Looking one way and then the other

What happens when you have too much to read? I try to be systematic but I find that there’s also something productive or creative or even funny in being up to your eyeballs in books and papers knowing that you’ll never read them all even as you know that you have to read them all, you have to get a grip on the ‘field’ and the papers are flying around the room and keeping them straight is important and not important at the same time and you’re looking one way and then the other – especially when you’re writing three things at the same time and editing something else.

What happens when you have too much too read and you read it and then you have to integrate it into something you’re making? Does it stay sorted in your head in a way that makes it possible for you to find it, to navigate through it and does it look similar in your brain to how it looks in your office: piles of papers spread out over three desks and a bookshelf full of bookmarked library books plus the stuff on the computer that you’ve never printed because it’s 400 pages despite being only available on line? And reading off the computer screen is so not happening…

Yet no panic rises. It feels right. Is this psychonavigation? Is this the knowing that the route will be found and successfully negotiated without extreme danger? Although I did have a nightmare (unrelated to reading) last night…