| | You know how we apparently only use ten percent of our brains?
I really felt that today. It was odd. I was sitting in my creative writing seminar, talking about some short stories- 'Intimacy' by Raymond Carver and 'Architect' and 'The Crossing' by Rachel Seiffert. 'Architect' was my favourite, it's about an architect who suddenly loses his ability to understand buildings like he used to. The idea of losing the creativity you've taken for granted all your life was quite terrifying. In my case, in a parallel situation, that wouldn't mean just having writer's block, or being unable to get the words right (that's almost always the way it is for me, anyway). It would mean not even thinking in terms of stories any more, which I do- see something, make it into a story in my head, pick out things in the world around me like cloud shapes and people with interesting quirks, and come up with random descriptive lines (that I usually forget to write down). "Some time later, he realises he has been walking in and out of buildings without even thinking about them." Wouldn't that be awful, for the singular way your mind works to suddenly alter?
And woah, how much digression was that? None of the above is relevant to what I started out saying. We didn't even discuss 'Architect' in the seminar, we focussed on the other two.
What I was saying, then. We were talking about some short stories. And the tutor kept posing interesting questions, and I had that lots-of-ideas-buzzing-in-my-head feeling, but I was struggling to connect and articulate them all. And at that moment I really felt how small my mind was, too small and inadequate to turn the way my thoughts engaged with the stories into something concrete that I could write down or say. I could literally feel all my thoughts stuck in what seemed to be a tiny part of my head, surrounded by something impenetrable, and I thought, if only I could explode those thoughts out to fill the whole of my head, if only I could use my mind to its full potential- how amazing that would be. But I can't, and it leaves me feeling frustrated, intellectually impotent.
I don't expect that makes much sense. Oh well.
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| | Posted 11/28/2006 11:54 AM - 6 Views - 2 eProps - 2 comments
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