Revision is the Nature of Life

The Immediate Problem

Yesterday's blog was very long. Parts of the writing were more exploratory than I expected when starting different trains of thought. It was obvious when I looked at the blog later that I should do some revision and editing. Revision of one's writing is normal. Some writers will revise and revise until they have almost nothing of value. The problem is continually that when you are getting your thoughts out, you tend to have a window of opportunity in which you can follow a train of thought. If you lose the train of thought, which is a stream of ideas that translate themselves into words, you don't accomplish the goal of expressing that inner impulse.

Revising may or may not put you back into the original stream of thought. More often than not, revisions lead to confabulation. Artists know of this problem when painting. Some writers are not even aware of it. The criminal law courts are increasingly aware of it.

Our inner impulses are produced by molecules making up our bodies. Thus, our thoughts are affected by what we feed ourselves by way of food, water, and other intake. It is too simplistic to think that we are a machine or a comprehensible input-output system. Some of our behaviour may be very machine-like, but we, as humans, are very very far away from being simplistic machines. A displacement in time of a thought, means an entirely new thought because what is stimulating the original thought disappears after a short period. Thus it is that interruptions, no matter how warranted, will change one's life and thinking.

A characteristic of our humanity is the fact that we sleep and that we need considerable amounts of sleep in order to retain our sanity. Deprived of sleep, a human being quickly goes insane. Humans are made from genetic material, which means that we have exceeding complex structures that have very early origins in the coming into being of the earth. We are only now discovering how complex genetic material actually is and how important sleep is to making sure that body revises and updates the protein and genetic code it has already written.

In other words, the body is correcting for the mistakes it has made and that is what sleep is all about, correction and reviewing, smoothing out and simplifying. We may in fact be so good at repairing and revising our experiences that we don't really remember what we experienced. This is called confabulation and it means that our minds revise so well that we forget. This is a protective process going on in the body to help us heal from trauma as well as to help keep us sane and clear thinking. For example, try to draw something on paper using your memory. You will find how well your mind is actually able to remember detail. Not all of us have such ability, and what we have needs to be continually exercised to work effectively. In some ways, our bodies work against us remembering a lot of details. To have clear thinking, you need to train your mind to revise and still retain the memory that you wish to retain. Read, review/re-step, and recall, are stages to remembering more accurately and we need to repeat the process many times to be sure of accuracy.

The Bigger Picture

A book by Steven Oppenheimer arrived on my desk this morning. It is entitled 'The Origins of the British - A New Prehistory of Britain and Ireland from Ice-Age Hunter Gatherers to the Vikings as revealed by DNA Analysis. The book is enormous and has over 600 pages of written material to support its thesis. This is a lot of material to get through.

When you have a book of this size written in English, one trick is to use the English method of reading to your advantage. Culturally, or for whatever reason, the English tend to organized paragraphs by putting the main idea in the first sentences. The paragraph is used to support the main idea. By reading the first sentence of each paragraph one can get through a book much faster than reading every word. At least, such reading tends to prepare one for a more detailed and exhausting reading later on. It also helps one to determine whether the work being examined is something one wants to spend a lot of time on, or can it be put aside temporarily or indefinitely.

There are some provisos. The quick reading trick does not always work for every paragraph. It is intended to work on the average. Works in English, but written by someone of another culture may not be written with the normal logic of the English paragraph. That depends on culture and education. You will have to find out for yourself whether the writer is using standard English methods of presenting paragraphs and sentences. Some scientists and engineers do a lot of writing but the structure of their writing may follow different rules from those of the normal English.

What does this mean or imply when research a work, a place, a name or something like labels and identification. It probably means that an English person tends to organize materials in a predictable way. If initially, the product of an English person is fairly complete, it may be that the organization comes as a secondary activity. Sentences may be organized into tighter mire structured paragraphs etc as a secondary stage.

Know Your Cultural Biases

I personally have at least three cultures affecting my writing. My main is English, my second main is Canadian, and my third is French / Quebecois. I am also heavily influenced by having lived in America for an extended period. What does this mean for my own logic and preferred style of thinking, writing and organizing words, sentences and paragraphs?

To be honest, I am not sure. I tend to be more English than French. What this means is that I tend to prefer objects over people, and to organize and to label accordingly. Now that sounds very cultural. I am not sure, but suspect that it is.

Maybe, I think the way I do because of my genes. I know that I eat the food that I eat because of my genes. My body tolerates oats better than wheat. In fact, now I find that I am becoming less wheat tolerant as time goes on. Is this due to my DNA being associated with the majority of ancestors living in the woods or in northerly climes.

Putting Together a Mental Image of What Seems to Fit Best

What I am finding is that given druthers, those subconscious preferences one does not have much control over, one is drawn towards locations because of reactions to the environment. If one rarely moves around then one is not giving oneself the opportunity to be drawn. What makes me think that this is genetic is the fact that I have an Australian friend, whose ancestral origins are from the northern Scottish islands, red hair, fair skin, not used to too much sun light, always wanting to be in doors and huddled away in some cosy dark room away from people and the elements of climate. One example, may cloud my thinking, but when I see a tomb of a book, such as that by Oppenheimer, I can't stop thinking that it says something about where one might be happiest without knowing why. Another issue is whether one would gravitate to such places, given druthers. The answer, for me at least, seems to be yes.

I notice that Scots, and Russians, Yorkshire, and Brittany people mostly tend to like Canada and its climate. This is a very small sample of different cultures, but it may be that there is an adaptive process that has gone on over many many generations. When I was young, I may have been more sensitive than now to these inner factors shaping my preferences, what economists call preference functions, but they seem real enough even now.

It is the advantage of having time that one does revisions. One corrects mistakes and one moves closer to situations and places one is more suited to or prefers. Essentially then, revision is a way of life. We may not understand it or see why we do it. By having genetic preferences locked into us we may even be destroying ourselves, as say falling prey to our latent addictive tendencies that are prescribed genetically. Do you think that you are really in control? Well consider the amazing studies done on identical twins.