the timboucher experience

One of my greatest strengths, I think, is understanding how I operate. At least on the level of being able to harness my creativity, anyway. I’m not going to claim to be fully cognizant of every little thing in my entire life, but I’m pretty decent with that. I seem to have two major modes that my brain likes to operate in. One is the really strong systematizing side, which gives me insight into arcane pursuits like information architecture, and developing all these theories about story-systems and shit like that. It’s what lets me explain complex things in a simple straightforward manner. Then, on the other side, there’s this much less logical, much more mystical kind of seeking, where its all about resonance and establishing connections between things that don’t really make any rational sense. It’s more of a discovery mode, or something along those lines. I’m not so concerned with how shit works, so much as how it feels.

Anyway, I tend to fluctuate back and forth between the two of these a lot. Usually, I’ll get really far into one of these directions, and then I’ll have a radical swing back in the other direction. That’s what happened over the past few weeks. Before I left for Thanksgiving vacation, I was up to my eyeballs in systematizing, trying to work out ideas for my book. And it was going really well. But I don’t know if it was just travelling, or if it was needing a break from that sort of thinking or what, but I very suddenly switched out of that mode, and haven’t been able to jump back into it since.

In one sense, it’s sort of frustrating, because I want to get back to working on my book. But the thing that I’ve come to learn about myself is that I can’t force this sort of thing to come about. Doing that is only a million times more frustrating and never works in the end. So I basically have to ride this other more mystical/feeling-toned wave until it splashes back on the shore. I know that it’s good in the end though, because what is happening behind closed doors inside of me is that I’m being renewed, and that all the really hard work is being done by a part of me that I can’t name or locate. When it’s all done, it will basically just burst out of me fully-fledged all in one surge.

Maybe that’s more what the systematizing part of me is all about. Like it just waits around for my subconscious or whatever to figure out a bunch of crazy shit, and then it just casts out its nets, and pulls in the harvest. That seems to make a lot of sense to me. In the meantime though, I’m very much in this other mode where I’m less inclined to write. Partly because the things I’m thinking about and feeling aren’t really things that I can explain just now. But I know they are hugely important, and will be launching me with great speed into a new direction very soon.

Last night I got back into doing some free association style writing, which I hadn’t done for several months. Actually, now that I think of it, the last time was probably just before I got really heavy into all this systematical sort of writing I’ve been working on lately. Anyway, all that stuff is weird. Cause I feel like some of the writing in it is very good, and some sucks. But that’s not the point of it really. For me, it’s just an exercise in going down all these weird avenues and jumping across all these gorges and stuff. Like it doesn’t so much matter what they say, as long as I did them.

The best most effective times for me is when I’m able to write them with virtually no conscious thought at all. I don’t make decisions about what will be said or how, it just bubbles to the surface. Last night I started thinking about it in a very useful way too. I’d read recently in A Wind in the Door, there’s a passage where the twins Sandy and Dennys are working the flower garden, and they are “turning it under” in preparation for the cold weather. This means that they are sort of chopping up the remnants of the plants from the previous growing season, and then tilling them back into the soil, so they decay and their nutrients go back to the soil. I think this is very much what this kind of free-association writing is all about for me. Just going out there and chopping everything up, and digging it all right back into the soil, to fertilize it and to renew it for the next growing season. I like this quote on the subject from a gardening site:

I use my garden as a dump site for all the darn leaves in the fall & winter, spreading the piles out. If we clean the chicken coop, that goes out there. If my neighbor who owns horses wants to dump some horse manure out there, we let him. If we have alot of storm damage to trees, we’ll make a big burn pile in the garden & burn it. In the spring, we’ll mow & then have it tilled or disked a few times before we start planting.

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