Playdoh Forking

Our group came up with a good two pages--front and back--packed solid with words pertaining to and describing the fork. I would never have thought such a feat could be accomplished, but, as Professor Moss elucidated for me (and indeed as the process of this class demonstrates (for I think the best of classes, or rather, the best of students, should always approach an item as a process...always absorbing, digesting)), creativity is truly the state of open-mindedness, receptivity, or, as I like to think of it, mental fluidity. I do notice that in my most creative states (and they are becoming increasingly rare as the end of the semester approaches...), I am at ease, in tune with both the landscape of my mind and that of the environment/how my body interacts with the environment/how my body interacts with my mind. I am not afraid to welcome obscurities in thought, inconsistencies in sensual perception; I am perhaps at my most calm. Maybe this is close to lucid dreaming? I find that right when I am about to fall asleep (indeed, it feels like "slipping"), I see montages of very strange imagery in my mind, and associations that sometimes don't make dimensional sense. A computer cursor might suddenly evoke the same visceral response as someone's face, or I might decide to go off in four directions at the same time. These images remain as mere traces of fascinating shadow-shows in the waking mind, and can serve as catalysts for something more. What is that something more? I'm not really sure, and feel lacking in the tools necessary to translate them into accessible form.

Wow, I meant to talk about the in-class fork observation. Such unintended digression happens a lot for this class, and I must express how glad that students are given the freedom to explore branches, bubbling, the surface of all things (I love what one of my classmates brought up earlier in the semester--that everything we can see is a surface. Even the core is another surface; this is particularly true when one applies the concept of mathematics to this idea: a solid is the integration of infinitesimal "ribbons," not really "solid" at all). Indeed, indeed, how can one concern herself only with substance when the surface of that very substance remains occluded? Perhaps we should strive always for that strange dream-state association and processing; combine the productive power of the unconscious with the analytical power of the conscious. Is (what we call) genius, then, the ability to maintain this constant level of receptivity, hypersensitivity to stimuli? Is it genius that can seamlessly integrate the many faces of the mind?

There I went again. Seriously, back to forks (although, now that I look at it, those paragraphs above are instances of forking themselves. And so too everything in parentheses. I love parentheses. My writing would be even more of a mess without them!). Our group pounced on the single fork that had some distinguishing characteristic: the one that was aligned upside-down next to its fork-clone brothers. It just made it easier for us, made us feel like we had some reason for picking that particular fork. (It was a necessary tether.) Once we had it, the most obvious place to start was with what we could see. It was clear, plastic, the tines were curved. It was remarkable how those three visual characteristics alone propelled us onto far-off cousin branches, and we were soon speaking in abstract tongues ("the fact that the light bounces most off of the curves of the tines describes the idea that intrusions into uniformity are the most illuminating") that 9-5 mode passerbys would have checked off as hallucinogenically-induced babble. So what's the use of all this up-and-out-the-tree thinking if people get by in life without it? The truth is, everyone probably does it to some degree anyway (I know I did, but just never thought of it within the frame of the forking concept)--it makes life richer, the mind stronger, and the inpalpables of the Being a little more stable.

A week or so later, we got to play around with PLAY-DOH!! This substance was probably my favorite toy in grade school. I could never get enough of the colors, the smell, the nude cylinder out of the plastic cup, pregnant with possibility, the promise of discovery (and hours of fun! until it dried out and married itself to one form). Our group spelled out the word "fork" using letters from four different languages. Language is playdoh (if you take playdoh to be the formless mind) put into form, and consequently becomes a type of playdoh itself. Playdoh offers premium grade forkability, but by itself it is powerless. Quite like an idea. Both need an external force to impress a form upon it. To clarify, take the word "digestion" into account. If you physically digest playdoh, the material will conform to the shape(s) of your digestive tract. To digest an idea, perhaps encapsulated/expressed in a work of art like a poem, one takes it deeper and deeper into the mind via the gravity of thought; until the idea becomes may thoughts, one or several of them novel. It travels down the interborough fissures (Hart Crane's "The Tunnel" I credit for that phrase, which, being a neuroscience/english major, I simply adore and return to often) of the mind, and as it does so, conforms not only to the shape of the existing mind (for the extent of digestion depends on the dimensions of the processor), but also deforms it by creating new connections [there is this GREAT animation/concept I saw in a Brain, Learning, and Memory class last year, but fail to find now: it illustrates how, if the mind were a landscape, learning occurs when that landscape becomes impressed; thus, the more convolution, the more evidence of learning and memory there are (this leads me to wonder, what if the landscape was deformed in a way that two distal ends are brought together, much like a wormhole in space? Is this an instance of forking? We discussed in class how the tines of a fork remained eternally parallel. It looks like a wormhole would be the place where these tines met.).]. It's very fresh and exciting to look at the mind as an "external force!"