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[Father Luke]

Two part exercise.

Part 1.
Write your real name


Part 2.
Write an alias for yourself.

[Brecht]

Part 1.

Ying

Part 2.

Ying

[asbestos_dust]

Part 1:

Lucullian Magen ben Naumen. Butchered Anglicized Latin, Hebrew and German (roughly "Luxurious/Self-Indulgent/Overblown Shield of My Name".) Quite the little kidder, him what saddled me with that one. "Luke" for short. But that's confusing here where there already is a Luke, so I use my more common name "Asbestos Dust."

Part 2:

Asbestos Dust. I was frequently accused of creating this as a fake name over on UseNet. This always annoyed my parents (Bobby and Lucille Dust) who had gone to great lengths to find a euphonious name for me. Much as with the kid named "Shithead" (which his crack-head mother intended to be pronounced "Shi-THAYD,") the name is full of unrealized good intentions and murky beginnings which are possibly urban legends. So now I use it as a fake name. So I guess they were right, those UseNet unbelievers.

[Father Luke]

Now here's why:

What this little exercise reveals is that the creative process requires a mode of
thought that is diametrically opposed to our usual way of thinking.

Part one has only one correct answer, and an infinite number of incorrect ones.
Part two has an infinite number of correct answers and only one incorrect one.

Part one is called "convergent," since it requires us to converge on the only correct
answer, and the second is called "divergent," as it requires us to diverge from the
only incorrect answer -- the fact -- and consider a range of possible correct answers.

As has been said about art:

"Not-knowing is crucial to art, and is what permits art to be made. Without the
scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind
move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention."

Uncertainty is to be, as the narrator in William H. Gass's "The Pedersen Kid"
describes himself, "alone with all that could happen".

This exercise is taken from a book I'm reading called:
Alone with all that could happen, by David Jauss.

Just thought I'd pass it along.

 

[asbestos_dust]

My life seems convergent, as it is very "now" focused. But, as demonstrated in my response, I know that my life on both sides of the bright, diamond-hard, infinitely narrow point of "now," past and future, is divergent, an increasingly fuzzy unraveling of the thread of "is or is not."

Therefore, my writing is practically all divergent, even in those "is or is-not" areas. There's almost always a "sometimes" or a "usually" or a "as far as I know," or a "as I recall" implied in all writing, except as to trivial recordings of the "now" like checks and credit card signatures.

It seems at the end of it that all writing, or more generally, life, is divergent. Even the single-fact, heavily-researched black and white truth histories get fuzzier and fuzzier the further back they go. And since our memories are always (literally) re-creations of events and increasingly inaccurate ones at that (it turns out we don't work like computer files or file drawers at all,) they always move away from that "one REAL answer" ideal into more and more extreme divergence.

Everything you remember is, to some greater or lesser degree, a lie, and creative divergence is needed at least at some subconscious level to make the lie hang together and seem to be truth. And each time it's told or even remembered, never mind written, more divergence is accreted and made a permanent part of it. "What if" becomes history.

A good writer is just someone who deliberately takes at least some control of and distorts that inexorable process to his own use when making his art.

The line loses its punch, but "The Pedersen Kid" might as well have said, "alone with all that could happen and everything that might have happened".

Listen to the podcast at http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/06/08 -- if you're into that sort of thing. An excellent exploration of memory and how it works. Turns out that we're all pretty divergent - even the most convergent of us.

[Father Luke]

Actually the book covers a lot of this. I'll do a book report on it when I'm done and
poast it with the rest of my book reports here:

Father Luke's Book Reports[CLICK]

I still like this exercise. The space for uncertainty is usually avoided like a
prickly heat rash, but uncertainty is where it all lays. Or lies, which would be a
nice pun. Uncertainty is great. I love that sphere. I mean, I really dig it.