Adventures in Ideaspace — Richard Holman

The poet and musician Leonard Cohen was once asked where he found inspiration. He paused for a moment. And then, in that rich, deep, whisky and tobacco stained voice of his replied, “Well, if I knew where the great songs come from I’d go there more often.” It’s one of the curious things about the creative process that our best ideas can arrive unbidden, when we’re least expecting them, seemingly out of nowhere. And there’s something magical about this. How dreary it would be if having an idea were as mundane as making a cup of tea. Yet it can make the whole business of being creative a frustrating one. Never knowing from one moment to the next when the muses will choose to smile on you. Or – sometimes, when things are bad – if they ever will again.

But instead of waiting for the ideas to come to you, what if you could go to them?

A little while ago I was reading a great book by John Higgs in which he sets out to uncover the reason why the band the KLF burned a million pounds on a small Scottish island. Spoiler – he fails. But along the way he explores Dadaism, magical thinking and chaos theory. And there’s one chapter dedicated to the comic book writer and creator of Watchmen, Alan Moore. If you don’t know Alan Moore or his work, well, let’s just say he has a brilliant and unique mind, a sometimes impenetrable Northamptonshire accent and a very fine beard. The chapter mentions a notion conjured up by Moore called ‘Ideaspace’. It piqued my interest so I decided to delve a little deeper.

Alan Moore photographed by Mitch Jenkins

It all began when Moore was musing on the rather thorny question of human consciousness. He felt that science had yet to make a decent stab of explaining how a clump of brain cells – or ‘pinkish-grey electrified custard’ as Moore puts it – could generate something as abstract and expansive as human thought. And this was a shame because, ‘all we directly experience is our own consciousness of the universe. Consciousness, this lovely and mysterious gift is the only thing that any of us truly have or are.’ So he decided that he would have to build a working model of consciousness himself. And the more he thought about it, the more a spatial metaphor seemed to make sense. After all, we tend to speak of things being ‘on’ or at the ‘forefront’ or at the ‘back’ of our minds; we talk of being ‘in our right mind’, or sometimes ‘out of our minds’; and ‘when we speak of higher consciousness, just how many feet above sea level is that?’

These were the foundations on which Alan Moore built ‘Ideaspace’. It’s a model of the mental world in which we all live. According to Moore’s hypothesis we all have an individual and private place in Ideaspace that is our discrete consciousness – our address, if you like – but we can also step out of our front door into a shared world of ideas accessible to anyone. And the ideas one discovers there are all of a size: big ideas like religions or sweeping scientific theories like evolution – or indeed Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious to which Moore owes a debt – could be mountains or even continents, while smaller more mundane notions are just rocks and pebbles. Anyone can wander around in this mutual space, which would explain the phenomenon whereby several people often hit upon the same discovery, say steam propulsion, evolution or electric light, at the same time.

The kicker is that although we all spend time in Ideaspace, few of us are prepared to travel very far from our front doors. We stay in the populated areas, where the landscape – and the ideas – are familiar. According to Moore it is up to the artists and innovators to go exploring, to head off into those uncharted territories where the ideas are truly novel.

I find this notion of Ideaspace not only appealing but also rather helpful. At a stroke it flips our role in the creative process: we go from being passive receivers, waiting hopefully but helplessly for the muses to look favourably upon us, and we become active adventurers, forging a path into the unknown in search of ideas which, while still undiscovered, do already exist: they’re out there waiting for us.

And it’s fascinating that this way of thinking about the creative process is not unique to Moore. While few have gone to the trouble of orchestrating as elaborate a metaphor as the bearded sage of Northampton, several other writers and artists of note have thought along similar – physical – lines too. I remember reading an interview with Ali Smith, one of our greatest living novelists, in which she said ‘I’ve always felt that a book’s already written, whatever it is we’re writing. Our job is to unearth it without breaking it or doing damage in the digging.’ The creator of Killing Eve and Fleabag, Phoebe Waller Bridge, has described how she feels, ‘as if the story is there floating round in my peripheral vision, I just need to catch sight of it for a second.’ And the film maker David Lynch often talks about ideas being like fish: ‘You don’t make the fish, you catch the fish … there are trillions and zillions of ideas and they’re all there, waiting to be caught’.

Ali Smith photographed by Felicity McCabe

Now, I know what you’re thinking … this is all well and good, Richard, Ideaspace is a nice metaphor and everything, but what does any of it actually mean for me and my own creative practice?

Well, the first thing to take away is that if you’re spending your time in the streets close to home, the ones you already know well, spaces that are maybe busy with other wanderers, you’re very unlikely to bump into an idea that is new or surprising. A much more fruitful strategy is to pack your toothbrush and set off to territory you’ve never been, somewhere that you’re unlikely to find many other people. Rather than return to the same genres or authors or films or music or paintings or photography – you know, those normal places you go to for inspiration – what if you deliberate immerse yourself, for a little time each day, in the work of someone new?

Choose to read or listen to or look at something completely different from the kind of thing you would normally choose. Pick a book at random from the shelves of your local library. Choose a documentary on a subject you would normally dismiss. Sign out of YouTube so the algorithm doesn’t know who you are and then see what thumbnails it throws up. It’s funny, the more unfamiliar our environment – either in the real world or Ideaspace – the more alert we become, the more alive our senses are, and the closer we come to the creative state of being.

The second implication of Moore’s Ideaspace is a subtler one. Let’s go back to his original analogy – ‘Maybe our individual and private consciousness is, in Ideaspace terms, the equivalent of owning an individual and private house, an address, in material space?’ Another way to frame this would be to say our home in Ideaspace is our ego. And the ego, as any creative person well knows, is where all sorts of problems can reside. It can make us feel worthless, like we’re talentless pretenders with no hope of making anything good. Or, on fewer occasions if my own experience is anything to go by, it can get rather puffed up and overblown, making us think our work is better than actually is. Either way, it’s a problem.

But maybe, if we run with Moore’s metaphor, the secret of getting out to the further reaches of Ideaspace is to leave the ego behind? To step outside your front door without looking back. To choose to forget about personal success or failure and simply explore with an open mind. Again this seems to be much closer to the mindstate I’ve tended to find myself in when the ideas have flowed most readily.

So next time you find yourself in front of a blank sheet of paper, bereft of inspiration, waiting forlornly for the ideas to come to you, maybe fix yourself a couple of peanut butter sandwiches and head out into Ideaspace instead?