free association

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A recent orchestral composer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work recounted how he spent so much of his time apparently doing nothing, gazing out the window of his study.

A well-known poet reports, before reading his poem on video, that
the short poem took 3 years to finish, because he would come back to it and come back to it—presumably until it had just the elements that let him feel the poem was complete enough at last in the details enough
that its conception was full enough.

Enough, enough.

I got lots done last week, after “Feeling concerted parenthood,” having left that context completely behind. You meet it as something new
for perusal, as if it expresses where I’m staying that week. But the writing was a departure from the subject (for that week, this month).
I was soon far away in my developing landscape.

I expected to have something ready to share by last weekend, about idealist humanism as a realistic nest of values. But free association is
a “dangerous” playmate of desire for closure. Enchantment—

I wrote earlier: Trust your intuition (Wednesday), but I didn’t come through with something short and clear to share about feeling the origin of value (another hope for my week) that, over time, gives intuition
its reliability. A reader wants something practical, not conceptual musings. I want both. How might the two modes best weave together? How does embodied cognition (feeling for what happens) grow to become practical value? I should not fill space with my learning process (i.e., rough sketches that a burdened reader would not later bother to find revised)? A reader wants final results, because we’re too busy for mere explorations.

What values are very good options for deciding between two conflicting values?

What may self-actualization hope to achieve?

Is voracious aspiration for high humanistic fruitfulness admirable or
just symptomatic?

Days go by.

In a sense of the universe that has outgrown God (don’t tell my dying mom), can our condition of ultimate constructiveness give Meaning enough?

Is being prone to wandering and solitude alienating to one? I’m a psychologist without apology, under cover as a functionary maintaining enough professionalism. Yet, I’m a wild parent of figural spaces, given enough time in free associations of a plural psyche interplaying facets of self like improv with a friend on the street.

It’s too much love of verbal self-possession for a world monetized for systems management and consumption of results.

Meeting you last week was enough to inspire much free association, but
I also got lots done—though not enough for offering a result by Sunday (and this isn’t a fair result).

I’m so happy you bought one of my all-time favorite philosophers, and
I caught you at it during enough free time to share appreciations. It doesn’t matter that the philosopher is new to you and old to me. I needed your unwitting dramatization of the obvious: that philosophy matters for others, which I too easily feel is not obvious, falling prey again to others’ alienated judgment of idiosyncrasy about interest that is really special,
if not rare (like devotion to a fine art). I am so tired of vacuous dailiness—and people who trivialize aspiration. It ruins value.

I was not sitting in wait for someone to buy a book I loved. It was just good luck that you happened along.

Poetic thinking can be rigorous, is one upshot of his work. So few readers even wonder whether or not. Why, after humanity’s self-undermining of Godly metaphysicalism, can poetics yield anything reliable in our evolving reality?

You’ll let me know what you think—because I want you to: Your fresh sense of it all matters. Love what you discover, and make it yours.

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