The poem that kept me awake on the 5th has continued to be troublesome. It has not come together at all smoothly but in bits and pieces in need of careful consideration and brutal hammering out. This painstaking, arduous and time consuming procedure is one of my creative modes. Another, infinitely preferable, method is the one in which a story or poem seems to form in my head all of a piece, from whence it spills without effort onto a paper or electronic page (there are differences between writing on real vs. virtual paper but that is another post).

Stephen King on Good Morning America, apparently, made the following comment in regards to writing:

"My job is not to create, per se, but to unearth, to get these things out of the ground as fully complete as they can. . . I never felt like I wrote a story. I felt like I found them all. I feel more like an archaeologist than a creator."

This notion is one that I can empathize with and endorse completely. While I can only wish that I was as efficient an archeologist as Mr. King, I can attest from my own experience that writing is like finding buried treasure.

This line of thought leads me directly to Jung's theory of the collective unconscious . This concept, as I understand it, deals primarily with archetypes , which are more general, of course, than a specific story that Stephen king or myself might write - or should I say discover? - but any difference between the general and the specific here is minimal, I believe, when we are talking about these largely uncharted regions of the mind.

Let us consider the following excerpts from an interview with Alan Moore regarding what he refers to as Idea Space :

"For the sake of argument we can imagine that our thoughts occur in some sort of medium which we will call Idea Space. That our personalities, the things we call ourselves might be a kind of travelling nexus in this Space, that ideas or concepts are solid forms or the equivalent of solid forms within this space. How this space differs from our space is, firstly it isn't a space � space does not actually exist there. The distances are associative like in the real world Land's End and John O'Groats are famously far apart but you can't think of one without thinking of the other � so in Idea Space they're next to each other."

". . .There's no time either. There's no space and there's no time. It's just as easy for you to think about what you were doing this morning as Victorian street scenes. You can go there instantly. You can imagine a scene from ten years in the future. Time is not the same. Time does not really exists other than to the conscious mind, that's what I believe. Our perception of linear time is purely a construct of the conscious mind...."

"...Your mind is not bound in time the way your body is, it's certainly more fluid � there's not really a time barrier in the world of the mind. Now it struck me that a good model might be, we've all got our own Idea Space which is individual and unique to us. This is like having your own house. We've all got part of our unconscious in the back garden but the back gardens all lead onto the same street. In another model you might say there's all these little individual inlets of consciousness, but they all connect to the same central ocean."

"... Interestingly, when James Watt did discover the steam engine there were about six other people in the same two or three month period who, completely independently, also discovered the steam engine. Charles Fort , who documented much of this, said, in his special whimsical way, 'I guess it was just steam engine time.'"

". . .Someone has got a film out with the same idea. And it's tempting to think that the idea could either have been a solid thing floating in a mutually accessible space you happened to come across, and so did somebody else. When we say things are in the air, what do we mean? What air are we talking about? We all know that phenomena, you have a word explained to you, and within the next three days you hear it three times...
I don't think I'm saying a lot here that hasn't been suggested by people like Jung and Plato before me, where he talks about his world of essences. I'm coming up with this theory to explain things that seem to have happened to me."

Jung' s collective unconscious and Moore's notions of idea space ring very true to me. This concept of a single field of mind ties up nicely with one of the standard characteristics of mystical experience , namely the awareness that all things are one.

So where does the problematic poem bumping around in my head fit into all of this? It's simply a piece which I am having trouble excavating, I suppose. I'd better hurry up and get it out, though, before someone else does!