creativity cycles, thought machines, whining

Exhausting week. Little time.

Thought as a system of machines. Or thoughts as machines. Or thoughts as interactions between machines. Thought as composed of machines. Little systems, fragments of language, building on, consuming, incorporating, becoming, pointing to one another. Bubbles. Bubbling up. The constantly changing pattern of bubbles breaking on the surface is thought itself, the flow of coherent thoughts expressible in words. Fragments of language assemble themselves into coherent wholes, or illusions thereof. Each coherent whole is a thought. The self-assembling of language is what we call thinking. The surface of the lake? Awareness, I suppose. That's what's mystical. Not the soul which speaks in words, but that blank field of awareness as such, totally passive, infinitely sensitive, it "registers" anything that passes through it, "knows" immediately when and where something touches it and what that something feel like. It is simply this "registering" and this ability to "register" in a perpetual present, no memory or sense of time whatsoever.

And so on.

All this to say, sometimes when creative energies flow freely, when there's never any question as to what to say, when one just says and the saying itself does all the work -- those language-machines under the surface of the water all kind of sync up somehow, start to work together as a single unit. Then the synchronization break down and it's back to a bunch of little warring and parasitic machines gobbling one another up, a bunch of little mirroring machines reproducing the behavior of the neighbors, a bunch of little giving-and-taking machines exchanging one another's parts. And so on.

But the desire to create is still there, but all you get are some random bubbles and thoughts that just seem to connect or say much of anything. You open your mouth, set pen to paper, and . . .

It must be possible to plot these cycles, to examine the roles of variables like diet, sleep, anxiety, work load, etc. A science of optimizing creativity, of creating the conditions which permit the machines to sync up, to speak, to write.

Whatever the case, that syncing up just hasn't happened lately, not in any big way. It's not at all unlike a case of bad insomnia. By the way, I posted a couple of recent electronic music/sound compositions here.