Testing the new technique

Vassar Millar

A couple of posts ago I wrote about experimenting with using the initial letters of a piece I wanted to memorize. The initial letters act as a kind of code for reminding you how the words run in the piece you’re learning.

I wasn’t greatly impressed with the results, but I felt I might have done the system a bit of an injustice, so I tried a different piece this morning – a poem: Vassar Millar’s Morning Person, which is about the Creation.

Some years back I had some problems with the muscles in my right leg, and now in the mornings, I exercise my legs while doing my memorizing. This morning, I started by reading the poem over and over as I exercised. Normally I just bowl on in and begin memorizing from the word go.

This time I first got the feel of the piece as I read and re-read it - it’s fifteen lines long, so not huge - and saw how things fitted together, and where there were internal rhymes and so on. It’s a very energetic poem, which helps in the learning, though it doesn’t have an obvious metre to it.

When I’d finished the leg exercises and the readings, I sat down and coded the poem into the initial letters. Working from these, I soon discovered that while some things had stuck fairly easily, others hadn’t; a quick reference back to the words helped. I also wrote the poem out, by hand, in full. 

To my surprise, after several attempts I was speaking the poem without errors – for the most part. One or two lines or phrases, as is always the case, kept zipping off and leaving me, but I wasn’t under pressure to have it memorized instantly.

The end result, however, was that after about half an hour, I had the thing under my belt. This is definitely interesting. And quite unusual for me. I’ll keep reviewing the poem during the day, and see what the state of things are tomorrow.

One other thing that helped, I believe, is that unlike most mornings lately, there were no distractions from other people in the house. And being a Saturday morning I didn’t have to rush to get anything else done.  

Some thoughts on being Intuitive

Recently I've been more and more thinking of myself as an intuitive writer/composer/actor.  Creatively I work by discovering the creation piece by piece rather than forming it carefully in advance. Certainly I've worked on structure, and the musical (Grimhilda!) was pretty well structured, but I think that was because I had someone else assisting with that side of things.  On my own the process of structuring something (especially something large) doesn't come easily to me. 

The intutitive aspect is probably also why I tend to absorb stuff, like books I'm reading, rather than learning the details, or the arguments. Even though it hasn't been consciously 'learned', the information will often turn up when needed at a later time. I don't have to search my brain for it; it arrives in some sort of subconscious way. 

I learn how to do things properly if I have an enthusiasm for them, but I'm not good at retaining 'facts' or 'information' by trying to learn them. I tend to absorb them in a way that I don't understand - probably like a child learns language. 

This intuitive approach can be unhelpful at times, especially when you know something you've written isn't working but can't see why, or you know a piece of information, but getting it to come to the surface is a problem, or when faced with the need for lateral thinking, you seem to fall over completely: the ideas will come, but long after you need them for that situation.   

I look with some degree on envy on those writers who can churn out work at the drop of a hat; they plan the structure, and then just get on with it.  I have to discover the whole thing (or a good deal of it) before I know I've got anything to structure.   

Yet give me a topic - like getting rid of moths, for example - (and even better, a deadline to go with it) and I'll produce something out of the blue.  I won't have any idea at the beginning where it's going, but it will slide out of the brain bit by bit and then, with a bit of editing and sorting out, it will be formed.  I used to do a lot of my columns for the Star Midweeker in that way...especially it they were needed the following morning and I hadn't managed to write anything in time. If I needed to do any research, I'd do it once the thing was done - generally.  Although this wasn't a hard and fast rule.  

The flash fiction I've written for the Flash Frontier site has tended to arrive in this way: having a theme means I've got something for my subconscious to get its teeth into, and having a deadline helps as well.  And I remember writing a couple of songs by request for our current church, and doing them with ease at a couple of days' notice.  It helped, again, that there was a topic, and a deadline.  (And at our previous church I wrote a script and several songs within a very short time because we had to start rehearsing so we could present the thing by a certain date. Amazing what happens when you're under that sort of pressure.)

However, things that involve a lot of facts and information, things that needed compiling into order, from different sources, are sheer hard grind.  I can do them, and it's usually satisfying in the end, but the process is much harder for me than doing something that has no obvious order when it starts.  This was the kind of work I did in my last job before I retired.  It took a lot more concentration than the purely creative stuff does.  Which is curious.

 

The missing link

Apparently it was the chicken that came first, not the egg.

Scientists have discovered that the egg can't be produced with a particular protein called ovocleidin (OC-17), and that's found in the ovaries of the chicken. OC-17 acts as a catalyst, kick-starting the conversion of calcium carbonate in the chicken's body into calcite crystals.

The particular news report this appeared in finished by saying: But the researchers have not yet got an answer to how the protein-producing chicken existed in the first place.

Oh, hang on, of course, we all come from a single cell that came from....wait! we haven't discovered that yet, even though we know it must be true because we've thrown out the idea of a Creator....therefore...hang on, something's missing from the calculation....

I know: God!

N T Wright on the Arts

‘We have lived for too long with the arts as the pretty bit around the edge with the reality as a non-artistic thing in the middle. But the world is charged with the grandeur of God. Why should we not celebrate and rejoice in that? And the answer sometimes is because the world is also a messy and nasty and horrible place. And, of course, some artists make a living out of representing the world as a very ugly and wicked and horrible place. And our culture has slid in both directions so that we have got sentimental art on the one hand and brutalist art in the other. And if you want to find sentimental art then, tragically, the church is often a good place to look, as people when they want to paint religious pictures screen out the nasty bits. But genuine art, I believe, takes seriously the fact that the world is full of the glory of God, and that it will be full as the waters cover the sea, and, at present (Rom 8), it is groaning in travail. Genuine art responds to that triple awareness: of what is true (the beauty that is there), of what will be true (the ultimate beauty), and of the pain of the present, and holds them together as the psalms do, and asks why and what and where are we. You can do that in music, and you can do that in painting. And our generation needs us to do that not simply to decorate the gospel but to announce the gospel. Because again and again, when you can do that you open up hermeneutic space for people whose minds are so closed by secularism that they just literally cannot imagine any other way of the world being. I have debated in public in America with colleagues in the New Testament guild who refuse to believe in the bodily resurrection and, again and again, the bottom line is when they say ‘I just can’t imagine that’, the answer is, ‘Smarten up your imagination’. And the way to do that is not to beat them over the head with dogma but so to create a world of mystery and beauty and possibility, that actually there are some pieces of music which when you come out of them it is much easier to say ‘I believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’ than when you went in’.

Thanks to Jason Goroncy for alerting me to this (long) paragraph, which comes from a talk N T Wright gave entitled, 'Jesus, the Cross and the Power of God' - a conference paper presented at the European Leaders' Conference, Warsaw, 2006. (It seems only to be available as an mp3.)

I love that response: Smarten up your imagination!

Couple of quotes

"We don't create something sacred. We find it right where we are by the way we deal with experiences."

Abbot Robert Joshin Althouse, a Buddhist priest and founder of the Oak Park Zen Community

"We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world."

Jill Bolte Taylor in her recovery memoir, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

Thanks to Cathleen Falsani's column, where I found these quotes.

Is Dawkins sliding down the pit to self-destruction?

Some quotes from an article by Melanie Phillips, in The Spectator, 23rd Oct, 2008. The article concerns a second debate between Dawkins and John Lennox, author of God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?

At the very beginning [of the debate, Dawkins] made a most startling admission. He said: A serious case could be made for a deistic God.

This was surely remarkable. Here was the arch-apostle of atheism, whose whole case is based on the assertion that believing in a creator of the universe is no different from believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden, saying that a serious case can be made for the idea that the universe was brought into being by some kind of purposeful force. A creator. True, he was not saying he was now a deist; on the contrary, he still didn't believe in such a purposeful founding intelligence, and he was certainly still saying that belief in the personal God of the Bible was just like believing in fairies. Nevertheless, to acknowledge that ‘a serious case could be made for a deistic god’ is to undermine his previous categorical assertion that

...all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection...Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

In Oxford on Tuesday night, however, virtually the first thing he said was that a serious case could be made for believing that it could.

Read the rest of the article, in which Dawkins digs himself deeper and deeper into a confused mire, and seems more inclined to believe in some alien force creating life than God. As the King of Siam says, 'Tis a puzzlement.