I came across the notion that "Writing is thinking" from post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman - in the mid 1980s; and the potentially-linked idea that "Thinking is participation" from Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield, in the past 15 years or so.
Both are valuable insights, but partial truths: writing can be thinking, but usually is not; likewise thinking with respect to participation.
The situation is that "writing is thinking" is true only when we are writing in a certain way - meditatively? Spiritually?
At any rate, you know it when you are-doing it, if you are looking-out for it.
Further, this is a real-time and dynamic experience between the writer and ultimate reality...
This kind of writing must not be confused with possible later processes such as editing and publishing the inspired writing, or the potential effect of that published writing on various readers at various future times. For instance; published or professional writers certainly are Not thereby more profound or significant thinkers.
The relevant "thinking" is that which happens during the writing.
And what about "thinking is participation"?
This means that some kinds of thinking may be an active and mutual engagement in the ongoing divine creation: potentially, in thinking our-real selves are changed, the universe is changed...
Another way of considering it is that (contrary to common ideas that thinking is sealed off inside the brain) thinking is an action, a behaviour.
Thinking therefore, like many other kinds of physical behaviour - Has An Effect.
The double-insight is that active process of writing can - potentially, sometimes, while it is actually happening - make a difference to ultimate reality.
It can change the world, and change our-selves: for better, but also for worse.
So, even though nearly all of writing is insignificant, trivial, ineffectual; there is a writing-thinking which is a serious business; because it is a magical act for which we have an ultimate responsibility, and which has ultimate consequences.
2 comments:
Your post made me think again of the TV writer David Milch, who did most of the heavy lifting for Deadwood, NYPD Blue, and some of the CSI seasons. According to his rare public appearances, he was utterly incapable of writing to a deadline, or indeed of outlining anything at all. Apparently the idea distressed him so much that it tempted him to return to extreme early-life drug habits, and the one thing that lifted him out of addiction and depression was the open-ended process of writing itself.
On Deadwood, his writing process was to dictate dialogue off-the-top of his head to an assistant, print out the pages of dialogue, and take them out to the actors on the day of shooting(!).
That is, writing, revising, memorization, and the direction and performance of scenes took place on the same day! The show itself is quite profound, albeit with a tremendous quantity of profanity. This could've only been possible to carry out on the fully-built replica set of a Wild West town, I suppose.
@Epi - I haven't seen these shows, but they did seem to have something special about them, from what I gathered (e.g. my wife was very keen on NYPD Blue).
My current ideas are that when writing/ thinking/ participation is actually happening - this is good, necessarily good, aligned with divine creation.
But the product of this essentially good process - eg the written words - may afterwards be twisted to another purpose.
This is one way that we get the "evil genius" kind of creativity, and its lesser analogues.
Anyway, that's how I interpret the many mainstream media TV shows and movies in which there is an origin of real creativity, and therefore an origin in participation; but where this has afterwards been "put into the service" of an evil agenda.
If this is done crudely, with explicit evil messaging; the quality is overwhelmed (as so often in recent decades). Done subtly, we get the great TV and movies that are, nonetheless - overall tending to the subversive, negative, materialist etc.
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