I suppose every book we’ve read and reread, and every movie we’ve watched more than once, and every song we’ve listened to on repeat, eventually left some kind of memory trace. This trace, which might be a phrase, a word, a character or a moment, is what makes up a ragbag of memories and references that each of us has. And it’s the ideas generated by these memories that lead us to making art that lasts longer than we do.
One way to remember
As a writer, I often work through these sources for inspiration. I play old audio clips, check my old voice notes on my phone, go over those hundreds of half-documents stored on my Mac. Wade through the thousands of photos in my photo albums. Prowl through screen shots of pages with quotes and memorable words. Flip through my racks of LPs, marvelling at the sleeve designs. Back then, memory was biological and analog. These days, it’s digital and backed-up virtually, and you have plenty of opportunity to go back in time.
But it’s the old stuff that’s real and lies waiting for you to rediscover, that is important.
What inspires you?
For example, in the past month, I composed a piece of music based on a clip of a passage from a Vivaldi overture that I had sitting on my phone. I wrote lyrics from a voice note that I’d made to myself in the unholy hours of the night. And I recognized a very old memory trigger from a children’s book.
Someone who I know, who has a refined sense of style, posted a photo of himself with a Tintin badge on IG. Tintin! Can you imagine, Hergé’s children’s book series The Adventures of Tintin was published between 1929 (!) and 1976. It’s like vintage comic art. It made me go poke around in our bookshelves and find my original Tintin editions – the actual hard copies.
Memory trigger
And I was paging through “The Secret of the Unicorn” – and the book fell open (like when you throw a dart at a board while blindfolded) on this page:
Captain Haddock bellows: “The red pennant!…No quarter given!…A fight to the death, no prisoners taken!”
And I suddenly remembered where I got the idea to name my business “Red Pennant Communications”. No quarter given. No prisoners taken. At the time that I started it, I was pretty obsessed with being morally superior in all my business dealings (since the South African business environment was focused on the King Report on Corporate Governance, for good reason.) Me, on a pedestal of purism. Ha. In time, I completely forgot where I got the name from.
Well, I didn’t know that a red flag has an entirely different association to people in Canada – namely, China. In the first logo I designed for Red Pennant, I fancifully depicted the only red pennant that I knew – the one in the famous painting of people revolting in France, by Eugene Delacroix.
This just proves that there is no telling which memory will inspire someone’s creativity – whether old or new, physical or virtual. No telling at all!
SEVEN CIRCUMSTANCES 
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