New ideas about old ideas

(Old paper finds from a local Trödelladen.)

This is a loose follow-up to this earlier post. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about idea cataloging lately, thanks to a course Caroline and I are taking together about “Building a Second Brain”. We’re coming to the end and it’s helped me reorient my relationship to all the cool and interesting links, stories and half-baked ideas I run across (or seek out) every day. 

Remember a few years ago when everybody on the internet was “a curator”? While I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that I’m curating (in the meaningful sense of the word) I do feel like I’m building a Wunderkammer that I can learn from and return to on a regular basis, instead of simply noticing that something is neat and then forgetting about it entirely. 

One of the most interesting ideas from the course, obvious once pointed out, is that regardless of what any individual book highlight says, your collection of highlights, ideas, quotes, images, and links is really just a mirror. Your magpie collection of sparklys is a peek into your own brain.

Which may ultimately be the point of finding new things, so see what’s already there. I read a lot. Not as much as Caroline (not by a long shot) but based on all the oft-lamented statistics about average reading habits I’m way above average. That’s cool I guess, but how much do I actually remember and how much does this reading change me? There’s a bit on The Incomparable podcast that several of the regular guests need to look at their Goodreads accounts to remember if they’ve liked, or even read, a certain book. Me? I barely use Goodreads, so what can I even reference? 

In my imaginary scenario, all the things I read - the most interesting tidbits at least - are somehow expressed in my collages and prints. While nothing I do is narrative or even representational, I am making choices at every step of assembling a collage (we’ll stick with them for the sake of example but you could substitute print, drawing, or sketchbook spread). The reasons behind those choices are sometimes concrete, like eliminating a weird tangent, but most often they are because one option “feels better” than another. It could feel better because I’m consciously engaging with an idea, or it could feel better just because I like the way it looks. 

So does this scenario play out? And thanks to spending more time with my Wunderkammer (I am alternately calling it my “witches cauldron” and my “spark file”.) am I more aware of what I’m trying to express? And is my work therefore better? I don’t know. My guess is, not yet. I don’t know how ideas expressed in words turn into ideas expressed in pictures. It’s not a 1-to-1 equation but it happens, somehow.

The course has also revitalised how I use my sketchbook. While I still let myself simply “doodle”, I’m getting better at treating pages as small projects and experimenting on them. My sketchbooking has become both looser and more “serious”. Sketchbook pages as intermediate packets. 

All this writing and I’ve not talked at all about how I actually catalog my ideas. Next blog post?