After the flight, I got a four hour coach back to Bristol, and the fun really started. While waiting in the airport I read a bit more of Keith Johnstone’s Impro, and got on to some pretty crazy-sounding free association exercises (the earlier part of this is what inspired my post about the pastebin of utter crap). Most of them required a partner, or at least a situation where you could talk out loud without sounding like a total nutter, but I thought I could at maybe try improvising stories in my head, allowing myself no pauses to think about what should come next.
I’ve forgotten most of what I came up with, and it was probably mostly crap anyway, but there were a few segments that were a) strange and memorable; b) somewhat in the style of those in the book; and c) nothing at all like what I would have expected to come up with, given what I normally think is in my head:
1. Plovers make their winter migration to the pole star, where all lines intersect. The surface of the pole star is covered in bulrushes, but the inner core is ice. Each plover brings a small amount of warmth to the star, and melts a bit of the ice. When the ice is fully melted, the universe ends and infinity returns.
2. Wolves are streaming down off the tundra in lines. In each line, each wolf carries the tail of the preceding wolf in its jaws. The air smells of lichen and wet feet.
3. There’s an internment camp for people who have forgotten the names of the four seasons. Most of them have internalised that they are stupid and deserve to die.
A man there gets angry and kicks his chair to bits. He makes a fire from the pieces. Staring into the ashes, he intuits new and better names for the seasons. He shouts them at the guards and they drop down dead. The inmates run out through the gates and all four seasons happen at once.
(These are sort of tidied up, but I think only slightly; the verbal content was almost exactly as I wrote it down, but there was a funny mix of visual imagery in there with it which I obviously can’t reproduce. This was interesting to me because I normally have a rather weak visual imagination. The reincorporation of the seasons at the end of the third one is probably because I’d just read the section on reincorporation. I’m pretty sure there were wolves in one of the Impro stories too.)
It’s fascinating to me that this stuff is just there. As Johnstone says, it all turns up when you stop fussing about whether the thoughts belong to or mesh well with you in any sense, and just let them come out with no particular owner. As ever, I wonder about whether mathematical intuition is made out of similar stuff.
After a while of this, I finally fell asleep and napped until Bristol.
drossbucket 