The poem is a dream, a daydream of wish fulfillment but not by any means because of that a field of action and purposive action of a high order … We seek profusion, the Mass—heterogeneous—ill-assorted—quiet breathless—grasping at all kinds of things—as if—like Audubon shooting some little bird, really only to look at it the better.

From the essay The Poem as a Field of Action by William Carlos Williams

We recently saw a documentary about a man obsessed with proving that the first moving picture was filmed in a certain place. Throughout the show, people lamented lost footage, footage that would clearly prove one thing or another. But to me it’s remarkable that any footage still exists from that era. It’s so fragile, so fleeting. I thought, as I watched, about all the things I have created that I have lost. I’m that age that teeters on the edge between the generation that couldn’t save anything and the generation that shares everything. I have short films from my film school days, super-8, silent 16: all lost. I can’t find them and maybe I don’t want to, because in my mind they’re perfect. Beautiful, funny, with great depths, and full of the fervor of my younger self. Full of my dreams, waking and sleeping, of what I could create.

It got me thinking about everything that people have created for centuries that has been lost to time, for one reason or another — things that were never captured, or things that were captured and destroyed. I imagined a collection of these lost souls, a sort of limbo where all of these beautiful ideas and dreams and lost objects float on display. A Magpies’ Museum of Lost Creations.

It’s all welcome in our Museum of Lost Creations. Anything somebody set on paper, canvas, or clay and then became impatient with and destroyed. Anything lost to fire or flood or crashing computer. The half-finished victims of discouragement and self-doubt. Lost sketchbooks, undeveloped rolls of film, over-developed rolls of film, canvases lost to decay, sculptures lost to the weather. Any music performed since the beginning of time that wasn’t recorded. For all the blues musicians Alan Lomax tracked down and recorded, how many others were there that he didn’t? Think of every performance of Bach’s music in his own time, or anyone else writing or performing music all through pre-recorded history. Think of Mick Kelly, sitting on the roof of a vacant building, humming “Motsart’s” music till she grew hoarse, because it made her happy and sad at the same time and was like that smell in the springtime after the rain. We’ll have that humming corked in a bottle in our museum.

We’ll collect all of the lost work of great artists and all of the works of great artists that were never created because the artist didn’t know they were an artist, and were too busy waiting tables or scrubbing toilets or doing anything they needed to do to pay the rent. But if, while we work, we’re thinking about art, dreaming of a story, daydreaming a poem, imagining a painting, we’re still creating. The worlds we’ve created in our imagination but never had the scope or skill or resources to make real, we’ll collect those, too. A story written in someone’s head in the middle of the night that’s gone with the morning light, or a painting, dreamed up while glancing at the heavy twilight landscape on a commute home, but never painted — those will be there, too. Though the product is lost or was never created, the process isn’t, it’s still alive somewhere, perhaps where it can’t be seen or heard, maybe only felt. And maybe that’s as important.

I think therefore I create. I am therefore I create. We create our world by dreaming of it, it’s as real as we imagine it to be, whether we record that or not. Our museum won’t be lined with small shabby stuffed birds we’ve shot to see them better. It will be alive with birds singing in the trees, and we’ll catch fleeting glimpses of their unfathomable feathers.

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