As some of you may know, over the last few years I have taken to playing with writing.
Whilst more news of the fruit of these efforts is one the way in coming months, I continue to post short pieces over on another website called Did She Know.
Who knows how these written pieces will be perceived, received etc, but I welcome you visiting the site and getting in touch with your thoughts.
As the frontpiece for the site says, the eyes upon a thing, they change that thing, utterly.
“A secret is no longer so if it is seen, viewed, watched, available to scrutiny.
So here it is, not hidden, squirrelled away, licked and stroked, ambition a lofty ideal, the anxiety of being unveiled never faced.
Here are the words that I play with, circle, lie beneath, dream of, stretch and dissect…”
If you feel called to comment please remember that I am human, even though I am not sitting beside you, hearing you breathe as your eyes devour.
Actively giving away Stillness to…
A few samples of pieces to get you started, both from one of the veins I have begun to explore in my writing on Did She Know, are on the topic of a man you may be familiar with, Mark Zuckerberg, and all we give away in the scrolling, clicking, liking, checking, posting… on our phones and screens.
“I want to begin this series with The Work of Mark Zuckerberg.
What a curious place to begin, you say, laughing at me. With all the places you could go, you want to write about His Work. You lean back in your chair, one hand on the table, finger tapping, smiling at me.
I do. I want to think about how One Man could be allowed, be given absolute permission to spawn, to seed, to sow, to cultivate, to grow, quite so much hatred…”
“It is the birthright of each and every one of us to have stillness.
You laugh: Ha! Really? Are you kidding?
I can hear the guffaws being hurled out of the mouths of the readers like cabbages being thrown at a bad play.
I will bow and say: it is the birthright of each and every one of us to have stillness… Booing, I can hear it. Boooooooring…”
The Gaze of Zuckkerberg
I Am Not Going to Be an Alarmist… But
Writing for presence?
Do you enjoy writing? Do you notice, if it is an endeavour you regularly take on, what it does to your thinking?
A man called Martin Lotze did MRIs of various creative processes.
These studies are interesting and too multifaceted to go into huge detail on here, but the most pertinent finding in this, was that writers have additional activity in the ‘caudate nucleus‘, responsible for automatic functions, and the ‘Broca’s and Wernicke’s’ areas of the brain, which deal with language and word formation.
Writers, or at least those considered expert at writing, change the way that their brains work whilst writing. They became language-oriented, thinking more in words than in pictures, and in this, this study suggested that the brains of writers differ from the general population.
If this is an area that interests you, there is a very well known 1960s study by Frank X. Barron on the creative brain, and what sets highly creative people aside from everybody else.
He studied architects, mathematicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, and writers who spent time living at a University being observed by scientists.
The findings of this are interesting, and the habits and observations most interesting include that those who are highly creative in this ways have an openness to their inner life, a preference for complexity and ambiguity, a high tolerance for disorder and disarray, the ability to find order in chaos and a willingness to take risks.
Barron stated that the creative person is “both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person.”
“Dancing on a Crack in the Human Psyche”
They dance on the crack in the human psyche, you could say.
Frank X Barron performed another study on creative writers that suggested that writers tend to score in the top 15 percent of the general population on measures of psychopathology, such as depression, mania, schizophrenia, and paranoia and, although this would be suggestive that writers would have high levels of mental illness, they actually largely had positive measures of mental health. This was suggested to be down to the ability for introspection, the ability to be self-aware, and more comfortable with their own hell states.
Essentially, the writer has a rare complexity of personality and brain wiring that brings creative results.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this, on my writing (again, remember I am human) and for you to take time to explore Did She Know.
