No.192
It is Friday, a day that happens all too often, and I’ve been sitting here thinking for some lost and countless minutes about the fact of other people’s thoughts. I’m thinking about this because lately (the past five mornings, a hugely scientific field of reference) I’ve noticed more acutely than usual the impact of other people’s thought-noise on my own—I will go out on a well-worn limb here, and suggest that you are also more affected than you might think by the phenomenon of other people’s noise-thoughts. This is not groundbreaking stuff, I do realise, but the difference in the quality of my own thinking, especially in the mornings, is so shaped by early and quiet choices that I feel this bears mentioning.
The change in type and texture of thought is what has struck me most, and such factors are seemingly altered depending on whether or not I a) read a physical book, b) talk much aloud, c) scroll or read things on the damned device e.g. the news, d) dare to turn on bright lights and e) go for a walk. It is whether or not c) happens which seems to ensure the most disruption (again, I realise this isn’t an internationally fresh discovery, but I do feel it is of some interest).
If I succeed in avoiding the hungry, glistening square eye of the phone for at least the first portion of a day, my thoughts feel unhurried, more gentle, more structured, smoother at the edges and more weighted towards the useful, the interesting, the productive mull, the creative-without-conflict, the settled sort of dreaming. I like the thoughts and ideas I have if I have steered clear of Other People’s Thoughts—how can a person end up anywhere personal and centered first thing in the morning if they’ve listened or read or scrolled at high speed past a thousand stranger-thoughts before they’ve even had a moment to think a single one of their own?
Perhaps this happens or matters only, or intensely, if you wade about in words for a living, both in your head and on paper, but if I compare the smooth and useful thoughts to those my brain produces if I have, say, read a lot of news before getting as far as coffee, or glanced through other people’s mornings before pausing to consider my own, then I simply do not care for those thoughts very much, and those thoughts do not seem to care much for me either.
The thoughts that follow an exterior, outward-peeled beginning to a morning are a jumble, they are often unfair and unfounded, folded into discomfort, they are scattered like un-held papers when a gust blows through a room, and they leave me mostly unable to go about the rest of the day in a helpful way—this being in terms of work, or I suppose even communication generally, broadly, vaguely. And without a doubt all will seem completely lost if I elect to turn on any overhead lights while it’s still thickly dark outside, let alone have searing brightness in conjunction with reading the news.
I’m finding it so plain-and-simple odd now, the way we fill up our small animal heads with the thoughts of faraway others at all hours of the day, how we slurp them up through our screens—much as you may be doing right this moment, here, horrors!—feelings upon feelings upon lives upon feelings that, would they arrive on the doorstep, be mainly alien to us. Perhaps this is really about the distinction then between In-person and Internet, a question of selectiveness, and at root just the plain fact that we have evolved as creatures to interact with and come to understand the people around us, face-to-face, and only a few handfuls. We are supposed to be in and of the world, not watching it happen from a distance.
This phenomenon doesn’t seem to happen for me in the same way if I read a book upon waking—though this can depend on the variety and content of said book—but in fact reading serves the purpose of prolonging the daily existence a little, keeping the reality and the laundry at bay for just an hour more, something which can then help maintain the dreaminess and detachment that are often necessary for the writing of things. Celeste Ng put this general conundrum very beautifully in a 2017 interview with The Atlantic: “So I try to write in the morning now. It’s difficult if I get sucked into email, because it burns off the morning-ness, the dream-like quality of attention that’s still present when you first wake up. And when it’s gone, it's gone.”
So I would suspect that it could be summarised like this for now—the dream-ness, the morning-ness, it evaporates like a fine mist of rain from a burning concrete pavement, our delicate, spiderweb attention lost so instantly in paying that attention to others, and the “dream-logic” as Ng calls it vanished before the birds have even begun their earliest singing.
Our attentions are scattered, so finite, and I want to be far more careful about where mine are placed—generally-speaking, but also very specifically in the context of those hours when the birds are waking the trees up. At this moment, the window is open slightly to let the 7:30am-ness inside, it is now Saturday and as such I’ve moved myself through time and through words, and I’m getting terribly cold hands but the birds are waking the trees up, and I can hear the river from here, and I’m resolved to think only my own thoughts from now until noon.
THIS WEEK I FELL FRESHLY IN LOVE WITH:
The paintings of Hilma af Klint (1862-1944).
“I must soak more in the moonlight,”
— No Ch'ŏn-myŏng, from “Cricket” trans. Ko Won (June 1938)
“Sometimes I draw straight lines on the page because the words are too slow”
— C. K. Williams, from “Yours,” Poems 1963-1983 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988)
Exactly! Not a lyrical word but it gets the point across. I stopped opening my phone months ago, until I had produced a creative gift to glorify God (or at least started one). The gift must meet the same intentionality I would invest in any other personal or professional endeavor. I print out my calendar the night before if necessary using an app. I use an analog clock to wake me up (wonderful improvement). I enter these mornings with the greatest challenge. How do I create something, whether it be music, art, writing, cooking, gardening, etc., that will glorify God from whom all blessings flow? I maintain that near-monastic mental and spiritual purpose until noon. It reforms every molecule in my being for the better and builds on itself over time. It sounds like you are doing something similar. I like the way you were trying to express yourself and your goals without letting the words weigh the message down. Using the words lightly and letting them evaporate much like the morning mist. Well done.