Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Meta Logic in an Existential Debriefing with Rambling Verbosity (Obvious Redundancy)

The closer you get to writing in true stream of consciousness, the closer you get to understanding your own inner workings.  You see the Deeps where words form, a borrowed metaphor here, a cultural lambaste there, a song lyric weaving its way between and around the words, sometimes spilling over into the prose.  And when you try to nail down just what exactly you're thinking about, you realize that you're mind's hand is no longer holding a hammer and the nail is now an ibis wading in the shallows, now an image of Isis on top of Big Ben.

It makes me wonder if there's any sort of logic to it, and I long to say no.  The inner workings are too random, too influenced to have any real logic.  Sure, we can certainly concentrate on our thinking, but is the act of concentrating contrary to stream on consciousness?  I see the Stream as an ever-flowing source, unstoppable.  We may put up a dam and steal some of the thoughts, but we cannot hope to catch them all, let alone understand it. 

Observe:
bottle of mixed juices setting on a desk inside a tiny man's hand with only one sugar cube available.  nimble fingers.  keystrokes.  mere ideas, and thinking, always thinking, three steps ahead and two sentences behind, never on the current.  what to do when one errs?  your you're their there they're editing breaks the Stream.  what to do when one becomes Aware?  Awareness threatens the purity of the Stream.  thoughts scramble.  piano songs...  12:49pm...  lack of output, standard and HD both.  is there a reckoning?

Can you imagine having a perfect memory, able to recall every thought you've ever wondered, each permutation an idea takes from a ONE to a TWO?  Horrifying, methinks.  What kind of filters are set up within us?  Are there some people without these filters?  A ripe and open mind, uninhibited? 

I posit that it may be impossible to write in true stream of consciousness.  The human mind is too wild to truly capture and replicate with 100% accuracy.  Perception can be grasped at, but even that is subjective.  Understanding can be rendered, but not wholly.  What a magnificent machine of thought we have!

I think the point is something about stream of consciousness and how fine a line one must walk in order to write effectively in the style.  On one end, you can go too deep, and the story--arguably the most important element to any work of "fiction"--suffers, drowned by the extraneous.  Or you can simply wade into the Stream, and the tone suffers loss.  It's a delicate task at best, writing in the Stream, but oh it's a fun one.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

nice post, logan.

ah, stream-of-conscious. ms. virginia woolf is one i look to when considering how best to render the matter; and now mr. t.s. eliot comes to mind.

love how you mix your contemplations, your creativity, and your sense of humor

~L

logankstewart said...

Thank you, L. I love me some Eliot; I've never read any Woolf, though I may have to now. Thanks for the suggestion!