Acts of mercy, murder and keeping people out of your underwear drawer

There’s a particular folder on my laptop which, should I meet an untimely end, I hope is never discovered.

“Deletions”.

Much of its contents are the wordy equivalent of vegetable peelings; discarded roughage that made the writing uneven or harder to chew (but might still come in handy as a garnish).

Hidden amongst the dross, however, are assorted unrealised and unpublished ideas in various states of undress.

Half-baked and ill-conceived thought-bubbles, wonderings, musings and meanderings, puzzlings and probings – failures that, by any other name, sound far sweeter.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that making a lot of things increases your chances of making one thing that doesn’t suck too bad.

You’ll take 46 terrifying selfies to achieve one profile pic that doesn’t activate your gag reflex.

Even Claude Monet amassed 250 canvases in his quest to capture the light as it fell on his beloved water lilies.

Yet, despite being able to forgive himself during the creation phase, when it came to show the pieces, he slashed 15 of them to ribbons – a loss amounting to around $2,000,000 in today’s coin.

The prickles of shame we feel regarding our secret works could be our gut trying to tell us something: not all things we make must (or even should) be released into the wild.

And yet we see this happen all the time.

It seems the minute an artist, musician or writer passes, someone (either out of grief or opportunity) feels inclined to offer the world a peek in their underwear drawer.

And while there have been some notable writers who requested their ‘never before seen’ work be released posthumously (thus, perhaps, being spared a bad review) just as many have ordered all correspondence and notebooks be burned upon their demise.

But what of those who don’t get the chance to decide?

Should we be rifling through their deletions?

Take my book of Cavafy poems.

Constantine Cavafy is a poet I love for his restrained, yet painfully revealing writing.

He wasn’t one to publish. He had, as E.M. Forster said, “the strength … of the recluse, who, though not afraid of the world, always stands at a slight angle to it.”

The only way Cavafy could write this way – unafraid and unashamed – was to write for no one. He published just a single collection of verses before his death. Other than that, there were a few printed in broadsheets or pressed into the hands of trusted friends.??

And yet, since he’s no longer around to object, everything he wrote is now available in two volumes;?CP Cavafy: The Collected Works?– ie those already published – and CP?Cavafy: Unfinished Poems.

The book on my own shelf includes both. And you’d think, as a fan, I’d be keen to consume everything I could get my hands on.?Yet, I may as well hack the second half of that book right off its spine; I have no intention of ever allowing myself to read it.

That second volume (to my mind, anyway) is an anthology of un-Cavafy poems. Things he abandoned – perhaps with good reason. Ideas that, once tried on, didn’t fit after all. Locked doors, that having peeped through the keyhole, he dared not open. Work that was simply, as we might say, “off-brand”.

There’s every possibility he could have attempted to encourage these nebulous sketches to form something quite-like-a-Cavafy-poem. But he deliberately chose not to.

So, perhaps this is a matter of curation vs editing.

The word ‘edit’ comes from the Latin,?edere, meaning ‘to bring forth’. Polishing a thing until only the best and most important parts are visible.

‘Curate’, on the other hand, comes to us via?curare, meaning ‘to care for’. Carefully selecting, arranging and treating a collection of things in ways that present a certain narrative to the world. As TS Elliot said, “a face to meet that faces that you meet”. Part of that ‘care’ is putting some things safely away.

Which all sounds a lot like branding.

There are some truths about a business, a product or a person we choose to leave behind the curtain. Not because they’re dirty little secrets. But because they don’t add much to the story we’ve chosen to tell.?

Plenty of examples of how important curation is for maintaining a brand can be found in the recording studio.

One that immediately springs to mind is a scene in the Metallica documentary,?Some Kind of Monster. Torben Ulrich (father of drummer, Lars Ulrich), upon hearing one of the tracks from the band’s ill-fated Presidio sessions, utters two words that put a pin in an entire album’s worth of work.

“Delete that.”

As harsh as that sounds, the upshot of the conversation was this: regardless of whether or not he thought the song was?good, it just wasn’t ‘Metallica’.

Torben was, no doubt, present at the inception of the band – and therefore the brand. So, if this wise, Heavy Metal Gandalf felt the songs failed to move the Metallica story forward, they trusted his advice.

Of course, our Metallicats didn’t actually delete the songs. There was still love there. But they felt editing the tracks would be too difficult. Too painful. Leaving them out was an act of curation. Perhaps even mercy.

Frontman, James Hetfield, said of the unreleased material, “It would be tough to go back and redo some of that stuff or get it in the shape to put it out. That would remind me of, like,?'Load'?and?'Re-Load'?— working backwards… there's no use in kind of turning around. So those things will appear in their form some way or another.”

And that they did. The Presidio album was eventually released in a low-key way on YouTube. But even hardcore fans agreed that, while it was interesting, it really wasn’t great.

Not that this hurt Metallica in the slightest. In the context of being songs from?Some Kind of Monster, it was an extension of a film that existed purely to expose their soft underbellies.

It also demonstrates the protection a strong, established brand provides. Those weaker moments are but a drop of water in a jar of whisky.

I’m not suggesting my deletions folder has anything on Metallica’s rough-cut diamonds, Cavafy’s private universe or Monet’s murdered darlings. But it is the stuff I choose to leave out. As much a part of my brand as anything I share.

It’s not about inauthenticity. It’s about holding space for jumping off the roof to see if you can fly, without someone there to capture it all on their iPhone.

Even public faces need private spaces. And mine is my deletions folder.

So, do me a favour...

Stay the heck out of my underwear drawer.?

---