Recently I happened across the idea of the digital garden. It's a good concept. I see the value of a place where one can jot ideas, write essays, collect information & so on: a multimedia scrapbook or mood board.
However, my ideas are not buds and shoots emerging from fertile ground. They are relics, artifacts, stripped chassis, and discarded parts. They ghosts of schemes, passing fancies and fervent obsessions that grabbed my attention and held it, until something else, (often it was what people call “real life”), redirected my focus.
Like spirits that have not been laid to rest these ideas lurk around corners, follow me on the streets, and whisper their stories to me every night after bedtime, sometimes into the morning hours. A few of these ideas have stalked me for forty years.
I needed to gather these ideas and deal with them: to reanimate and complete the ones with merit, to bury some for good. To sort them, to repair and put to use those I can, and dispose of those I can't, I need a scrapyard.
Scratch paper for this page
(voice-to-text, so proofread thoroughly)
I see it as the digital equivalent of pulling all one's sketchbooks, notebooks, notepads, browser bookmarks, yellow stickies, 3×5 note cards, YouTube history, and photo albums together into one virtual space. The advantages being the central location of everything, the ability to cross-reference between things heretofore un-crossreferencable, and the fact that it's digital.
Being digital means it should be easier to cross-reference ideas, to pull together fragments of inspiration and assemble them into solid concepts, and to piece together drafts of fully realized works to publish elsewhere on other sites or in physical form.
That sounds easier and less stressful than the idea of sitting down and trying to write something from scratch in the academic, I'm-going-to-sit-down-and-write-a-paper, kind of way. Particularly since my approach to writing a paper was sitting down the evening before the paper was due and trying to write it all out in one sitting, whether that left time for sleeping between putting pen to paper and handing in the final copy or, as was usually the case, not.
I like the idea at a conceptual level but it doesn't really suit me personally not not the aesthetics of it. The term digital garden sounds like a very broad or general term for a kind of platform the way the word automobile is digital garden in particular sounds to me in an automotive terms like a VW bug the the Latter-Day VW bugs the little smooth pastel ones in the 1990s or arts with the flower Bud on the dashboard and all the touchy feely Latter-Day happy neo-hippy vibe around them know what I need is something more like like a 1982 box body F-150 something will move something that'll hold yeah move quote unquote do what I needed to do carry all the stuff I needed to carry get me to and fro doesn't have to be pretty just has to be practical no real sentimentality or mawkishness or or I don't know, just a different vibe
My ideas are not fresh soft green buds emerging from fertile soil. They're more rusting hulks of former good ideas Doodles on scraps of paper and a napkins paper napkins and Dawn on paper cups and there's a similageable strollings in spiral notepads three ring binders stacks of 3×5 cards the backs of paper menus at a restaurants God knows how many bookmarks and YouTube videos and all kinds of ideas and associations and cross pollinated concepts I've had over the years I just get written down on paper and squirrelled away somewhere that all needs to be don't need to be assembled in one place so I can pick through the ones that merit salvaging take the ones that are crap scrap them melting down or dispose of them finally for good and reuse and recycle and renew what deserves it and dispose of what doesn't and give away or sell away whatever can be used by somebody else you know giveaway more than sell away of course just some place to put all together