Just before work

When I woke up for work the other day, there was a gorgeous little snip of music looping through my head. I'm pretty sure I'd never heard it before; it wasn't familiar at all, and unfortunately, I lack the skill to bring it into existence. Not that it matters, because I've already forgotten it, had forgotten it within a few minutes, in the rush to get up, get dressed, and get on the highway before the drive out to the suburbs got too long from all the stupid drivers, like most things occuring during sleep are forgotten at awakening, impending rush hour or not. I find this kind of depressing, and wonder how much potential stuff I – and everyone else – could make is lost every morning to alarm clocks and traffic.

If the thing can't exist, how far do you go with the description, anyway? Claire of the Moon, a reputedly horrible little film, uses the nice technique of a rectangle of light to demonstrate a woman looking at the most beautiful painting she's ever seen, which apparently turns her into a lesbian. Or something. The Library of Babel has recently been reprinted with some illustrations that, while gorgeous, are not at all what I had in mind when I originally read it. Strangely, the library in The Name of the Rose was described in great detail, including a floor plan printed in the book, and yet the movie's version bore very little resemblance, as far as I could tell. I once read a short story titled "Orange is for Anguish, Blue is for Insanity" in which it's eventually revealed that a painting that's driving everyone insane or something is actually made up of thousands and thousands of tiny little screaming faces, like some sort of hellish pointilism that Clive Barker would've come up with. That I'd like to see. What do you do with these things to salvage them, once they're more out of than in your head? Describe them well enough for someone to maybe eventually go through with, like the almost-invisible necklace in The Fountainhead or Atlast Shrugged(I forget which)? The Invisible Library collects books that have only appeared in other books. I wonder if there are any other collections of non-existent things that people are maintaining somewhere.

Do you let them remain ephemeral, so there's just that semblance of could-have-been? Or do you just let them go entirely? And of course there's the question of whether it's even new. Is what I heard not just some bit of Beethoven the monkeys in my head came up with on the way to something else entirely?

All I can remember at this point is that there were strings. And it was pretty.

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