The topic to discuss when you can't think of a topic to discuss is what other people talk about. This always seems to cure the dilemma when the bread is being buttered and the ice-water poured, the menus dealt and the pencil ready. Lots of people these days are talking about language as clay; my preference is somewhat closer to wood, maybe paper, maybe water, but if so, ice, and with lemons (lemon in this sentence has become the second tangent from language).

What is the difference between diving and sinking? That you did so on purpose? Seems most people dive into thinking and wind up sinking. How many abstractions of abstractions does it take in order to reach white-thought? Like how many licks does it take to get to the center of the tootsie-pop? According to the owl, three, but do you have the patience to make it four? Will you wait before you speak from your talking mind to listen to your talking mind have a conversation with your thinking mind, and send those thoughts over to your thinking to talking converter? And if you can absolutely bear waiting that long before you utter, or mutter, won't you wait until your thinking mind is through associating those talking thoughts with your associative mind? Can't you just hold on long enough, like you're on a bus and there's no bathroom, will you wait for your associative mind to finish its collecting and pass the collection to your idea mind? If you wait these four licks, you may make others impatient, but you'll speak from the fourth abstraction from talk, instead of talking thought you'll be talking thought talk.

How though, once you've been a good little girl listening, can you speak that white-thought? (K) is an attempt to speak white thoughts, to reach for the place where all the details have been generalized away, and to say the words that describe the feeling of being thought about. In this world at the top of the ladder of abstractions on abstractions, there isn't even sight or wisdom, only basic sense, in a sense the most primitive of thoughts - stimulus. And the stimulus the most primitive of inputs, shades of white, no not shades, because that implies shadow or difference or light source, but instead shades of a single color, only known to be shades by the nature of the abstraction itself. Are you blind in white-thought, yes. But in being blind you can still feel. You feel: when there is light and where, and in this way, see.

When do you talk from the associative mind? You have thoughts that you could just as well utter, but think on them, and then let them find their friends. These are the kind of friends who are friends because they are the same, and that many of their differences are known. One thought likes to snowboard, and it reads all the snowboarding magazines and goes out west to snowboard on good powdery snow, meets up with a cute snowboarding chic, hangs out in the half-pipe with all the smoothy logos and the flippy boards. These friends congeal, as do the friends who like the computery talk and so they talk computer. When you talk from the more jelly part of the associative mind, you get something like Wisdom, from the powdery, like You Don't Have to be Here In Fact Get the Hell Out All Right You Can Stay.

The associative mind is also fun to play with when instead of listening to its thoughts on thoughts, you listen to its thoughts on language. Association is what you do when you hear a word like mother, and all these other words that sound like mother light up - other, smother, smoother, mover, moth, theater. You're hearing these every time you hear mother, but just a little bit quieter. Your associative mind is chattering all the time, but usually we are only listening to the guy with the megaphone. If we shut him off for a while, we'll hear all these other bidders; they're bidding their distance from the loudest guy, some are shouting, some whispering. It takes practice to avoid the loudmouths and listen to the unconfident who are many more and surrounding and let us know what else we're hearing when we're hearing.

The thinking mind has thoughts. It's a knee-jerk responsive mind. The thinking mind produces volumes of thought and these days most of those thoughts when put into words are either 'like', 'fuckin', 'right?', 'yeah', or 'uhh'. In fact, now listening to association and idea, the above is almost all just thought. Let's begin again from the bottom:

Words, dinner conversation, thoughts, association, meaning, abstraction, ideas - then down - (metaphor, analogy or comparison), example, (anecdote, poem or other form), dinner conversation, words. Sorry, doing self-reference is difficult, but when done well, revealing (Did I say that?).

Thought on thought on thought and so on, is continual abstraction. But from that elevation of generalization, you cannot express. Meaning, metaphor and analogy demonstrated by example in the form of poetry, that's what I've been up to lately. I've been looking around and seeing events, not all dissimilar and jumbled, but sharing. And then asking what are they sharing? Sharing meaning. And then back down by selecting, or just making up, events that show the shared meaning. I'm not expressing the events themselves, but like the relationship between the photograph and the object it represents, expressing that relationship through metaphor. And, trying to perform that expression with a style, a filter on the glasses of the metaphor story-teller. Looking back, this is how I wrote Wisdom, and this is how I'm writing this.

You start in a place, and from there, move. Because you can go to the grocery store, then the post office, then the Gap and back home, or to the Gap, the post office and then the grocery store and back home, either way winding up back at home, busily unloading the same items from your trunk, you might think that order doesn't matter. But, in an increasingly disappointing way, order matters. And in starting a description (discrepancy?) in this way, the start is decided, and all future points will follow a path through intermediacies that lend continuity to events.

You can put on your underwear, and then a pair of pants, but, put on a pair of pants and then a pair of underwear and you're not dressed quite the same.

Don't you want to splinter time until a decision has been made and its consequences known, only to go back and choose the reality more to your liking?

Driving down the highway, I split time down two paths. In one I drive 85 miles per hour, the other obey the speed limit. If, in the reality where I'm speeding, I get where I'm going without tickets, accidents or other mishaps, I choose that reality and cut a few hours off my trip. If by going so fast, I ram into the median, my car hops onto the other side of the divided highway and I get demolished, then I choose the reality where I stayed in the right lane at a slow speed.

Frustration doesn't knock, but walks in and sits across the breakfast table, says all these realities are splintering all the time, that the one I'm experiencing is one of infinitely many, of all the permutations of all events. Argument is dozing in a La-Z-Boy but wakes up at this and makes an elaborate point of disagreement.

Why can you only go forward? No matter how hard I try: I put the car in reverse, but my watch ticks the same; I unstir the batter but never get back the eggs, throw up dinner, but never retrieve the steak. Only thing that seems to work both ways is my memory, that I forget everything I learn, and still I wind up older for it.

Writing is more than just slow talking because of the nature of memory. Memory betrays us when trying to recall what we said just a few moments ago, whereas writing allows us the edit. Meaning can be refined, and then rewritten. Writing ties the visual into language: we look at an image, and from it derive words. Yet, we don't encode everything expressed in speech into text, such as intonation and body language. Spoken words tend to have less meaning because they are normally accompanied by a great deal of other information.

Summary is looking down from the summit. Summary selects the details that stick out the most, the tall trees. Conclusion crystallizes analogy and exploits it with prediction. They are subtle those events that were predicted by their predecessors.