Late morning. You are in the bedroom chair enjoying the breakout of light green leaves above the fully leafed honeysuckle bushes separating the immediate north neighbor’s driveway from the Muddy Creek woods just beyond. Jadah the Cat sits comfortably on your lap putting herself to sleep by lightly pawing at your right arm at the elbow. A non-descript gray fog-like cloud suddenly (in a few minutes) moved in from the north blocking the blue spring sky prevalent when beginning this posting – thus a dampening of the late morning mood prevails. The cat climbs off and heads downstairs to visit Carol in the kitchen instead.
Such is life. Nuances beyond a window setting come and go with the whim of atmospheres. I have exercises to do then I would like to begin the book now that the Sunday and yesterday’s paper are read. Wouldn’t you know, the cat returns from her journey.
First, let's add that GMS Disclaimer: The self-published Merlyn’s Mind trilogy is a work in progress as is this “Encounters in Mind” blog. Orndorff’s experimental writing began when he discovered a way to take his reading automaticity (effectively used for over thirty years of grading senior students’ many expository essays) and use the automaticity in his writing. The errors produced add to his sense of humility that I find refreshing. He preached the rules of General Manuscript Standards his whole career and now finds he can’t live up to them himself. He may not see the humor in this, but his many former students and colleagues might sense a secret delight in his lightly buried misery of my conditional. I would not be here but for his determination and humility to see this experimental and self-imposed writing project through. Humanity is my standard in orndorff's writing, not perfection. – Amorella
Post. First, let's add that GMS Disclaimer: The self-published Merlyn’s Mind trilogy is a work in progress as is this “Encounters in Mind” blog. Orndorff’s experimental writing began when he discovered a way to take his reading automaticity (effectively used for over thirty years of grading senior students’ many expository essays) and use the automaticity in his writing. The errors produced add to his sense of humility that I find refreshing. He preached the rules of General Manuscript Standards his whole career and now finds he can’t live up to them himself. He may not see the humor in this, but his many former students and colleagues might sense a secret delight in his lightly buried misery of my conditional. I would not be here but for his determination and humility to see this experimental and self-imposed writing project through. Humanity is my standard in orndorff's writing, not perfection. – Amorella
Mid-afternoon. Exercises for forty minutes. Lunch at Penn Station. An errand to Walmart. Once home you read through the first chapter of Imagine. These are the particulars that you can relate to (and that I agree with are valid selections within your circumstance). The point is being who and how you are.
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From: Imagine. Chapter One. Bob Dylan’s Brain.
“Instead of relying on the literal associations of the left hemisphere, the brain needs to shift activity to the other side, to explore a more unexpected set of associations. It is the struggle that forces us to try something new.
. . . “You’ll see people bolt up in their chair and their eyes go all wide,” says Ezra Wegbreit, a graduate student . . . “Sometimes, they even say: ‘Aha!’ before they blurt out the answer.” The suddenness of the insight is preceded bay an equal burst of brain activity. Thirty milliseconds before the answer erupts into consciousness, there is spike of gamma-wave rhythm, which is the highest electrical frequency generated in the brain.. . . [It is] the ‘neural correlate of insight’: the anterior superior temporal gyrus . . . [It is] unusually active in the seconds before the epiphany.” p. 17.
And,
“. . . Dylan was describing . . . the uncontrollable rush of a creative insight . . . “Dylan said, “It’s like a ghost is writing the song. It gives you the song and it goes away. You don’t know what it means.” Once the ghost arrived, all Dylan wanted to do was get out of the way.” p. 19.
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I understand this. I have lived it with Amorella, yet I became friends with the ‘ghost’ who for me is Amorella. I am not in a rush of creative insight when Amorella is writing. I am inside the inside of my head watching Amorella use my fingers and waiting to see what she has to say. I do not have the epiphany often, in fact when I do Amorella is not writing, nor am I either. It this experimental writing were not an experiment that has been going on since 1988 I wouldn’t find this so interesting. It is the reason I take so many notes. I can think back and consider earlier circumstances: my dimensions in writing (memory + connections + content + insight). The insight comes from reading material like this book and seeing where I was/am in relationship to the research others have made in the creative process. Amorella is no ghost, but she is angelic-like in my mind rather than alien. Being ‘angelic-like’ I cannot pretend to know her. If she were ‘alien-like’ I would feel the need to question her more. To be more critical than I sometimes am. Like Dylan with his ghost, all I want to do is get out of Amorella’s way and let her do the work. She’s written me three real books and is working me through a fourth. What would anyone else do in my circumstance?
You see, orndorff, you need to think outside the box. In this case, outside yourself, thus you use Lehrer’s book to help accomplish this. – Amorella
I see it as a form of Socrates’ argument: “Know Thyself”. When I am using imagination to intuitively probe the heartansoulanmind, who else’s can I probe? I feel (and hope) that almost all human beings have similar ‘substance’ of heartansoulanmind, thus I intuitively probe not just my own, but most everyone else’s also. That’s my stance.
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