Home
Unraveling a Tangled Ball of Yarn
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Creative
- Hits: 832
It's like I'm in a dark room attempting to unravel a tangled ball of yarn. This creative blockage, it's gone on long enough - 2 trivial projects to be completed, only 2 in the immediacy - 2 short fucking little projects. Squibs.
The kind of stuff Shelley would barf up in an afternoon just trying to get lucky. Worse even, I mean, my bar is nowhere near that high, (there are disadvantages to this, I'm striving for a planiloquence that doesn't demand too much tongue-twisting or mental agility).
Pull them up on the computer, 1 at a time. Stare at them. Read through them, find the holes, there are holes, lots of holes, childrens rhyming verse, rhymes that fall flat, too complex, don't ring true, don't even rhyme, don't, don't, don't, and the beginning, "In the beginning", fuck, I hate it, how to start, how to start...
Ten thousand little don'ts. But there are occasionally those little gems, short verses, stanzas even, that are perfect, or close enough to, and I'm trying to build around them.
A 32 page project - tops, 1 stanza per page - maybe 6-8 lines on average. And I print it off because I can never grasp the scope just looking at a single page, now 40 pages of printed notes, words, rubbish, ideas, repetitive, the same note made a dozen times, it's fallen by the wayside, or like a hedge grown all thorny and overgrown and I can't find the shape of it...
Or I draw the shape of it, but can't fill in the words, the shape of the verse a cup waiting, I rattle letters, rhymes, jostle them together but nothing seems to fit, it's making me crazy, I've fallen, fallen into very bad habits. It's never been this bad.
Write it all out now, untangling the printed words with pen and paper, sort, make it clear in my head, break to meditate, try and try again, juggle, mix, shake, it's not coming together...go for a walk, pace, pace, this, these projects, they've made me a neurotic, restive, infected me with a hundred nervous tics, this - and this is the worst - is I know it is a simple thing, it should be struck from my pen like a grocery list or a scratchy-Bill-Paid, somewhere in my head my little genii's playing "hide and seek", and I'm going a bit crazy trying to find him...
Time for a break. I'm gonna try and sell off some more shit on Kijiji.
Screenshots of the Sahara
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Images
- Hits: 736
Cold weather making me a little restless, virtual prospecting the Sahara. Some amazing Satellite Imagery that whets the curiosity...
I could do this all day, but it's time to get back to work...
Cognitive Filters
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 850
The idea of a Cognitive Filter is that we all - consciously but more usually unconsciously, view and experience the world through our own unique perceptual framework which often reinforces our established points of views. We are all guilty of it.
The best way to imagine a Cognitive Filter is a 2X4 jutting out of our forehead, from which we hang countless prejudices, prisms, bits of colored glass, polarizing filters, ornaments, whatever prior experiences we have had in life. Not only do we hang things, but for a great part of our lives - think childhood, think politics, news, education, friends and family - we allow other people to hang things there as well. Very often this 2X4 becomes so cluttered with "filters" that our vision is obscured unto blindness.
The funny thing about Cognitive Filters is that while none of us can see our own, or very often even the world past our own, we for some reason think we are able to see others. For example, we all recognize bigots, racists, homophobia, we can all look at our friends and say "this is your problem...", and our advice very often is good - we can see their problem, we've swung our own 2X4 far enough out of the way to take a clear look at theirs. Not always, and never as well as we think, but often enough. And often we can see a filter on their 2X4 - the same one we've hung on our own - and out of embarrassment refuse to observe it - Alcoholics, for example, generally out of politeness or a matter of form won't acknowledge that another person is an alcoholic - it's easier to ignore that filter and instead put their problems down to one of a thousand other filters hanging down from the 2X4, or we might recognize a filter on another and realizing we have the same one on ourselves flatter or congratulate the wearer - think of religion, politics, nationality, any number of clubs or organizations.
The point of all this meditation - "All This" so far rarely adds up to 30 minutes a day and never even a minute of true mind(ful)(less)ness - is to see past the cognitive filters and get back to an unencumbered view of the world.
...Or maybe I'm understanding it wrong...
Free Will VS Predestination/Predetermination
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 785
I see this cropping up from time to time - interviews with Psychologists, Physicists, Biologists, and the question is reduced to Free Will or Determinism.
I am clearly a firm believer in Free Will - and that the question itself is a red herring that paints one into a corner - much as asking someone "Would you prefer to die by drowning or hanging?", when, in fact, that someone had no intent of dying whatsoever and so the question is irrelevant.
Determinists subscribe to the mechanical view of the universe as laid down by Newton or Galileo, that cause follows effect, that we, as people, are of necessity driven by a thousand subconscious "causes" of which we can recognize only a few at a time. These "causes" result in most of the largely unconscious day to day decisions we make. Therefore we can be seen as being driven by unconscious urges and reaction to external forces and cues such as advertising, peers, society, people in the street, etc, etc...
They would argue that as we are largely unaware of the forces that shape us and control our behavior we are therefore little more than automatons, admittedly with a very complex programming, but automatons nonetheless.
To a degree this is true - but like many things it's a question of degree. We are all - to one degree or another - Schizophrenic, Neurotic, Obsessive, etc, etc - but our place on the scale of labels determines whether we take it as part of our identity or not.
I personally disagree with a great many of the physical and psychiatric diagnoses handed out for the sole reason that it disempowers the patient and takes away the ability for them to try and effect positive change and accept responsibility for their actions. Not that they are necessarily responsible for their disease or condition, but people that accept helplessness never get better, people who accept responsibility and take action occasionally do. A cancer patient might resign himself to a terminal outcome on the recommendation of their physician, when they could instead be making adjustments to their lifestyle and attempting to remedy the causal factors that led to the cancer. And I've met a lot of mentally ill people that seemed to accept their illness, as opposed to attempting to understand and control it. No diagnosis should be an excuse or a defining part of anyone's character or circumstance.
I fundamentally disagree with the question and would argue that a better question might be "How can we best reduce the influence of internal arguments and external influence to achieve the results that we truly want?". This, then, supposes we have some agency in our fate and by the very supposing we take responsibility and agency.
Page 369 of 1021