Transforming clutter

Everything we write is, in a sense, translated from another language: from the chatter we hear inside our heads, translated from that interior babble (more or less comprehensible to us) into (what we hope will be) the clearer, more articulate language on the page.

Francine Prose, What to Read and Why

Eric Weiner

I have sometimes attempted to excuse my messy desk by saying that I have an orderly mind, and I am only half joking.

In The Geography of Genius, Eric Weiner poses the question, "Might Beethoven's slovenly ways help explain his musical genius?" He, too, is only half joking. Albert Einstein, too, he points out, had a messy desk. I am hardly claiming Beethoven-like or Einstein-like genius. Far from it. At the very least we might conclude that the clutter in one's life does not equal cluttered thinking. Or we might say that a person with a messy desk or a cluttered room might have better things to think about. Who has time to clear off your desk if you are pondering relativity or a fifth symphony? Or we might go even further and say that clutter and chaos actually stimulate orderly thinking.

In her book What to Read and Why, Francine Prose writes not about the clutter on one's desk but the babble in one's mind, all those things we read and hear, all those memories that keep coming back to us, all those stray thoughts and ideas that grab us and won't let go. What a writer does, she says, is to try to make sense of all this babble. Writers cannot do much with empty minds. They need something to work with, as with Beethoven and Einstein, and it is this jumble circling through their minds that they attempt to turn into something new and original and ordered.

When I was a newspaper reporter I covered city council meetings, where there were always public complaints, speeches by council members and discussions of various ordinances and resolution, followed by votes. All this took several hours. Then I had to write a story, sometimes several stories, about what had occurred. Doing this meant unraveling the tangle in my mind and in my notebook, discarding the insignificant and ordering the significant according to relative importance. Order out of chaos, in other words.

All writers work in the same way, to some extent. Prose calls it translation from another language. Or perhaps it's just translation into language.