Your last paragraph strikes a chord. Going back to that fourth line:
conscious thought was in there before the line was produced, so
"something happened" between the thought and the word on the page.
Maybe the conscious thought overlay the stream of randomness
generation, particular phrases were "found" and the results fed to my
writing arm. There's a knot in there I haven't teased out yet.
I think I meant, minimizing conscious thought rather than banishing it
outright. There is a balance between the two, I think. I have
sometimes used "dissociated noise" - or long lists of "random" words -
to produce other work. The first pass has rarely been useful.
Roger
On 7/5/05, Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The experience of writing code all morning, hitting compile at
> lunch-time, and seeing it all come together and work first time is
> indeed a spooky one. Sometimes you just know how it has to be.
>
> I often solve seemingly intractable programming problems (this might
> sound grandiose: I don't mean proofs that P=NP, just niggly bits of
> delinquent program behaviour) the following morning in the shower. And
> pretty much all of the Half Cocks poems have been written at speed,
> grabbing whatever suggested itself to me and gaffer-taping it into
> place while keeping half an eye on the word-count. But there is a
> monitor process in place - it wouldn't occur to me to want to *banish*
> thought altogether.
>
> [OMNES: It wouldn't occur to me to want to *banish* thought!]
>
> Daniel Dennett gives an interesting speculative account of how speech
> and dreaming work (random stimulus filtered and sorted on the fly, the
> "cleaned up" version then feeding back into the noise generator as the
> seed for further randomness) in _Consciousness Explained_. The
> conscious moment is needed in order for the feedback to take place -
> otherwise you get dissociated noise.
>
> Dominic
>
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