This Blog is Addicted to Me!

We are nearing the end of Part One (of three) of The Matter With Things, the latter two parts presumably more about the philosophical implications of the neurology. 

One thing I've been thinking about is that there's nothing unfamiliar about what we've been discussing, it's just being discussed in a different context, i.e., LH / RH differences. 

I remember having a similar experience when reading Allan Schore's monumental two-volume monument to Affect Dysregulaton and Disorders/Repair of the Self: it too is a discussion of familiar concepts, only reframed in terms of neurobiology and other Hard Subjects. 

Come to think of it, both works are like an explicit LH mapping of intuitively understood RH intuitions. 

For example, an overactive LH 

will present problems for creativity: it is too linear, too detail-focussed, and too concerned with naming or labelling, which tends to crystallize meaning prematurely.

I knew that, I just didn't know it was the LH doing it. But whatever you call it and whatever its source, it is definitely a thing. 

For example, back in grad school we learned about patients -- and therapists -- who eagerly grasp at a superficial answer instead of tolerating the pain of "not knowing" and waiting for a deeper kind of insight and synthesis. Again, the phenomenon is familiar, whatever we call it. 

There is much evidence that negative emotions can lead to creativity, probably by a range of routes: for example, by enhancing contact with a more emotionally rich level of awareness, more broadly ramifying into redolent emotional memory, and involving deep unconscious and embodied cognition, as well as analogical [RH] thinking...

"Insightful individuals show greater RH activity at rest, relative to analytic individuals." And "the work is constantly 'incubating,' in highly creative minds," because "they are not creating only when overtly engaged in a task." 

I'll buy that. I'm always incubating or cooking up something. It's like my head is a crockpot, except I have no idea what's cooking until the crock is served up in the morning. 

It's kind of addicting, which explains why I've been doing it for 17+ years. 

Earlier in the chapter McGilchrist briefly alludes to the pleasure of "aha" moments, and perhaps he will expand upon this later. But once your life starts to revolve around these aha -- and guffah-HA! -- moments, nothing else can take their place. 

What would life be without this constant creative engagement? I don't want to know. Philo-sophy. If loving truth is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Jazz. McGilchrist touches on this back in the introduction:

It is something we improvise -- within bounds. Whatever it is will emerge from a balance of freedom and constraint. It won't exist until it is being performed: no-one can know exactly what it will be like. But it will not be random: it will emerge from the players' continuous interaction, and from the music's own "history" as it unfolds; what comes next will be anticipated by what has gone before.....

To be in the groove, in the flow, is to feel oneself played by, as much as playing, the music.  

Exactly. I am reminded of Bill Evans' "invention" of the modern piano jazz trio. Before him, the bass and drums were essentially there for support, but in his trio all three improvised simultaneously, like so:

Incidentally, the bass player, Scott LaFaro, died in a car crash a couple of weeks after this legendary engagement, which plunged Evans into a deep depression, leaving him  "numb with grief," "in a state of shock," and "like a ghost." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_LaFaro)

Speaking of which, there's a lot in here about the relationship between creativity and vulnerability to mood disorders. I guess it's the price you pay.  

Now I'm wondering: do I write the blog, or does it write me? 

Whatever comes to be does so through an interaction of a multiplicity of elements, some ours, some not.

Whatever-it-is-that-exists-apart-from-ourselves creates us, but we also take part in creating whatever-it-is (McGilchrist).

Again, this is just another way of describing a familiar reality that I call O <-> (¶).  It is

a seamless, always self-creating, self-individuating, and simultaneously self-uniting, flow that is truly only knowable as it comes to be known (ibid.).

Hmm... it's like, every night I fall apart, and every morning I put myself back together. I mean that literally. Figuratively speaking.... Whatever it is, it's been going on for a long time, which is why you see that comment by Voegelin in the comment box:

The quest, thus, has no external 'object,' but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.

My life in a notshall.