Sitzfleisch and Catching IDEAS
Inspiration needs office hours.
I have nothing today so I am going to write about ideas. Ideas come and go all the time. They will disappear if you don‘t capture them. They are both important and so abundant that they are cheap.
Filmmaker David Lynch spoke about this in his masterclass (where I took notes that currently are not with me - nomad life - so from memory), how easily we lose ideas that come to us if we’re not ready to catch them. He compared it to fishing. And then to planting little seeds.
The big ones, naturally, are harder to catch. They need time and preparation and silence. Little fish, ideas that are just a fraction of, say, a future film or a design or a song (or a solution to a big problem for that matter) can slip through your fingers much easier but can be planted like a seed to grow into something much bigger.
Write down an idea immediately or else it may vanish. You can think it‘s the best idea you‘ve ever had, impossible to ever forget and that you’re a genius and you wake up a few days later and it‘s gone. Poof. This is why documenting thoughts is so important for creatives. Sometimes you can drag it back but very rarely. Thank goodness other people, including David Lynch (no comparison obviously other than good hair), have had the same experience so I know it is not my brain alone that is to blame.
You have to tie these little weasels down or else they are gone forever.
Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Big Magic, Eat Pray Love), who speaks about this frequently, once interviewed Tom Waits on his song writing process and he related how a fraction of a beautiful melody came to him while he was driving and he had nothing to record it with. You may already have heard this but I will share it anyway. She talks about it in a conversation with The New York Public Library’s Paul Holdengräber1 (links below):
EG: And he (Tom Waits) thought, “How am I going to catch this song?” And he started to have all that old panic and anxiety that artists have about feeling like you’re going to miss something, and then he just slowed down and he looked up at the sky, and he looked up and he said, “Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? If you’re serious about wanting to exist, come back and see me in the studio. I spend six hours a day there, you know where to find me, at my piano. Otherwise, go bother somebody else. Go bother Leonard Cohen.”
PH: And I love that, and I love that because … Leonard Cohen, when asked about inspiration, he said, “If I knew where inspiration came from, I would go there more often.”
EG: But you know, there’s a way to go there more often, and it’s to show up at your desk at six o’clock every morning.2
I love how they are then trying to pronounce ‘Sitzfleisch’, one of those great (but difficult) words of my mother tongue for which there is no equivalent in the English language.
It literally means sit + meat but it’s not the actual butt cheeks that are meant.
Rather, the word denotes the persistence and endurance needed to get stuff done: bottom in chair, putting in the hours, getting the work done. Give inspiration office hours and it will show up, the muse knows where to find you and ideas swim past and you’re ready to grab them.
Combine it with walking and time to let the mind wonder (see my previous post), and you should be on your way to creative productivity.
That’s all I have today after an eventful week. As this edition is a little late, the next one is hot on its heels.
Happy Sunday/Monday!
Hadassa
PS: What should write about next?