The Immediacy of the Idea


"Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." Rainer Maria Rilke

Given the sieve-like status of my memory, I keep trying to make the effort to keep a sketchbook. The effort usually wanes. I end up with odd jotting on random pieces of paper that make no sense to me later. This blog, for better or worse, is the most sustained record of my creative life that I have been able to keep going.

Almost in spite of myself, I still seem to manage to hold on to some ideas. Does the thought get re-filed into long term storage through the process of writing things down? Or does simply asking "What if?" start things cooking in the back of the brain?

Jude Hill at Spirit Cloth has posted a thought-provoking piece on capturing an idea. Equally interesting are the comments by her readers.

I guess, in the last few hours of 2010, I have arrived at my resolution for the New Year: "Live the questions now."

Comments

  1. yes. and a happy now to you.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Happy New Year!

    I love the quote.

    Are you familiar with Ze Frank? In '06, he posted this resolution on his blog:

    I promise not to keep ideas in my head, unfulfilled and full of promise - not to let these vague outlines of future actions give me false confidence and security in the abstract. Instead I will execute them quickly and faithfully so that I am again on the brink of the unknown, hoping that these ideas were not the last that would ever come to me from God knows where.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Brilliant! Happy New Year, Rosa!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I love keeping ideas notebooks. My sister gave me the utmost flattery a while ago when she asked me to leave them to her in my will!

    ReplyDelete
  5. What a marvellous new year resolution! you should embroider it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. sieve like memory and... uh yeah, a little while ago I read (somewhere) about putting doodles and scraps of ideas in a shoe box... and then I forgot where I read it but it's a great workable idea. Mmhmmm, you know where I read it. I will say I still like it and have been putting stuff in that shoe box, when I remember.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Please forgive me for using word verification. The spam robots got to me.