What do you think about when you’ve nothing particular to think about, when your mind unharnessed may mosey where it may?
We are what’s on our minds. Minds supply our personalities, distinction, what makes me me and you you. Bodies may observe each other but not converse.
We saddle, bridle, and direct our minds some fraction of each day. We learn this in school and later at our tasks. For some, harnessing their minds is easy, for others harder, just as some horses are easier to break. Some of us are scolded for daydreaming, but how can we help it? “Concentrate!” is almost as silly a command as “Cheer up!”
Most of each day our minds are on their own, nosing and browsing where they will. In sleep they may meander crazy places, to our surprise. Awake, we may find ourselves noticing, wondering, pondering far from what we meant. Cooking I find myself musing about the deer in the field, the clouds, some pal, something I read. Why? You tell me.
We don’t much discuss this divergence between our intentional and inadvertent intellects because it embarrasses. We’re in charge of ourselves, we pretend, “the captain of my soul,” who can force ourselves forward in lockstep, saluting our commanding officer. “Single-minded” is a flattering adjective to many, though it sounds like hell to me. Younger, my ambition did its best to break my mind, lashing it bloody, but my mind kept writing poems, taunting ambition’s attempts.
What my dreams like to dream about, more than anything, is language, words in English, how they frolic, coquette, play tricks; how these tidbits of sound and sense, with their varied origins, combine or conflict; what I’d teach about language (heaven help me!) different than what I was taught. I do not rate this curiosity creditable or practicable, it’s just how my mind swings. A painter may envision colors, a chef flavors, a sybarite pleasures, a scholar footnotes, what delights is neither our doing nor our fault, just how we are.
This morning I woke puzzling why no teacher ever installed the reader as the writer’s indispensable co-creator, whom we ignore at our peril. As we speak differently to different audiences and on different occasions, so we must write differently, for what is writing but the codification of the human voice. One speaks differently to tot, teacher, cop, boss, priest, pal, paramour, in pulpit, parapet, redoubt, to cudgel, convince, cajole, so should we compose our words to our occasion, and not according to some grammar from nowhere about do’s and don’ts. There’s no such thing as proper speech and any vital speech is as unprecedented as its instant. We need a common language to comprehend each other but beyond that how we use it is up to us – and the more “like ourselves” we sound, distinct from the compliant crowd, the more compelling and persuasive. Writing is not obeying rules but bending them in our peculiar direction, as cooking isn’t about following recipes but concocting one’s own.
I woke from my dream into a paroxysm of scribbling, my preachment felt so urgent, then looking up from my page, almost laughed aloud at my vehemence. Who a quarter through the twenty-first century cares about this stuff! Maybe back in Shakespeare’s day or Pope’s or even Frost’s or Joyce’s a hundred years ago, but literature and literacy these days are an esoteric backwater, not quite lace-making or buggy-riding, but close. My fascination fixes me as a fuddy-duddy in my epoch, a relic, but so what, it’s what my mind adores, demands, so can’t be helped.