The Great Closed Mind Crisis
hey minds. First blog post.
HERE'S A DOUGLAS ADAMS bit I remember from when I was growing up. Arthur Dent is stranded on a planet, and somehow learns how to fly. The way to fly is very simple. All it takes is to throw yourself at the ground as hard as you can, and the trick is not to think about hitting the ground. As soon as you think about hitting the ground, you will most certainly hit the ground. And you will not fly. You'll be smacked in the face, and in the body.
So Arthur tries and tries. He can't ever not think about hitting the ground. And it really fucking hurts. He's faceplanting. So he stops trying.
It's only until later when he's running away from an erupting volcano does he fly. He falls and is so concerned about the boulders that could kill him, tumbling around him, he's a blank about hitting the ground. As he trips and falls, he's thinking about death. That's when he finds himself floating in the air.
After the initial shock and wonder, he drops to the ground on thinking it.
The Great Closed Mind Crisis
Most people on contact fucking hate my poetry. They really do. I've shared it with enough randoms to know that they are, for sure, not open to it. That the experience they have is of frustration, apathy, fatigue, boredom, of a total lack of meaning. In short, bad vibes. They tell me they can barely stand to read it.
And: every two days, we generate more information than the dawn of history to 2002, combined.
Hold those two points.
Read this:
||\ Torrential rain as sold by algorithm, that the data should be so severe, and how like with umbrellas we angle, and make failings in one sodden ear and out the other, residual irritation in betweenPressure in the Great Closed Mind Crisis, we each fold our complexities a certain way in defenseThe awesome power of water falling. .. what particle effect unfolds so entirely, so asynchronously, feedback, hard to even flock in such in-form-ational weather. Hard we make our flock in such formational in-stable. Hard we choose our boundaries so as not to overstimulate or waste us, or overstimulate yet, we mean and I do mean how doors will emerge in the makeshift-ing architecture. They could be like the eyes of computer generated art. This age making each one diamonds. so to say, each more each, roughly, like bodies sinking in the [ ] plane.
Do you sense a gist? Did you hate it. Or did it pass over? Some readers at this point will resent this style of thinking, while others will have a pretty good sense of where I could be going. For most, the next jump--
So, I'd like to move to what open-mindedness is, psychologically speaking, its role in creativity, why we are living through a, hopefully, brief deconstructive era and how we might concretely develop our open-mindedness. Why we would even want to.
For whats the point!
The Science Behind Open-Mindedness
Okay, so. This study has been banging around my interior since reaching r/all on reddit earlier in the year -- Creatives Really Do See the World Differently hey sometimes that site doesn't fucking suck.
Color perception, the study's focus, is compelling given how fundamental it is. It's a precept before any conscious thought. The experience of color happens much quicker than recognizing how it happens. It's a process like pain, how you'll find your hand jumping off the stove before you can consciously register heat.
So when a study like this determines a difference on such fine-grained pre-thought level -- that is a difference between open-minded and closed-minded mental states -- we get an interesting picture of how subjectivity is created at all, and what it means to be both open-minded and closed-minded.
Read that reporting before we continue.
Creatives Really Do See the World Differently
I'm not kidding, read it. Because, this isn't hippy dippy new-age insight. It's a very real quality of ourselves we can detect and manipulate and exercise. I know this as an artist -- because all creativity is a practice in open-mindedness.
.. And all transcendence is. Yeah, I fucking said it. Transcendence.
Travel and psychoactive drugs increase the trait. .. What do we hear from those people doing that hard travel shit? My life was changed, oh. My God.
Did you read it?
Did you see how holding those two colors is juxtaposition? One eye taking one color, and the other another, and bam -- synthesis. Something new that wasn't there before. Juxtaposition is a fundamental technique in art, and unless you are in an open-minded state, there's nothing to gain, no glimmer of resonance or music.
Artists consider relationships. That's why love is such a powerful and popular theme. That's the complex web you hear in music.
Our brain is essentially a relational engine.
And there's been a lot of times where I'm not open-minded. That's when I can't dance, I can't talk. That's when I can't integrate. That's when I feel awkward. That's when I feel dull, and depressed. That's when I feel like life has no meaning. That I don't love her. I've been writing and making movies and other shit so much, and smoking weed, that I know it doesn't happen often. This true, open state. When I feel like anything is possible, I can walk in another man's shoes. When I can hear the beauty of music. The beauty of a thought. When I can sense the bizarre scale of time. Of our age.
I've been watching myself, with this idea hanging, of the neural action of an open mind. When I go in to read another poet, I try my best to take the poem on its own terms, try to see it as the poet does -- with love. And you gotta think what that means. what it means.
And, I've been thinking our world's an emergent brain.
Yeah, our world ain't so open now. We've fragmented. We've got a very closed minded media. Worse, our social networks compete for our attention at such a volume -- we move too quickly. Or else the AI shapes us. So we feel it as insane.
And the echochamber tech closes in. And the corporations closes in. And the warfare closes in. Paranoia, hallucinations, self-hate, break-down. How do we make sense of it all? This outrageous complexity.
The information is torrential is what I'm saying.
I'm also saying, poetry is practiceTo read it is to exercise. You watch yourself. What really is a word salad. Working out isn't always fun. What right do I have to impose such a thing on you? says the closed-mind. And that's fair.
Because the paradox is, you can't force it. And maybe sometimes, you rightfully should. Close your mind.