Wilds of the Mind

Who Am I Anyway?

The thoughts, the sequence of the concepts we are following, are trying to express, sometimes get away from us, sometimes evade us, like the prey escapes the predator in a chase.

A friend had this experience in conversation with me. Suddenly his thought eluded his presence of mind and he lost what he wanted to tell me. This happens more with the wild thoughts, the new ones, when the conversation is in an earlier stage and the concepts inchoate.

I told him, “You must domesticate your ideas, make them your creatures, animals that come when called, so your process is not the hungry savage half animal himself seeking the wild ideas and untamed notions.”

I saw the cheetah of his desire to express something panting and exhausted as the antelope of what he wanted to tell me bounded away.

I told him, “Wait by the water hole: the animal you seek will return.” Sure enough the idea returned to the water where he waited, where his eager predatory desire to express something lay in wait.

The animal always returns because it can exist only in the ecosystem of consciousness. These are always our creatures sustained only by the pastures and forests, the jungles and deserts of ourselves.

In the meantime we must work to domesticate our ideas. They are not alien even when new, when first formed in an evolutionary process all our own. They are always our creatures.

In my own mind the concepts are no longer cats I call without calling, the cattle, the cows which come at regular times for milking and food, grooming and shelter, for my care as they grow fat. They have their own needs beyond mere domestication, originating new ideas of their own, and familiars, creatures I recognize only as spawn of my spawn, a generation or two removed from my quiet farm.

At the end of any day I enter the great hall filled with raucous spirits, the things my mind made long ago, now crying for drink and meat, for music and diversion, and I try to accommodate their demands, my grown brainchildren and children of children I only half recall; and they give me treasures I only dreamed of, treasures for the dance I perform as I serve them without a chase.

Each night I wear a king’s ransom and the larder remains full.

KLK