online: 28 june 2008 modified: 2,3, 28 june 2008 2 june 2008 nework
beginning from zero
i resort first to Dorothea Brande's method* of writing whatever comes to mind or page (or tongue?):
...finding mind empty of new thought (or any) i randomly select page 141.9 on which she suggests that the Freudian 'subconscious' is not BELOW conscious thought but ALL AROUND it... apparently Freud later changed 'subconscious' to 'unconscious'... which could include any and every thought that one is not thinking at the moment... perhaps...
...having written that, I feel fully launched, or re-floated, having immediately caught a fish almost too big to pull out of the water... perhaps it is best to leave it there, close to the surface of conscious thought, and see what happens!... (i'm already feeling that this is not the personal unconscious described by Freud but a much larger creature encompassing all the thoughts experienced (or to be invented) by anyone... the whole content of human knowledge, discovery, shock or seeming trivia - perhaps closer to the collective unconscious described by C G Jung (but not mystical, or superstitious?)...
...someone phones with the thought that life is too difficult, or depressing, one cannot know what is right to do and so one is bound to make mistakes and to live wrongly... which to me seems like recovery from depression and the beginning of the new, a door to the unconscious (in this new sense)... a realising that that uncertainty is what makes life always great always trivial, what keeps open the unbounded as well as the deadly...
...for life is not real... nor is it magic...!
...clearly this is a moment to 'rectify the names' ... as Confucius proposed, in times of uncertainty (after 'looking straight into the heart'... see Ezra Pound's translation** of 'the great digest', 'the unwobbling pivot' and 'the analects' of Confucius)...
...and lastly (in this little beginning of something) there comes the thought that this enlarged unconscious is not a great fish but a shoal (of all fishes in the ocean, of all things in the universe... or else it is the new awareness (since Teilhard de Chardin) of ourselves as THE SELF-AWARENESS OF NATURE...
...and at that i pause, feeling that with luck this may continue... but it's not what I expected...
*Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer, Harcourt Brace, 1934, with a foreword by Malcolm Bradbury, Macmillan, London 1996.
**Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects, translation and commentary by Ezra Pound, originally written on bamboo tablets about 500 years BCE, and New Directions Publishing Company, New York 1969.
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