Godsong of the Pale Blue Women, 25th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Often, while I'm in my alternating-day meditation, I'll have a stream of thought that I'll want to post here in this blog. But after I'm done and sit down in front of the computer, I find that either the thought was way more involved and convoluted than I could possibly try to capture in a single blog post, or that I can capture portions of it but can't find a starting point to jump in on, or, most often, that I can't remember the "genius" idea I wanted to write down. The memory is like a dream, vivid at first, half gone by the morning's first cup of coffee, and completely forgotten by noon. 

Leave it to Michael Pollan to describe the ephemeral nature of thought far better than I can ever hope.  Our so-called thoughts, he writes in A World Arises, "are preverbal, often showing up as images, sensations, or concepts, with words trailing behind as a kind of afterthought - belated attempts to translate hose elusive wisps of meaning into something more substantial and shareable." 

Exactly. We understand and know what we're thinking without needing the words to nail it down. I might forget a person's name or a movie title, but I know full well who or what I'm thinking of and don't need a label in my mind to identify them. A smile, a nod, and a simple "thank you" might have made my day, and I recall the sensation without having to tell myself it was, say, Joan White from accounting, and when I tell someone else how much I appreciated the gesture, I find that the name "Joan" is suddenly gone because I didn't need the proper noun for it to exist in my memory. 

Also, while I might use full sentences to reconstruct a thought ("last night, I was thinking about a sunset I once saw in Lanzarote"), when I was actually remembering that sunset last night, my mind didn't form the words "a sunset I once saw in Lanzarote." In my mind, I just imagined the reddish sky over the ocean blue, and felt the fading warmth of the crepuscule sun. Our memories, the stories we tell to ourselves, depend on words, but the faculty of memory, the way they actually arise in our minds, doesn't need language - we already know what we're thinking.  

In Ulysses, James Joyce accurately mimicked the mind's stream-of-consciousness wording, but it's difficult and sometimes annoying to read the words. "Hmm, mustn't," Leopold Bloom thinks to himself. "On the dresser, the letter. Breakfast, eggs. Nearly time." If he were trying to tell someone else what he was thinking right then, he'd say he was trying to not think about what his wife was doing back at home at that very moment, because he saw the letter from her lover on the dresser thar morning saying they would be trysting within the hour. But all those words aren't how thoughts arise, and "Hmm, mustn't. On the dresser, the letter. Breakfast, eggs. Nearly time," is much closer, and that's how Joyce writes it in Ulysses (actually, something like that - with apologies to Mr. Joyce, I'm too lazy to go look that passage up to get the exact wording, but you get the idea).

I'm driving to Knoxville today and don't have the time to post much else here today. I may not return to posting until The Topaz Glove, the 29th Day of Spring (March 30 to y'all), but I may post some late-night or early-morning updates about the Big Ears sets over at Music Dissolves Water and on Instagram, if you know how to find me there.   

Car. Long trip. No time. Music first.