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with my ghost(ly) writer, the "slave within"
I had a lesson handed to me by my subconscious writer this week, and it was a hard one. Returned to Tallahassee from the TAA Convention in Orlando, I sat down to write a report on the excellent sessions devoted to the digital revolution in academic writing that were presented on Friday and Saturday. I had, as is my practice, "given the assignment" to my slave within, the subconscious level of composition and other cognitive activities that I have described elsewhere. To my delight, the article was ready to transcribe! Although tired from the return drive, which was an hour longer than necessary due to getting lost in conversation with my subconscious (yes, I talk to myself a lot!) and passing the exit off of I-4 onto Florida's Turnpike south of Orlando, I was eager to "download" what I felt was completed. And this was a big mistake! Oh, the writing went well enough. But the sleep "that knits up the raveled sleeve of care" was tugging, and I was in a hurry to finish and retire. I finished, clicked the exit button for Word, impatiently clicked a pop-up that asked me whether I wanted to do something, and closed down my computer. Only the next day when I went to retrieve the summary and could not find it did I realize what I had done: I had not saved the file. But that's not the whole lesson. The story is no longer in the subconscious ready to transcribe again! My brain is working like my computer: I dumped the contents of the subconscious into the conscious, transcribed that into the computer, and in so doing literally transferred that work out of mind. So the failure to save the file means that I will have to write the story all over again. And as Heraclitus would remind us were he alive today, you cannot step into the same river twice. And you cannot step into the same stream of thoughts twice. My computer has a restore function on it, which permits me to go back to a configuration at a previous time or date. I tried that, but it works only on files that have been at one time saved. So I have a need to respect the way my subconscious works for and with me. Because, it seems to have a mind of its own. |
