|
|
| date | 2000-12-08:17:56 |
| Writing |
Writing is one of the most important things in the world to me. It is intensely private, which makes publishing a chore, but I'm working on that. Writing stuff like this is easy--creating fiction is hard. The state of mind required for creating fiction is unlike any other. It involves all of me, integrated in wierd ways that let spontaneous inventiveness and purposeful analysis intermingle freely. It is hard to maintain, to keep that balance. I have rituals I go through to get into that state, sneaking up on the work. I typically make myself a cup of tea, then sit in my office doing other stuff, maybe marking up old copy, maybe reading something else, whatever. Just letting myself relax, while the work is nearby. I'll often open the file I want to work on, but not do anything more with it. I just want it there, close, so that when my psychological state is right there will be nothing between me and the work. I'm planning to start a major writing project soon--my third novel. The first two were experiments to see if I could do it. This one is for real. It's going to be a real challenge to see if I can find that state again--I've had it while writing poetry a lot, but one of the great advantages of poems is they're short, mostly, so I don't have to keep it up for long. To develop a novel-length work is something else again. |
| Metaphysics |
Robert Graves wrote in The White Goddess that he had never done anything in his life that seemed to him to conflict with the requirements of poetry; that poetry was his guiding passion. For me, it's metaphysics. I was talking with a colleague yesterday who commented that he didn't have any over-arching passion; he is basically interupt driven. He's very smart, and very focussed on whatever has his attention at the moment, but not very reflective about how his momentary interests fit together. This is fine, but it isn't the way I am. There are certain questions I've been interested in since my early teens. Primarily: what does it mean to exist? When we say something exists, what commitments are we making? What conditions does something have to fulfill to exist? People used to believe that things like the law of non-contradiction answered these questions, but Kant realized that those were really identified the conditions that things we could be aware of had to fulfill. He then erroneously concluded a bunch of nonsense about things that we couldn't be aware of, but thanks to John Bell's work we know that that's nonsense and can forget about it. And this leaves us free to ask anew: what are the conditions of existence? What conditions does a thing have to fulfill to exist? What is the minimal ontology? These questions have threaded through my life for more than twenty years, and now thanks to Caro--both the work she herself has done on identity theory and the enormous benefit I've had from working with her, learning good philosophic method from her--I'm closer to answers than ever. I became a physicist because I thought it would help me understand these questions, and it has. I think it would be very hard today to be an ontologist without being a physicist first. But to make sense of what the physics is telling us you need philosophy. Physics tells us the raw facts--philosophy is necessary to fit them into an interpretive framework, to tease out the meaning, to us, of those facts. On my own, I wasn't capable of doing that philosophy. Working with Caro, I could well be. |
| Play |
Working out gives one a fundamental sense of well-being, of existential efficacy. After a week back at the gym, I feel good. I've been pretty down most of today, and almost didn't go to the gym, and now I'm feeling calm and centered and relatively happy. Mens sana in corpore sano. |