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Spontaneity

(A work in progress)

Being little practiced in the employment of formal technology, I shall scarcely run the risk of offending against good taste by any misuse of it. My ideas, drawn rather from the uniform familiarity with my own self than from a rich experience of the world, or acquired through reading, will not deny their origin; they will sooner... collapse from their own feebleness than maintain themselves by means of authority and borrowed strength.

Friedrich Schiller, The Aesthetic Education of Man, First Letter

A major theme in my life has been spontaneity vs. rehearsed behavior. In the course of my daily life there is little I do or say, in public or by myself, without first acting it out on my internal stage, to gauge how it will look or sound, whether it is -- well, I can't verbalize (or really know) what the criterion is, that I'm looking for. I can only say that I run possible actions and statements through this nameless filter; some I "use" (i.e. I do the thing I was considering whether to do), some I discard. This raises a number of interesting issues that I do not wish to deal with here, other than to mention that they have occured to me; for instance, What am I afraid of? What character's personality am I trying to keep consistent (and how does this relate to my desire as a writer to develop a narrative voice)? Am I successful in my attempts?

What I want to address is, What is the reality behind the rehearsal? -- Where does the "script" come from, and what would it look like if this vetting process were taken out of the loop? And maybe what's most important is, Is it even possible for me to know that? -- Given that all my statements are rehearsed before I give them voice; I am arguing that this is also true of internally verbalized thoughts, the only type of thought that I can "know" in any (to me) meaningful sense. Sorry about the lack of clarity here; what I'm trying to get at is that if (a) I have a level of conscious reality which is not filtered and (b) all of my interactions with the world and with my own stream-of-consciousness are filtered, then I can have no access to that in me which comes up with the words which I eventually speak, the actions which I eventually take.

And yet that access is precisely what I am seeking.

I want to know myself; my feeling is that I can do so by better understanding what happens while I am filtering out "inappropriate" behavior. I should point out that I am making some assumptions here; basically I am assuming that my observation of spontaneous thoughts arising somewhere within me, then being filtered by another level of consciousness before emerging as behavior, is an accurate description of what is really going on in my head. There are certainly other plausible explanations; however this one feels right and I am going with it for now. Also I am assuming (or asserting) that the source of these spontaneous thoughts is somehow my truest, most vital self. I will not defend this assertion here, but merely note it.

Let me explain why I think that understanding my Editorial process can give me insight into the source material for that process. To do this I need to clarify a bit my thoughts about my internal geography. I have been speaking rather broadly of "levels" of consciousness and "layers" of being, of locations within my self as if I were a Cartesian space, mappable and divisible; as if given a sufficiently sharp metaphysical scalpel, it would be a simple enough task to cut away the extraneities of thought which surround my essential being. But I think geology provides a better metaphor here than geometry -- picture my internal landscape as a bed of fossilized strata, troubled by millenia of (ongoing) tectonic and volcanic activity, to the extent that the layers are discontinuous, sometimes out of order, often difficult to distinguish from one another. The metaphor is not perfect; it does not show, for instance, the uncertain nature of the phenomenon, the degree to which observation of the structure can cause it to shift, its essential mutability. But clearly to explore it, we will need tools more capable of nuance than a surgeon's.

The tool I propose to use is free-writing. (If you're interested in a good definition and discussion of free-writing, take a look at Writing without Teachers, by Peter Elbow, a really excellent book. I am using the term broadly here, to mean simply "blurting" -- attempting consciously to circumvent the editing process which I perceive going on in my head.) I would not go so far as to claim that the output of this process is my "unmediated" primary self, my very soul; not at all. However I believe that to free-write is to impose on myself a new set of filters, a different process of mediation than that which accompanies me throughout my everyday life. (More akin perhaps to the filters which, for me, govern my behavior during the marijuana experience; but more on this in another essay.) And I believe that by understanding the differences between my free-writing and my "normal" behavior, I can begin to have some insight into the processes that lie at the bottom of it all.

There is much more that I want to write on this topic, and on the cluster of topics that I see as linked to it -- sincerity, honesty, freedom, awkwardness. But not today. I hope this will provide some explanation of my motives in free-writing, of where I hope to get to. I will use this web site to publish some examples of free-writing that I consider at least partially successful, and perhaps in time some sort of analysis as well. Feel free to read it if you are interested.