Supple Towel Cuddle

Diagnosing Writer's Block

Note to self:

If you display at least three (3) of the following symptoms, you may have writer's block:
-- Denial
-- Disinterest, or distraction
----- Clock watching
----- Word mouthing
----- Keyboard tapping
----- Cognitive vagueness
----- Cyclical thought
----- Skimming (vs. reading)
-- Chronic proprioception
----- Restlessness
----- Optical discomfort
----- Jaw tension
----- Temperature
-- Obsessive compulsions w/r/t:
----- Synonyms, or salience thereof
----- Sentence fluency
----- Grammar
----- Perseveration
----- Creative juices, the flow of
----- Cursor, placement/movement of
----- Obsessive compulsions
-- Illusions of grandeur
-- Illusions of insignificance
-- Acute social anxiety
-- Sleepiness / sleep deprivation
-- Anterograde (vs. prograde) writing habits
----- More deleting than writing
----- Radically narrowed focus
----- Cursor-hopping ("Gotta do this, but first this, no wait--this, ...")
-- A conscious, or felt, absence of inspiration

The dictionary says that "to inspire" is, most 'commonly,' "to fill with an animating, quickening, or exalting influence." But shit. This definition is straight up unsatisfying, isn't it? I'm talking to you, Me. When you talk about needing "inspiring," you don't literally mean to say that you need 'animation, haste, or efficacy'; these are just some behavioral changes you might demonstrate after being inspired. After all, when you say you're hungry, you aren't implying you want fullness; you are saying you want food. I know you, Me; I know this is what you mean. Food is what causes fullness. It is what is "needed." Likewise, a certain kind of idea--an inspiring one--is what you need to "fill [you] with an animating, quickening, or exalting influence." (What is an exalting influence, anyway?) An inspiring idea is one that results in burgeoning, scintillating thought. This burgeoning, in turn, is what causes causes the obvious outward behaviors listed in the dictionary.

Just to give the thing a name that doesn't have the word 'inspire' in it, we'll call an inspiring idea a 'profound' one. A profound idea is--and here I'm just bypassing the dictionary altogether--one which is readily accommodated by some attending schema, whose slight alteration in turn is met with some accommodation by another schema, whose accommodation in turn needs still more accommodating, and so on and so forth; such that the subtle slipping by of just this single simple point sets off a many-forked bolt of mental action through the whole of who one is, along the paths of least resistance, a sharp and purely gratifying debugging of intuitions one didn't know one had. Though these 'profound' cognitive tremors seldom reach bedrock, they nevertheless recalibrate the way one thinks oneself prepared.

That's what a profound idea does. What one is, like as in 'what characterizes a profound idea in general,' is actually not as fitful or elusive a question as it sounds.

And so with this in mind, it becomes easy to see why the stereotype of an Artist is of a person who--among other things--tends to gravitate toward misunderstood ideas. But so you know where I'm coming from on this: misunderstood ideas are not the same as the ones cherished solely for their anti-majority status. They are not social memes like those that are the intellectual price of admission to that weirdly-knit, like-minded kind of in-group, the Creative Types. They aren't even what an Artist is ultimately after, whatever that is she's after. Really, what makes unloved ideas so alluring is their technical relation to profound ones: a profound idea brings about any number of ideas which, prior to having had the profound, would have been misunderstood--i.e., could not have been accommodated. Misunderstood ideas are just unclaimed territory, in Art.

The Artist's idea, then, is to start with misunderstood ideas and work backwards to the profound ones, like a cryptologist's hunt for her cypher. In Art, the ability to do this, to draw connections between unlike concepts and then gainfully entertain them, is called creativity. When it succeeds is when, after god knows how long, the Artist's strange connections finally constellate in such and such a manner as to make obvious the unstated. Or, if not obvious--if all her work should fall just so short--then at least intriguing. An intriguing piece of art is still important, still beautiful. Even if it's never shown around. And yet, still: how badly she simply wants to be obvious.

This is why I had to follow my shadow away from Art. Something about it was just too damn trying. Literally: every project just another inexplicable effort. Triple digits of hours poured into--poured into what? I cannot say I ever made a piece that made obvious its profundity. To do that takes so much effort. So much creative effort--effort which has an element of randomness to it that, god just believe me, takes a thousand times more effort than most well-planned kinds of effort. And if you do manage to nail it once--me, I think I came close once, with an idea, but it was just an idea, and it didn't do anything but sit there on the canvas--there is no guarantee you will nail it again. Creativity, because it is a cryptology of sorts, is not a skill measured by one's capacity to unscramble the secret; every secret is different, has its own mixed up way about it; and it's so undetectably easy for just that one little extra level of mixture to render a secret humanly unknowable. Skill, is rather, in one's ability to do what she does with grace. With just plain grace. It's harder than it sounds.

But now let me tell you, something, Me. You're going to like this, and then a second later, before I even say anything else, you are going to really love it: there is a shortcut to profundity.

Now I'm only going on with explaining what I mean because I trust you to not to blow it out of proportion. I'm not going to say anything devastating. I'm just going to say enough to give you what I mean to give you. See, thing is, it's just, I see you slogging and shivering, smiling with absolutely no conviction, even when you're alone in a room, week by week, through agonizingly unacknowledged writer's block. It's killing me watching you resist the notion that you're unwell. It's time you just acknowledged it. -- Okay, I can see, above, that you made a little diagnostic list. And I'm happy for you for that. That's good that you did that.

If you are looking for inspiration, you will find that there is a type of idea that you can go hunting after, and it's even going to be all ready for you to just simply read it and let it in. It's because of what these ideas are, why they can be profound no matter how often you come back to them. I can only try and explain in terms of schematic accommodation again. See, the way these ideas work is that, first of all, they still have all the thought-jostling oomph of a profound idea, they will still rock you, but instead of leaving your cognitive apparatus permanently rattled, what will happen is the cascade of accommodations in your head will sort of slow to almost a halt, like you just won't have anywhere to keep making accommodations, and so you just have to let go and watch all its changes to your brain come undone in reverse. The idea will just sort of poop back out. You'll maybe remember a useless gist of it. You'll remember where to find it if you want to come back to it and try out your brain-changing skills, again. Practice your cryptography on a code you'll never break. I hope you see how this is not entirely grandiose. Now's your last chance to not read any further.

The ideas of inexhaustible worth are to be found on the dark side of brute facts. The brute facts as in the brute facts. For instance, the brute fact of time. The brute fact of the experience. The brute fact of solipsistic bankruptcy. Brute facts, particularly ones acknowledged by the global scientific community, are the absolute most popular ideas in the world. You can't claim to know yourself without first basing the bottom-most of your premises on brute fact. And yet don't get me wrong. To reject them is not like logically absurd or anything--brute facts are logical duds to begin with. Which is to say we, humanity, are shooting with blanks, here. You can't get hurt, Me. The Artist, for instance, which you are careful not to call yourself, could do none better than to make obvious, from the ideas opposite brute facts, the one unspoken notion that would allow one to conceive the basis of an entirely additional body of human knowledge--of the universe, of individuality, of life and sentience--for she would have done the heretofore impossible. Profound wouldn't even be the proper word for this caliber of impact. It's not like we'd just merely have an extra fact for every fact. We would have have a novel sort of third fact--that there were two facts for every point of fact--which is practically literally to say that we would have access to a sort of three-dimensional knowledge. I don't even know if it would be fair to call us the same species, after an adaptation like that. You can bet you're dick it'd be adaptive. And the Artist, who made this incomprehensible idea not merely intriguing but obvious, she would be revered for centuries! It sounds absurd, to me; but then who knows with someone like you, Me; you go nuts for this shit, when you go for it at all.

Of course, the Artist won't ever uncover some meaning opposed to brute facts. And if she did, who knows what would entail. Maybe we would just have new kinds of brute facts. My honest opinion: the task is impossible. The brute facts are lethally brute, Me, trust me. But then here you go. You know what to do with them. An impossibly difficult challenge. An impossibly worthwhile reward. An erstwhile obligation not to call yourself the Artist and jinx the whole damn thing.

Over 'n out,
Towel

Posted by suppletowelcuddle at December 3, 2009 6:10 PM