It is true that my “ideas” do seem to come, as some observers have noted, from some odd, quirky, distant realm of being. Not daily life, not newspaper accounts. Not personal experience. (Not usually!) Not others’ work—not since adolescence. (Myopic) biographers have tried to trace lines between (what they know of) my life and (what they can glean) of my art, with unconvincing results. Any idiot with an impressive vocabulary can argue a “casual” relationship where there is none.

I rarely refute the most implausible notions. I am respectful of the eccentricities of others, so long as they are not malicious or meant to denigrate me. Though I don’t “take pride” in my achievement, any more than I “take shame” in it, for whatever it is, it does not seem wholly my own, yet I suppose I must bear some responsibility.

What is curious, I suppose, is that ideas don’t “come to me”—really. Rather I go to them.

It will depend upon where I venture. If I hike up (oddly named) Wolf Pit Mountain at the edge of the desolate little mill town in which I find myself living in the sixth decade of my life, on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River; if I make my way through tall, stiff grasses along the bluff, if I dare to push open the door of the old “Erikson mansion”—(a Greek Revival ruin invaded by generations of impudent children); if I dare to step inside, proceed cautiously across the (rotted, perilous) hardwood floor; if I find myself in a derelict drawing room where wallpaper hangs in strips like flayed skin, and overhead, the remains of a crystal chandelier shattered with BB pellets yet “chimes” in the wind; if awkwardly I squat to the floor to examine small, obscure objects like jigsaw puzzle parts awaiting the touch of the master; if, that is, a sequence of mysterious elements are in order, like DNA—it is possible that an “idea” will come to me with a palpable jolt, like an electric current.

Though sometimes it’s another sort of experience altogether—a sensation as swift and sudden as a tick hopping onto a warm patch of skin and instantaneously embedding itself there.

By which I mean a deer tick. The smallest, most malevolent of ticks, no larger than the period at the end of this sentence.

How, why, to what purpose, this has come to me in this desolate ruin—in which, strictly speaking, I am “trespassing”—I have no idea. For the obscure objects on the floor might be shards of glass, bits of crockery, strips of fossilized wallpaper, a button made of bone, a fragment of a yellowed ivory piano key … Once, a postcard from an otherworldly place in Utah called Bryce Canyon, badly weathered, its scrawled message only just barely readable—“Missing you all! Love you! Promise be home soon. Janey.”

With this “idea” seeded in my brain, I hurry back home.