Sorting

I spent part of the morning sorting. After all the years of college courses and my own teaching, writing for tiny student-run papers, writing unpublished books and this blog, research that I used or didn’t, ideas that I eventually explored in depth or didn’t… Well, you can imagine the piles of stuff I had sitting around. 

In boxes and stacks, folders and files, in old floppies and on crinkled paper, college rule or torn out magazine pages, paper clipped or loose, hand-written, printed, typed - it amazes me how the sheer volume has accreted over time.

Accrete: Grow by accumulation or coalescence.

Accumulation or coalescence: each applies to a particular aspect of my hoarding practice.

I think ‘accumulation’ in reference to the various physical media that carry the record of my ideas. The media accumulate – and yes, youngsters, ‘media’ includes paper and pen and typed documents, no matter how archaic you might consider them to be.

‘Coalescence’ applies to what happens when I review this stuff – typically while sorting but sometimes just thinking at random moments – and the ideas start to flow.  The direction of flow is seldom anything like what I would describe as linear. Because there’s a fundamental difference between sorting stuff and sorting ideas.

Sorting stuff requires me to make decisions as to what goes in the give away box vs. what stays. Then the stream of stuff that stays becomes bifurcated between stuff that will remain in our house (mine and Mary’s that is) and the stuff that will eventually migrate away with Daughters One or Two. A few stray items here and there will make their ways to other family and friends – books for Marc and Sherree, the Shirley Temple stuff to Jen and so on.

Once I’m left with just the things that will remain with us, it becomes a fairly straightforward process of sorting by function and importance. I’m thinking this phase should go quickly but usually it does not. Especially not when I’m sorting paperwork. The trouble with paperwork – especially for a writer – is its association with ideas. And ideas are messy things to sort. Inconvenient, as it were.

 Any neuroscientist can tell you that our neural pathways are not organized into neat little flow charts. The wiring diagram of a human brain, and particularly those parts of it that deal with conscious thought, are gnarly affairs. Our memories are not as well organized as we might like. We can’t know which one will pop up or when or in response to what stimulus.

I rely on memory for my writing, for my sense of who I am, for my ability to relate what I see and hear to what I’ve felt and touched in the past. Where I’ve been, physically or intellectually or emotionally, serves as the framework within which I understand the world and express that understanding back to you. And I have long since learned not to rely entirely on messy, disorganized collections of neurons and dendrites to reliably store my experiences and thoughts. Experiences and thoughts have to be intelligently recallable to be useful.

Hence the stacks of paper and other media.

Sorting today, I came across reminders of ideas for several blog posts, a chapter outline that I’d forgotten I’d written on an airplane some months back, odd little ideas recorded on the mangiest collection of substrates ever to occupy a rec room floor (my main sorting surface). And of course, some of them got me to thinking, sorting through ideas and combinations of ideas old and older. But this sorting was orders of magnitude less linear than the other sort (of sorting, that is).

I’ve no useful idea of how this manner of sorting comes about. I read some fragment from the past and find it joins up perfectly with another oddment from who knows where / when and suddenly I’m on the path to a whole new thought. Or I might review something I wrote while in the Navy (yes, that would be forty years ago, what of it?) and suddenly it becomes clear what I’d meant to get across and now have the life experience to complete the thought.

The other night while paging through a stack I’d very nearly fed into the recycling bin without review, thinking it to be only old, o-o-o-old homework, I came across some song lyrics I’d written back when I was a staff singer for a Catholic church. That would be post-Navy but by no more than a few years. Perhaps my most exciting find was an early abstract of the book on which I’m currently working. It was dated way before mere memory had claimed I’d first had the idea.

I’ve had various book ideas over the years and wrote my first in the late seventies but it was a bit startling to be forced to realize that this story has been bobbing about in my brain bucket for way more than a decade. And while the plot and ancillary elements have morphed and morphed again over the many years that I’ve failed to commit the saga to paper, the two main characters have always been crystal clear to me. Which leads me to believe that the overall plot has developed not so much in answer to the theme and plot elements I’ve imagined as in response to these characters about whom I care very much.

So that’s another sort of sorting that spans the gap between the linear and the non-linnear, methinks.

I could go on about this all night. But if I did, you’d soon get bored and be less likely to click into my blog next time. And I would use up time that I should be spending – wait for it – sorting.

(Sorry, I just had to. Sort of.)