four books a month.

Physically written

When they say that « people » are moving away from ebooks, they’re not talking about me. I’ve been obsessed with physical, paper books for as long as I can remember. I own many thousands. They’re part of our living room decor, a permanent fixture.

As I’ve written in The Color of Books, I’ve recently taken to ordering them more randomly, choosing color as a proxy for order. Anyway, all of this was predicted by Duncan Stewart in 2014, so who am I kidding.

That said, people who ask why I buy and not borrow don’t seem to understand. This is no mere “collection”. These books are an extension of my mind. An accessible library, a repository of the many ideas I’ve come to like and dislike over the years.

I’ve even bought and read my fair share of Anarchist and Marxist books. You know, stuff “intellectuals” like to brag about.

When I read, I normally annotate the margins: the books are mine, I do what I want with them. While it certainly reduces their second-hand value, I like to think that one day, in a distant future, somebody will stumble upon this collection of mine, and try to see what I saw in them. For posterity, then.

As a thorough approach to readership, annotation and commentary requires that the reader take his time. While I’m a fast reader, taking the time to stop and write down something forces me to interpret, to absorb, to let the prose sink in.

When I was writing my Ph.D. thesis, reading academic books on innovation and bureaucracy and creativity and strategy, I used to rewrite my notes and some quotes in Word documents. That would make the best parts of books — from my perspective at least — “searchable” in a way. It would allow faster access to the sources of knowledge.

From the quotes, I could go back to the source, remember the context, and link ideas together. A Ph.D. is nothing but a bricolage; an association, almost at random, of a vast amount of intellectual substance.

Long gone are the days of narratives like those contained in Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Semmelweis, the prosaic story of a man who forever changed the medical profession.

There is little room left for beauty in contemporary academia.

While I reckon that such a thorough technique is certainly the best way into the doctoral universe, it is difficult for a “civilian” like I’ve become to maintain such intensity when engaging with any given book. For one, I have been reading a lot more fiction these last few years, and not all of it has the same deep, ground-breaking pretention that academics like to boast.

Amnesia Tax Avoidance

What I do instead is that sometimes, at the end of a book — or sometimes after two or three — I open a blank page on the computer and start typing away. This yields all sorts of ideas, from pieces on ambition, to environmental and ecological concerns, to authenticity, trust and attention, wealth, technology, the place of women in society, economics, literature, arts, sexuality, and creativity.

Yet, because it is not a structured pattern of reporting / combining ideas, most of these preliminary articles end up unfinished. I have several dozen such pieces waiting to be completed, and because they end up taking a lot of physical space (both as icons on my desktop and in my mental representation of productivity), I have started dumping them in a folder dumbly called “Articles”.

Now and then, with strong resolve or out of guilt, I visit “Articles”. I surf through the preliminary attempts at brilliant pieces.

Some of these could become books, I say to myself.

Notes, brainstorms, ideas at the foetal stage. Most of the time, I don’t even remember what I wanted to say, or why I cared. But I keep it there, nonetheless.

A story half-written is better than no story at all.

It serves as a sort of creative slack, excess prose, unusable as such, but perhaps, when the conditions are just right, a great point of view that will write itself.

Articles is a garbage can for documents.

Its where ideas go to die, physically, mentally and literally. But in this dump are gems. Diamonds in the rough.

All we need is to be more patient with ourselves. Height can be achieved by the littering of building blocks; or at least by standing on top of our own piles of rubble.