The Magpie Mind
Writing is a voyeuristic process, one keeps wandering unbidden through other people’s experiences, opening door after door on their perspectives and ideas, sometimes welcome, sometimes not, always reflecting ideas that are not one’s own.
Like an antenna, the mind listens in silence, caught in torrents of thought before it even realizes it, mesmerized by one opinion, intrigued by another, quietly influenced by thoughts so old and deep they have no expressed form.
You’re not really thinking, you are being thought by a collective consciousness which delights in molding you like clay and reshaping your mind.
The outcome of this sophisticated game becomes your inner landscape, the treasure of artifacts that give your consciousness a home.
The better you learn to navigate this landscape, the more you realize there is no such thing as your mind, you’re like a magpie guarding a nest of shiny objects, and that brings a strange mixture of embarrassment and relief, while it puts into question the utility and goodness of being yet another reverberating box.
Fortunately, that’s not how the process works.
Ideas don’t spring forth once and stay put like good mental products, they emerge still in the developmental stage and once they’re born, they transform, pick up speed and dazzle, only to fade slowly after a while, hide under the deep in the sea of human thought, and come out for air in future historical contexts and unexpected places, still recognizable, but boasting different outfits, excited to pose again as pioneering thought.
If you engage in the critical process of examining your mind and keep peeling off the stray ideas as you discover their external origin, which education, or even a simple conversation makes painfully obvious, you end up ditching the entire contents of your head, and that’s because you are not the contents, you’re the box.
It is a humbling thing to learn, that you don’t have a single thought in your head that’s truly your own, but it’s a freeing experience too: it takes the boot off your mind and allows it expression.
Writers are the painters of thought, not its generators.
They honor the sources of their inspiration by devoting to them their undivided attention and by highlighting their wisdom and refinement to the best of their ability.
One may question the morality of this viewpoint or find it revolting in principle, but its is not a matter of right and wrong, since the universality of thought is a real thing, but one of utility: why say things that have already been said before, most likely in better form?
What else is one to do with the squishy glob between one’s ears?
