A Messy Desk

Many have commented that a messy desk is a signature of the creative person. Things are spilling out all over the place as the impulse to create cares not for putting everything in its appointed slot at its appointed time. It must get out and it must get out now and as long as the creator can find what’s needed— a particular paintbrush or piece of paper with some notes jotted down, what have you— let the flurry and frenzy of creation begin! 

 

I agree— up to a point. When we were working on the annual plays at school, the music room was a chaotic cacophony of props, costumes, instruments and mostly joyfully so. Everything was a’tumble and whirling around in turbulent delight. A visitor dropping by who understood the true nature of the artistic impulse might look at it all and exclaim—“Wonderful! Something exciting is happening here!”

 

But here’s another point of view. Wendell Berry once said “Order is the only possibility of rest” and whether it be the ordered mind gathering random thoughts into coherent ideas or straightening a messy desk, there is indeed great peace and satisfaction in organizing the chaos. My workspace is rarely outrageously over-cluttered, but I do give a little space for things to pile up until something signals, “Enough! Time to clean up.”

 

So this morning looking at the CD’s piling up here and there that I still buy even as I know there’s no more shelf space, the music books on top of the piano stacked like a precarious garbage heap on the verge of tumbling down, the papers here, there or everywhere, a little alarm sounded, “It’s time.”

 

I started with the CD’s, which meant clearing shelf space, which meant finally deciding to throw out (alas, not recyle!) some 25 VHS tapes I will never watch again. This liberated enough shelf space to re-organize and re-shelf some 1400 CD’s I’ve amassed over the years. (Not all shown in this photo.) Alongside the 1,000 LP records I have in the basement, I figured that if I listened to each one in the collection for some 8 hours a day, it would take me a full year to hear them all. Not to jinx myself here, but if (or when) I am bed-ridden for a long time, that could be my project. To remember all the music that has been the soundtrack to my life and feel it all flashing before me in a sonic slow motion. 

 

Then came the books on top of the piano, now neatly squared off in four piles and some re-shelved on the mantle over the fireplace. So many of them with covers falling off and torn pages, the loved Velveteen Rabbits of my life in music. Without a single book, I could still play the handful of memorized classical pieces, the few hundred jazz standards and the improvisation available to me that doesn’t require a single written note on paper. But still I clearly value this paper music that leaps to life, thanks to the music literacy my childhood piano teacher Mrs. Lutz gave to me.

 

Add to the above my instrument collection, my own writings, those files with letters and workshop notes and rough drafts of books and then the extensive library of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and at the same time that I dread the hours needed to spare my children dealing with it all after I’m gone, I’m also astonished at the enormous collective efforts we human beings have made to comfort each other, awaken each other, delight each other through the vehicle of art in all its many faces. Not only the creators of music, drama, dance, literature, poetry and beyond, but the enormous industry needed to record it, publish it, duplicate it, get it out to the customers hungry for some food for the soul. Not to mention the printers and recording studios and trucks hauling things to bookstores and record stores and beyond. And now a whole other industry sending it up to some nebulous i-Cloud to be brought down into our machines. It boggles the mind.

 

But no need to think more of that. My mind is now at rest, basking in my newly re-ordered workspace and ready to go to the Jewish Home with three books to help me fill the air with music. Tomorrow— pay bills!