Ghost writers in the sky

Are ideas “out there,” hovering just above our heads?

Some people keep a commonplace diary; I keep a “screenshots” folder on my Mac, where I collect snippets of the internet that spoke to me in one way or another. A new addition from last week:

NYT

Are there, in fact, “ghost writers in the sky”? If so, they are waving at me. Shortly before reading that phrase, I was served the following clip on Instagram:

André 3000 says:

See, I have this theory—or hypothesis, whatever you want to call it—that all of the songs, films, and pieces of artwork, et cetera, are already out there, just a few feet above us all, and it only takes the person that consistently cares the most about them to jump up and receive them.

I think the writer Elizabeth Gilbert shares this theory? Or so I was told in the comments the other month. Over the weekend, I went hunting through her book Big Magic to see what exactly she says. Here’s a piece:

I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.

Therefore, ideas spend eternity swirling around us, searching for available and willing human partners. (I’m talking about all ideas here—artistic, scientific, industrial, commercial, ethical, religious, political.) When an idea thinks it has found somebody—say, you—who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention.

Funnily enough, this idea itself has been trying to get my attention. Last June, I wrote about John Cage’s definition of discipline, which kind of blew my mind. Cage said, “Discipline is giving yourself rather than expecting things to give themselves to you”—i.e., that artists should not try to muscle a project into existence, guided by their individual taste and ambition, but instead put themselves in service to what the project itself wants. (Later, I talked about this idea at greater length on the podcast Weirdly Helpful.)

Ever since, that idea has kept boomeranging around into my field of view. In August, Elif Batuman published a piece titled “Against Discipline,” which includes pretty much the same argument. Batuman writes that it’s useful to think of your project “NOT as an object that you’re creating or birthing—NOT as a product that you own—NOT as something that’s inside you and that has to be extracted—but as an independent entity with which you’re in conversation.” (Emphasis hers. There’s lots more good stuff in this piece—but I hesitate to share large chunks of other writers’ paywalled content, so I’ll just encourage you all to subscribe and read the whole thing here.)

Subsequently, variations of this idea arrived via the composer Terry Riley (“You don’t want to already have the possibilities in you; you have to invite them in. So as an artist you have to create a culture that invites ideas in”); the novelist Solvej Balle (“the idea is a little bit like a machine that wants something on its own and . . . you have to accept it and see what it’s bringing in”); and the cartoonist Lynda Barry (“Something happens to my thinking when I start to draw. It becomes more like listening than formulating.”)

So what do we think? Are ideas, in some sense, “out there,” hovering above our heads, waiting for the right human partner to usher them into the world?

Well . . . I don’t know if I believe that this is literally true—but I absolutely believe that if you act as if this is true, you will get good results.

Because what would that involve? It would involve being, as André 3000 says, “the person that consistently cares the most” about whatever area you’re working in—being someone who is always looking and listening for ideas, for material you can repurpose, and for examples of what other people are doing or have done before you. In short: being curious and open to the world around you, and also—being after something, even if you can’t quite say that that something is. Especially if you can’t say what it is.

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THE OTHER ROOM

Or maybe ideas aren’t “out there,” above our heads, but in another room, off to the side somewhere? That’s the basis of this amusing back-and-forth between David Lynch and the interviewer Paul Holdengräber:

If you don’t want to click through, here’s a transcript:

Paul Holdengräber: You know, there’s a line I’ve always loved of Leonard Cohen. He said, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often.”

David Lynch: Absolutely. People, we don’t do anything without an idea. So, they’re beautiful gifts. And I always say: Desiring an idea is like a bait on a hook. It can pull them in. And if you catch an idea that you love, that’s a beautiful, beautiful day—and you write that idea down so you won’t forget it. And that idea that you caught might just be a fragment of the whole whatever-it-is you’re working on. But now you have even more bait. Thinking about that small fragment, that little fish, will bring in more, and they’ll come in and they’ll hook on. And more and more come in, and pretty soon you might have a script, or a chair, or a painting, or an idea for a painting.

PG: But they come as—

DL: More often than not, small fragments. I like to think of it as: In the other room, the puzzle is all together. But they keep flipping in just one piece at a time.

PG: In the other room?

DL: Over there.

PG: In a sense, David, there’s always another room somewhere.

DL: Mm-hmm. That’s a beautiful thing to think about.

PG: Let’s think about it a bit.

DL: No, you think about it.

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THE MARMOSET OF BLOOMSBURY

Our next Book Club selection is Mitz by Sigrid Nunez. I love this novella! It’s about Virginia and Leonard Woolf, the Bloomsbury Group, the joy and agony of writing, the soulfulness and mystery of animals, and plenty more—all contained in 147 beautifully written pages that you could read in an afternoon. I’m re-reading it now, and looking forward to discussing it with paid subscribers on Sunday, January 11th, at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 7pm UK time. Find the full details and the Zoom link below—hope to see you then.

Approved by this marmoset

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Thanks for reading! This has been the 175th issue of Subtle Maneuvers and my final dispatch for 2025; I’ll be back with a new issue on January 6th. In the meantime, hope you all have a restorative holiday season, or a not too hectic one, and that you get to spend at least a few moments in the other room—over there—you know the one.

Coming in fifteen weeks! Your pre-orders are much appreciated 🙏