David Lynch talks about ideas as fish. He says if you sit still and wait and are open to catching one, they’ll just pop into your consciousness, so you right them down and then others come and join it and you write them down too and then you can express them in whatever way seems right – a film, a poem, a piece of wood, whatever. For a long time I was stuck in wondering what this meant in my experience, “is *this* thought an idea?… or this one?” – that’s a sticky place to be and it stuck me good. From the perspective of today it’s easy to say, well that’s the mind getting tangled up in asking stupid questions instead of just doing what you’re supposed to do. It’s hard to admit that one’s mind has been so stubbornly in control – especially when you’re supposed to be thinking up ideas! I’ve been meditating for years. Have I been doing it all wrong all that time?
But I had an experience a couple of weeks ago that shifted my understanding. And funnily enough, it happened down by the river. I didn’t go fishing, I went for a run and I ended up at the river just down the lane from us. It was one of those going-to-be-hot days but it also felt like there was more moisture in the air than had been, and I’d gone out later than I’d intended. So I was hot, sweaty and worried about being late, but I had also run enough to shut the chatterbox up a bit. So I’m walking towards the path up to the main road and I see a guy whistling for his dog. He’s holding a lead but I can’t see the dog. He’s not agitated or doing anything wildly physical, just standing there and whistling and calling for the (invisible to me) dog to come out of the water. And I made up a little story, which I won’t spill out onto here, but “making up a little story” is something that I feel like I’m always doing, but this time I recognised it as and idea, as the kind of idea we were talking about when I started writing this post, the fish kind. And as I let it swim around in me, it did indeed attract more ideas and ways in which the story could expand and make sense and then by the time I was home and had stretched and showered, I could sit down and write the whole thing out and yes even more fishy little ideas came swimming along, to help me make sense of this weird story. And suddenly I’m sitting there with a notebook full of words and I feel like I’ve just sat by the riverbank and filled my nets, it’s so satisfying.
And it reminded me of some blurb I wrote for myself a few years ago when I performed some of my own songs, “that writing songs could mean just typing out those strange and silly words in his head, in a kind of sensible order, while strumming his ukulele”.
I’m thinking and writing about this now because there’s an idea kicking around that has some similar dimensions to the fish/idea I wrote down in August 2007 which then became all that stuff that happened since then (if you know, you know – if you don’t then just re-read the last 15 years of this blog and follow any links that work). But my mind is fighting writing it down and I recognise that that’s because I don’t have all the answers ready yet. But that’s not how it works, you don’t have the idea and immediately get all the other ideas and know how to implement it, how this particular set of ideas need to be expressed in the world, you just sit still with it, write it down, write down the other things that come along to join it and before you know it, it will have taken some physical form and you’ll need a few more hands to make a home for it.
