Emptying the brain pan

Fluid sloshes and ferments in my skull. It leaks from my eyes when I read, from my ears when I listen, from my mouth when I talk. Lately my skull-liquid drains faster than it refill and ripen. Not the prettiest metaphor, I admit. Much in my life demands my attention now. Maybe not ‘now,’ really. A hive of demands swarm around my head on a regular basis, but lately I feel particularly tapped out. Lately the demands buzzing by my face have been particularly large and insistent, and I’m at a lull after a large project, a valley in the waves of activity. Lower reserves and higher demands make this a good time to economize, to spend my brainjuice wisely. My impulse is the opposite, to dribble it here and there, too few drops to really nourish anything substantial, but poured out frequently enough to leave my head hollow and echoey.

There must be steps I could take to help my head refill and brew faster, but mostly I need to control how many taps I allow to feed off the tank, and how much flows to each tap. All of this is an extended metaphor to help me think my way to the point that attention is a finite resource, even if it’s renewable. To put it another way, attending is an activity and my ability to attend is limited. I tend to attend without enough larger focus and planning, tapping my skull for whatever purpose looms before my face until my headsap is dried up. Better is to make decisions about priorities and intentions, and to dedicate my mental resources accordingly. And it takes mental energy to remember those decisions and renew commitment to them. That is, I use my mental energy within a framework that I have to organize and maintain; that organization and mental energy takes some mental energy itself. It takes mental work to decide what to think about, and to remember what I’ve decided to think about, and to continue to focus on thinking about that instead of something else. When my gas tank gets down to mostly fumes I tend to forget to fuel those maintenance and organization activities. They sputter and slow to a stop, until I find myself as now, feeling aimless and tired but also restless. The restlessnes is partly a craving for my head to refill, and partly a craving for a particular kind of focus and an object or activity to focus on.

I wonder if there’s some connection between all of this and my impulse to parenthetical asides. As I’ve been typing I’ve thought repeatedly about writing such an aside commenting on the fact that I’m extending and mixing these metaphors. In general when I write anything I tend to open parentheses and brackets inside parentheses, and occasionally braces. At least I have that impulse; I try to resist it, and as I do so the impulse to comment on the impulse arises. As I fight to tamp down the eruption of asides, my attention threatens to split and at its worst becomes either distraction (I am so busy not making an aside that I fumble the lines I’m speaking) or an aside that is just self-commentary (look what I’m doing now, dear reader, cute and ironic, no?). At its worst this is a kind of vanishing into a downward spiral in my own head. When I successfully wrestle the aside into submission, success takes two form. I get back into the rhythm of what I wanted to do and the aside disappears, an itch unscratched but no longer nagging. Or I let the aside happen and am no longer fighting myself. At its best it can become a way to not take myself too seriously and to follow side thoughts down alleys branching off the thoroughfare of concept or story that I think I ought to be following; sometimes those side alleys end in places cooler than I expected, cooler than the main street. This amounts to telling myself “yes, you want to get somewhere, but you’re taking the scenic route now, and the overlooks may be worth the view.” The connection might be that the syrup in my cranium comes from somewhere. Let’s say it’s a system of siphons. An outflowing tube drains the liquid. An inflowing tube refills it. Sometimes the out- and in-flow cooperate. Fluid leaving creates suction pulling in new fluid. Other times the outflow is less a flow than a dribble from a leaking faucet, which somehow creates less suction and refill. Battling the urge to parenthesize is a dribble. Beating that urge, whether by tamping it down or by rolling with it, is first thing, the kind of out-and-in-flow.

One aspect of the fluid-replacement feeling is completion. Finishing something feels good, even if the finish (and the something) is provisional. A blog post that feels like a relatively complete thought feels better than breaking off mid- paragraph or mid-sentence. I suspect that this urge to finish can be self-sabotaging because it can undermine the next start. Ernest Hemmingway supposedly recommended breaking off mid-sentence at the end of a writing day because it will make the next writing day go better. This doesn’t mean that finishing is undermining as such, though. It means the timing matters: better to start a writing session in the middle of something than to start at the empty, daunting beginning. And so, don’t end a writing session by finishing a writing project (or a major sub-projects like a chapter or section or, according to Hemmingway, a sentence). Ending a session unfinished allows for a better start next time. But still, finishing is nourishing (mixed metaphor! mixed metaphor!), so finish in the middle of a writing session. Finish something? Start something else, and only then end the writing sessions, before finishing the new thing.

Finishing a work of writing (and by ‘finish’ really I just mean ‘finish-ish’) makes me want to write more. Starting a work of writing, or rather the threat of starting a work of writing, makes me want to write less. Those things seem to contradict but they are still both true. And so finishing builds up energy and the threat of starting blocks up and frustrates, creating tension. I can overcome the fear of starting more easily if I am mid-writing session: the more recent the finish the more energy I have to start something else. Beginning a writing session is also difficult, and so if the beginning of a writing session and the start of a project overlap, it is much harder. My thought then is to finish in the middle of a writing session then start something new and end the session with the writing unfinished. Don’t have an overlap between endings and finishes or starts and beginnings.

Here I am, coaching myself. Anyhow, the point, I think, was that my impulse to write short form (ish, anyway) is tied to my impulse to refill the tank because of the refill that comes with finishing. And for me the finish doesn’t have to be really finished, with the prose polished, so much as it’s hacking out the pieces that make up the main points: all the elements are in the bag now, I’ve bought all the groceries and own all the utensils required for the recipe. That’s done enough to feel satisfying, even if it still needs some chopping and some cooking. Finishing requires knowing when the finish has been reached. A race has a finish line, a recipe has a list and some instructions (and the product is tasteable). With short form pieces I can operate by feel, I can just sort of tell what seems like a stopping point, because there’s a sense of being done enough. With longer form, or with sets of short form pieces which add up to something, much more work is required (to map the route, to write the recipe). To mix the metaphor again, points of partial finish on the route to a larger goal are a kind of refueling station along the way, helping keep me in motion.

Let’s call this done enough. So where to next?