The one that got away

Castro = Dillinger? Crumping = Ductile? Crabs = Dumb?

Established artists advise you to keep post-its or a notepad next to your bed in case you’re visited by inspiration. New ideas thrive in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic state either side of sleep, but they’ll withdraw into the dream-fog unless you pin them to a page. Of course any homemaker or project manager with a knack for to-do lists could’ve given you the same advice, but artists like to make a big deal of things. As we shall see…

Most nights you’ll only get as much as one idea, no hassle to write down. But on the odd bright night of the soul, you end up filling post-it after post-it, flinging them over your shoulder Amadeus-style. Inspiration in the early hours is the most fun you can have alone in bed. Your mind courses through the logic of an idea, finding more and more branches: “Because of this then that, which means this, this and this, oh and also this. All of which mean...” Your imagination has drawn together enough connections, checked enough criteria, passed the right thresholds to set off a chain reaction, like the multiplier effects in a board game or a run of tricks in a card game or the flying king that clears the pieces in draughts. It’s similar to solving a puzzle - tension followed by Eureka - except it happens over and over, pummelling you. They call it the ‘flow state’ but it’s more a pulse. It’s like your subconscious is buttonholing you—“And another thing.” The snooze alarm of successive ideas has you turning your lamp on then off then on again so you can get it all down. And in the morning the post-its surround your bed like tissues when you’re laid-up with a cold.

Inspiration can leave you as unrested as a cold. Even a mild idea can disturb and diminish your sleep by hours. The alternative is letting the idea go and risk losing what might’ve been the first scribble in the years of work of a new book, or a stonker of a story no one’s thought of before. And so one night I came up with a halfway house of a plan.

Next time in bed when an idea alighted, I wouldn’t turn on the lamp to write it down in full, let alone elaborate on it and risk drawing out all its branches. Instead I’d write only the headline, or some keywords, a shorthand prompt I knew I’d know the meaning of and so recall the idea in full once I was up and fresh-brained in the morning.

For weeks this worked. My prompt notes were the proverbial knot in my pyjamas. Via them I still got the night’s yield of ideas as well as a good night’s sleep.

Deep into one night, in the shallows of sleep, I started to chuckle—a good idea has the free fall and click-into-place of a good joke. But I could tell as well the idea had legs and I’d lose sleep if I let it run on. I wrote it down in the dark only as an abbreviation then settled back on my pillow, looking forward to unpacking the idea properly in the light of day.

In the light of day I found this:

I stared at it with a touch of bluster. Ah, of course! Sure. That was all about, you know, something-something, what was it again? It’ll come to me in a second.

Seconds, minutes, hours later, the note hadn’t done anything but sit there and stare back.

Nothing in the preceding notes threw light on what this one meant. I tried instead retracing the breadcrumbs of my thoughts. Crazy that as a kid I could retrace them for miles! Now there were only these faintly stirring broken strands of mental web. I walked away then surprised the note coming back later, like you would with a crossword clue. My subconscious hadn’t spent the time knitting together any links. I told myself, ‘Well it can’t have been that good, else I’d’ve woken up properly and written it down in full’—all with a view to trick myself into remembering an idea I still suspected was good.

Next I squared up to the note, pulling it to me like a specimen I was gonna hunch over and dissect. Now for a different tack: not remembering what I’d meant hours ago but cracking a code as though for the first time. C = D. C = D…

Constructionism = Deconstructionism?

Calpol = Dangerous?

Can = Do?

Maybe in a dozy panic of unimaginative morbidity I’d meant “Cancer = Death.” Maybe I’d gone one step further than the usual “all cats are girls, all dogs are boys” discourse with my take that “Cats = Dogs”?

At this rate I might as well have just coded a program to give me all the millions of combinations of each C word followed by each D word, brute force it and eventually, hopefully recognise the right pair, pull out my idea from the wire wool of gibberish. That it was in there, in among all the combos - a fleck of meaning, a trace of an intention - bugged me like a drawer left open, a phone left off the hook.

I shifted focus from the C and the D of it, and onto the = sign. Was it a mark of identity, like A Song of Ice and Fire’s R + L = J? Or equivalence? As if the equals sign was the unmasking of two separate characters as a single One, like the clue in a noir detective story, found in the apartment of the dead dame, solved just before the final act: Cunningham IS Debrett! But then what did it mean that the letter C was the letter D? Was this my breakthrough, my life’s great discovery, that there were redundancies in the alphabet beyond C with S and K, that the alphabet should be 25 and not 26 letters once we’c cisregarcec the one letter, or donflated and dombined the other with it? Forget equivalence, maybe ‘=’ equalled equality. A value judgement: C is the equal of D. Well who said it wasn’t? Weren’t letters valueless? Maybe not, maybe we’d as a culture implicitly accepted C’s inferiority, which prejudice I’d stuck my neck out to buck. What other letters had their unspoken beefs? F had always seemed a bit of a ponce. Then there was awkward, husky H. Dull sensible L. Slick pencil-moustached N.

I was losing it. I had to get away from the signs. I’d assumed C = D was a lazy abbreviation. What if the whole thing was an ideograph, a drawing? There’s that bit in Gravity’s Rainbow where the similarly losing-it Slothrop sees on a wall:

a wirephoto of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward out of a white pubic bush. The letters

MB DRO

ROSHI

appear above with the logo of some Occupation newspaper.

Yes, turned 90 degrees, C = D looked phallic enough. Maybe too like Rainbow’s inaugural mushroom cloud…

Darkly charged symbol or gnomic utterance? I shuffled the streets muttering to myself, “C = D. C = D.” It was the reverse of repeating a familiar word till you can hear the nonsense of the signifier. My repetition didn’t wear down but harden the shell around the meaning. And my subconscious was no help cracking it. That night, years ago now, I’d prevented it from door-stopping me and my punishment was it no longer passed any hints.

What would it feel like to eventually crack it, to work it out, to unkink the hose-pipe of your mind? For your life itself to have a last act twist that reorganised all that’d come before? When I worked it out my down-sloped “oOOoh!!!” would last so long it’d be like the world’s longest burp. A penny-drop from such an extended height might even be lethal.

Then why was it worth getting so worked up over? It’s that sense of the road not taken. Where might the idea have led? Ideas aren’t singular, they’re roots you pull longer and longer out of the dirt. The problem with forgetting or losing an idea is that, if it was good and fruitful and gregarious enough, it could’ve changed your artistic output and so kind of your life. One time I forgot a whole filled notebook on the bus, and it’s no exaggeration to believe that all the projects lost or curtailed had as much impact as taking the one career and not the other would do. At least the combo of my crooked handwriting and all my diagrams of cones (I’d been writing a SF story) meant that any passenger or driver who found the notebook would’ve reacted like they’d found Richard Kind’s Mentaculus from A Serious Man.

Like the Jewish mysticism in that film, C = D has over the years taken on for me a deeper significance. A new meaning has been overlaid on whatever its original meaning was. It’s like one of those nonsense Zen koans, a stand-in for the ineffable (or the never properly effed). For that indivisible remainder in any attempt to “express yourself” through art; the why-won’t-you-be-art? frustration of your imagination never equalling reality. The tantalisingly out-of-reach. The forever on the tip of your tongue. It’s my own Zahir, my lack, my objet petit a (or I guess objet petit c = d).

Twenty years later (to the day) I’m not so effed up about it. More wistful. More resigned to the whole point, the whole humbling lesson being its inscrutability. As Borges wrote in his story The Zahir, “Quizá detrás de la moneda esté Dios”. ‘Perhaps behind the coin I shall find God.’ So: Centavos = Dios? Cataphatic = Deity? C = D? C = D…

The Duchampian whimsicality of non- or anti-appearance is replaced by the Mallarméan idea of beauty as a tribute to the ineffable, to absence. - ‘A Lexicon for Available Light’, Susan Sontag