Memory plays funny tricks. I’ve been transferring some of my old cassettes onto the PC, via a USB cassette player, bought for me by ex-hubby as a Christmas present, but which has spent most of the last decade stored away in its box. I haven’t been doing it the last few days – since the weekend in fact – because I realised the rooms on either side of my study were probably used as bedrooms and I didn’t want to disturb my neighbours too early in the morning.
But when I sat down this morning I had Joe Jackson’s ‘Breaking Us In Two’ in my head and thought: I don’t want to copy anything this morning, just do what I normally do, which is to shuffle the list and let Windows media player go randomly through my music. But when I opened it, the song which started up was ‘Breaking Us In Two’, so presumably it was the last track played and had stuck at the back of my mind from four or five days ago, or whenever the last time was that I sat here with music playing.
I started writing yesterday but everything I was thinking was so dark that I didn’t really want to go on. Feeling much the same again today. I think I am coming towards the time when this all seems so overwhelmingly futile that I give up altogether. ‘If you can’t think of something nice to say, don’t say anything’. It’s been quite a good run: four months, roughly 120 days (barring those I missed), 60k words.
‘I’m reading a book which puts forward evidence from research in neuroscience to show that what we call the ‘self’ is not single and fixed for any individual but rather plural and malleable, and hence, in a sense, illusory. I don’t find this contentious, in fact I’m rather surprised that anybody would. It’s rather like saying ‘there’s no such thing as society’ – there may be no specific institution or body which bears that name, but the influence of the web of interactions, rules, structures, relationships etc on the actions of people and organisations leads to impacts in the physical world.’
That’s how I started yesterday, which I suppose isn’t too grim, but the rest of what I was thinking was. I read some more of the book after that, and found that the author was saying that the ‘self’ is created by contrast with everything which is outside the self. Which surprised me, because there I was thinking the other way round, that it is embedded in a network of influences (nature and nurture) and is the product of those. I’m not a psychologist, and maybe I’m not understanding the terms properly – what’s the difference between the ‘self’ and the ‘personality’, for example?
He went on to say that the left brain operates by looking for patterns and telling stories. Which sounds very like me.
Maybe I will keep writing – at least, when I’ve read some more.