Society of mind walks into a bar…

Ernest Hemingway once said “Write drunk; edit sober.” This advice does not quite work well for me in its literal form, but the principle is generalizable in intriguing ways.

Other than being drunk or sober, there is a plethora of other ways that one’s mental state can change over the course of a day. For many of us there is that stark difference between before and after the morning cup of coffee. There are also differences in how the mind works at home or in the office, or by oneself versus in the company of friends.

For me, the early morning (after that cup of coffee) tends to be a time of boundless optimism and infinite possibility, a time when I feel as though I am present at the very dawn of the world. My evenings, on the other hand, tend to have a darker cast. After the sun goes down my mind can embrace the sort of rueful melancholy frequently found in Russian novels — and in the people who read them in bars.

There is plenty of empirical evidence to support the general thrust of Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind”: That our very sense of having a unified identity is mostly a cognitive illusion, the result of our conscious mind valiantly attempting to weave a single consistent narrative from the many strange and inexplicable things said and done by the many other parts of our mind over the course of a day.

It seems to me that accounting for all of this — the before and after coffee, whether one happens to be sitting at home or at work or on a bus, sunlight streaming from the window or the lack thereof — can be studied, and correlated with the evolving artifacts of one’s own history of writing and editing.

Perhaps if we could better understand which part of our mind is kicking in at various times, we could turn this knowledge into a useful generalization of Hemingway’s dictum — choosing the optimal time and place to attempt different components of the act of creative expression.

In other words, there should be an App for that. 🙂