Liquid States of Mind

April 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

William James (1892) famously uses the term ‘Stream of Consciousness’ to describe the unbroken succession of images which seems to characterize the flowing, river-like experience of wakeful awareness. He also writes of the ‘oceanic’ feelings associated with religious experience (1902), an entailment picked up by Freud (1973) and Clement (1994) and which also figures in first-person accounts of certain varieties of peak experience; a feeling of unbounded unity with the wider cosmos and an apparent dissolution of the boundary between self and world .

Clement, C. (1994). Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York, Harper & Row.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York, HarperPerennial.

Freud, S. (1989). Formulations Regarding The Two Principles in Mental Functioning. The Freud Reader. P. Gay. New York, Norton: 301-306.

Grau, O. (2003). Virtual art: from illusion to immersion. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Greenfield, S. A. and T. F. T. Collins (2005). A Neuroscientific Approach to Consciousness. Amsterdam, Elsevier B.V.

Gurwitsch, A. (1979). Human Encounters in the Social World. Pittsburgh, PA, Duquesne University Press.

James, W. (1981). The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Posted in Clement, Catherine, Conference Abstract, Consciousness, Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, Flow, Freud, Sigmund, Greenfield, Susan, Gurswitch, Aron, James, William, Liquid, Metaphor, Phenomenology, Psychology, Religion | No Comments »

Liquid Essence

May 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The human tendency to allocate all experience to classical (non-prototypical) categories results in an essentialism in which the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in a category are metaphorically (or metanymically) applied to an intangible essences.

An extended property of the urge to categorise is that we also tend to group categories into larger categories whose members possess more general properties, the ultimate category being the category of everything under which all other categories are subsumed, a summum genus which subsumes all other categories. An implication of this is that this ultimate category must itself have an essential condition for its own membership. This condition has been variously named as being, dasein, Tao, etc. However, such an abstract concept as being is outside the grasp of embodied cognition and can only be understood by the application of a metaphor. It will be demonstrated here that the dominant metaphor which is used in the understanding of the ultimate essence is that of the liquid. Thales was right, in its essence, all is water.

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The Parameters of Liquidity

June 3rd, 2006 Fred McVittie

The various uses to which a metaphor of is put are modulated not only by the entailments that accompany any such metaphor, but also by the natural variability in the parameters of the source of that metaphor. The range of variation in these parameters give a natural structure to the overall use of the metaphor across its many possible applications. In the case of the liquidity metaphor, in which a number of concepts are given the attribute of a liquid; mind, time, energy etc. the specific character of the concept can be fine tuned by modulating one or more of these parameters. The specific parameters available within the liquidity metaphor are:

• Viscosity (or degree of crytallisation)
• Depth
• Expanse
• Containment/canalisation
• Motion (existence of, and type of)
• Relationship to other elements (absorption, dissolution, flotation, etc)

Posted in Liquid, Metaphor | No Comments »

The Ocean and the Womb

June 10th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Many individuals report certain moments in their lives during which they experience a feeling of unbounded unity with all creation and an egoless merging with ‘the divine’. This is typically experienced during moments of highly novel and extreme stimulation (free diving, mountain climbing, etc), or moments of spiritual epiphany. Often this feeling is incorporated into cultural practice, either as part of religious or artistic observance, or less formally within the context of extreme sports, recreational drug use, etc.

This paper will suggest that the prototypical experience for this ‘oneness’ is that of floating in the amniotic sac prior to the partition moment of birth. At that literally pre-conceptual point in our ontogenic history there is no effective separation or ‘individuation’ between oneself and the environment in which that self is lodged. Floating in amniotic fluid we are literally ‘one with everything’. We are reminded of this experience non-conciously during moments of peak experience or religious epiphany when similar feelings of connected ‘oneness’ occur. It will be suggested that this is one of the reasons we tend to conceptualise and articulate these moments metaphorically using liquid metaphors, particularly those invoking the ‘oceanic’.

Posted in Liquid, Metaphor, Spirituality, Unity | No Comments »

Liquid Love

July 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The various states of consciousness alluded to using the metaphor of a liquid are comprehensive and consistent, from the ’stream’ of individual consciousness at one end to the ‘oceanic’ experience of non-individuated ego loss at the other. In between these states a range of states and conditions are similarly articulated using this metaphor, including flow, immersion, absorbtion, etc. These states are not only rational and logical however, but are also heavily informed by, or rather constructed with, emotional content and responses. The ‘oceanic’ feeling identified by William James is a notable example. Initially associated with the overpowering divine adoration of religious experience, this concept was reframed by Freud in terms of that other great first love, a baby’s ecstasy of embrionic and amniotic immersion within the body and the ego of the mother prior to partition, birth, and the individuating rigours of childhood. In both readings, one religious and the other ontogenic, the metaphor of a vast ocean stands in not only for undividedness, but for undivided love. Immersion and dissolution in this ocean is a kind of death, not of the body but of the ego, and we see miniature versions of this death, this dissolution, in the small death of sexual orgasm (in French le petit mort), and in the sacrificial ego loss when we are drowned in romantic love.

Posted in Feeling, Freud, Sigmund, James, William, Liquid, Love, Metaphor | No Comments »

Liquid and Crystalised Knowledge

August 20th, 2006 Fred McVittie

In the swirling currents of consciousness and cognition, knowledge forms icebergs.

Posted in Cognition, Consciousness, Liquid | No Comments »

The Tao of Water

August 21st, 2006 Fred McVittie

The metaphors which we use to conceptualise time overlap significantly with with those for being and energy. This metaphor is water-based and allows for these three distinct phenomena to be merged or synthesised. A particularly significant example of this synthesis is in the Chinese philosophy of the Tao, (which Alan Watts refers to as ‘The Watercourse Way’ [1975]), and in which these three phenomona are merged into a single concept.

Posted in Energy, Liquid, Metaphor, Time | No Comments »

Space Mind Metaphor

September 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Space is a key concept, perhaps the most important key concept, in Naive Physics. Remembering that Naive Physics is an extended field of knowledge that includes mental entities such as consciousness (Smith 1994) it is not surprising that our understanding of the mind itself in turn draws on spatial metaphors to structure that understanding. In other words, the Naive Physics of cognition imagines the mind as spatial. We talk of consciousness being ‘raised’, (following a general metaphor GOOD IS UP), and we may think of ourselves and other people as being ‘broadminded’ or ‘narrowminded’. Techniques, experiences, and chemicals for altering the state of one’s mind positively are routinely referred to as ‘mind expanding’. Generally these metaphors rely on two further assumptions about the mind, both of which are also features of naive science.

Dualism - that the mind is radically separate from the brain, possibly to the extent that it can have independent existence (as in the pre-psychological notion of the immortal soul).

Vitalism - that the mind is composed of a non-material, ‘ethereal’ substance which is often conceptualised as gaseous or liquid, (c.f. ‘flow’, the ‘oceanic’, ’streams of consciousness’ etc).
In this formulation when we talk about the mind we conceive it as a vital substance existing within Newtonian/Cartesian space, centred on the person.

With these two features in place, when we use spatial metaphors to talk and think of the mind we imagine this fluid mind-stuff, centred behind the eyes, as expanding and contracting; flowing from one part of the body to another and capable of extension outside of the body through processes we refer to as concentration, focus, attention, etc.

Posted in Dualism, Liquid, Metaphor, Mind, Smith, Barry, Space, Vitalism | No Comments »

Ectoplasmic Mind Stuff

September 12th, 2006 Fred McVittie

In addition to the three metaphors for mind identified elsewhere which depend upon spatial extension and location; central point, focal point, and totality of space; there is one additional key metaphor which is frequently used. This fourth concept imagines mind as a gaseous/liquid extrusion, a kind of ectoplasm that extends into space from the body (usually the head) and may even leave the body entirely. This is the most literal and visualisable of the metaphors even though (because) it is also the least rationally valid. Whilst it has been cogently argued that mind and space may be connected (McGill 1995), the strength of that argument relies, ironically, on the deeply unscientific nature of its claim. McGill’s proposal that mind (consciousness) and space are linked via some pre-big-bang form of dimensionless spatial ordering is unverifiability defined. McGill’s hypothesis is non-viable because it is untestable. Any hypothesis which proposes the existence of an ‘ectoplasmic’ mind on the other hand, (and traces of this are found in Sheldrake, etc), are easily testable and inevitably found to be scientifically and objectively invalid. This does not prevent such models of the mind existing within folk science and as a pattern on the fabric of language.

Posted in Liquid, McGill, Mind, Sheldrake, Rupert, Substance | No Comments »

Mind Metaphors and States of Consciousness

September 19th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The various metaphors which we use to describe mind can be broadly gathered in three key groups; objects, substances, and spaces. The application of metaphor from each of these groupings is largely dependent upon the particular mental function or mental state one is trying to conceptualise of describe, and some metaphors lend themselves particularly well to describing complex states of mind and forms of consciousness. An example of this, drawn from the Substance group of metaphors, is that of MIND IS A LIQUID. The entailments of this metaphor, drawn from the variable properties and qualities of the source, allows a wide range of mental states to be conceptualised and described, and for these concepts to be structured in an organised way in accordance with the organisation of the source metaphor. LIQUID, typically water, can undergo a range of transformations, from solid ice to vaporous gas. It is capable of flowing and making its own channel, but also of being contained. When heated in a sealed container it is known for increasing in pressure and possibly exploding, when cooled it solidifies and acquires the form of the container holding it. Water can both be absorbed and can dissolve; taking other material into itself, or entering into other material completely. All these entailments, drawing on the variable properties of liquids, particularly water, structure the particular ontology of mind which draws on the MIND IS A LIQUID metaphor.

Posted in Liquid, Metaphor, Mind, Transformation | No Comments »

Shared Skin

December 6th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Imagine that your skin is not a thin envelope of tissue holding your internal organs together, but is 15 ft thick. Its inner layers are close to the core of your body and you can feel the organs, vessels, and bones penetrating the skin. At this level it has the texture and consistency of meat. About 1ft out from your centre your skin is more glutinous, and there are organs here that migrate slowly through and around the body. Further out still the skin is runny like syrup, although there are currents within it which prevent it from dripping away completely and pooling on the floor. At this level your skin is permeable and subject to influences from outside. There may be currents flowing in your skin that are caused by a passing car, or another person moving close to you. There may even by objects and parts of objects protruding into your skin from the outside world. Further out still from your centre, and your skin is like water, like the aliens in The Abyss. It flows and forms eddies around you as you move and your thoughts and feelings appear as ripples in this liquid skin. Here there is considerable traffic with the outside world; objects float in your skin and the hands of lovers and friends splash in the waves. At its outermost level your skin is an evanescent gas, roiling and swirling amongst the atmospheres of the world. Here your skin mixes with the skin of everything else around you. The world appears in your shared skin.

Posted in Exercises, Liquid, Sense, Skin | No Comments »

Come into the light

May 22nd, 2007 Fred McVittie

The metaphors we use to articulate abstract concepts draw most extensively from those type of concrete experiences which are most common. In terms of the sensory mode in which such experiences present themselves the most prevalent type of experience is visual. With up to 40% of the brain’s processing power being taken up with dealing with visual information it is not surprising that visual metaphors are the most frequently used, (although sensorimotor metaphors are not far behind, for possible explanations of this see Noe, Regan).

Our extensive use of visual metaphor to conceptualise abstract ideas causes an interesting phenomenon when this conceptualisation reflects back upon itself. Given that thought and the making of concepts are themselves deeply abstract activities we can inevitably only comprehend and articulate such concepts through metaphor. In other words, we can only think about thinking metaphorically. When searching for a metaphor which indicates this self-referential thinking, and remembering that most metaphors are visual, we should expect this metaphor (or meta-metaphor) to convey something of the circumstances of visuality. If KNOWING IS SEEING, and we want to talk about the properties of KNOWING, then we should find ourselves talking about the properties of SEEING. When talking about knowledge we should expect people to use terms related to sight and the conditions which make sight possible. Again this is exactly what we find. Knowledge metaphors make much use of visual concepts and terminology: we say ‘I see’ when we mean ‘I know’ etc. Also, a basic condition for the operation of sight is the presence of light and once again there is a close correspondence in language and thought between knowledge and light. In concrete terms light allows us to experience visual space. In metaphorical terms light allows us to comprehend conceptual space.

Interestingly, when we want to refer to extreme forms of knowing, as we might when we are looking for some kind of spiritual or religious knowledge, the metaphor of light is extended, intensified, and sometimes personified such that the all-encompassing knowledge which passes all understanding is conceived of as a divine light.

Posted in Abstract, Knowledge, Liquid, Metaphor, Seeing | No Comments »

Wallas and Wordsworth

May 28th, 2007 Fred McVittie

William Wordsworth in the introduction to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1802 described poetry as ‘the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity’. This remark, often held to be an example of the Romanticism which dominated much (English) poetry of the period, also suggests that poetry, as a creative act (perhaps the creative act) requires the poet to move through a series of psychological stages. Also the mention of a ’spontaneous outflow’ points toward a model of creative production which is hydraulic or pneumatic, involving some metaphorical substance that is accumulating within the mind of the poet, a mind possibly limited in capacity. The limited capacity of the mind causes the substance to be compressed and alchemically transformed into its most dense state and the eventual inevitable result of this continued accumulation is the overflowing or bursting forth of this transformed substance. The mechanism by which this accumulation and transformation takes place has a number of stages. ‘Emotion recollected in tranquility’ points to two of these stages. The ‘emotion’ stage is one in which one is immersed in the experience that is the source of the poem, it might be considered a ‘preparatory’ stage or even a period of ‘research’ (although this term suggests an emotionally-disconnected activity this is not an accurate conception of research, or indeed of any form of experiential cognition. See Damasio 2005). The ‘emotion’ stage is when the object of study is given over to the senses, it is when one metaphorically runs one’s hands over the experience, gathering subtle feelings and sensations. This is followed by a period in which one is separated from the experience, the phrase ‘recollected in tranquility’ suggests a period of calm, in which the poet is not directly involved in the conscious exploration or examination of the experience, but that other, non-conscious cognitive processes are active. It is during this period presumably that the ’substance’ circulating in the mind of the poet undergoes processes of accretion and accumulation, compression and condensation, such that it eventually overflows the container of the mind. At this point the third stage in the poetic process is entered in which the tranquility is replaced by a mental state corresponding to the bursting forth of this ’spontaneous outflow’ .

These stages show some correspondence to the stages of the creative process identified by Wallas (1923) and others since. These are the phases of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Elaboration. Whereas Wallas uses the metaphor of light to relate this process, Wordsworth uses a metaphor of liquid. For Wallas, the moment of creative insight when the poet witnesses the emergence of the creative artifact into his own consciousness is seen as the sudden switching on of a light (Illumination). For Wordsworth this moment is the equally sudden breaking of a dam and the flooding of the stage of consciousness with the liquid of creativity.

Posted in Alchemy, Creativity, Damasio, Antonio, Emotion, Liquid, Metaphor, Transformation, Wallas, Graham, Wordsworth, William | No Comments »

Substance Metaphors

August 25th, 2007 Fred McVittie

One of the most extensive groups of conceptual metaphors that we use to structure and organise our thoughts about phenomena which would otherwise be incomprehensible and inexpressible is that set of metaphors which use SUBSTANCE as their source. Sometimes the substance used is quite specific, as for example when we talk about the abstract concept of genetic inheritance by using the metaphor of blood. In other instances we use more generic substances to stand for abstract concepts and exploit the general properties of substances to think and talk about concepts about which we would otherwise have to remain mentally and actually silent. A clear example of this latter type of generic substance metaphor is that of the type MIND IS A LIQUID which is explored in detail elsewhere and which shows itself in our use of such terms as flow, absorb, stream of consciousness, oceanic awareness, etc, all of which describe mental states or processes through the application of the one substance metaphor. It is inevitable that our use of such metaphors is based on our vernacular embodied understanding of substances, and not on an understanding of substance which requires specialist, non-embodiable knowledge. There is unlikely to be a metaphor group relating particularly to the halide elements for example, or to substances which form salts in the presence of acids. In other words, the ways in which substances are used as sources for metaphor is not dependent upon technical knowledge, of chemistry for example, but on the experiential knowledge of handling different substances and encountering different substances directly with the sensorimotor system. At this level of analysis, the body is the template for categorisation, not the chromatograph or the tunneling electron microscope. Unsurprising, the primary categories that the body forms are those familiar to all of us from Primary School science class, the categories of solids, liquids, and gases, and it is from this threesome that most of our substance metaphors are drawn. (Please note the inclusion of the caveat ‘most’ in the preceding sentence. I will be arguing that on special occasions we do invent, postulate, or imagine, a fourth state of matter outside of the big three.)

Posted in Liquid, Metaphor, Mind, Science, Sense, Substance | No Comments »

Rivers and Dams

August 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie

The river of non-conscious (animal) cognition flows along the path of least resistance. The great trick of consciousness begins with an ability to temporarily arrest this flow and make a choice about whether we really want to follow the urging of the landscape and carry on in that direction, always downwards. We feel these moments of choice occasionally as build-ups of pressure or temptation, almost as if the waters of the river that is carrying us along have been dammed and that water is backing up behind us. This arrested flow causes the water behind the dam to form vortices and eddies, turning over itself and becoming chaotically complex loops of current before the ground offers a route that we agree to. Then we let ourselves go and follow the river downstream. A valley carved out not just by the yes of the river but also by the no of the dam.

Posted in Consciousness, Flow, Liquid, Metaphor, Re-entry | No Comments »

The Fourth State of Imaginary Matter

September 12th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Matter, historically, was divided into the intuitively sensible categories of earth, air, fire, and water. To the medieval mind, this division was sufficient to cover the major distinctions in the properties of the stuff of the world, and associated conveniently with other quaternary distinctions, the bodily humours, the platonic solids etc. at a time when such correspondences were seen as significant evidence for the logical organisation of the world. The development of chemistry and physics replaced this intuitively satisfying but practically useless division with the period table of the elements and atomic theory which together reveal much more fundamental relations between substances and allows for vastly greater prediction and control of the chemical universe.

Outside of chemical practice however, we do still tend to use simpler systems of dividing the substances of the world into broad categories, regardless of their chemical constitutions. We do not usually use the earth, air, fire, water, classification but rather tend to think of ’stuff’ as being either solid, liquid, or gas. This trinity covers all of the material experience we are likely to run into in our daily lives, and maps thoroughly onto the sensorium in which we live. (Plasma has occasionally been referred to as the ‘fourth state of matter’ but since it is never encountered outside of high-energy physics it does not feature in our vernacular or intuitive understanding of the material world.)

Obviously, this classification of substance does not describe all aspects of the world, since much of our experience is not substance-based. We routinely engage with such entities as locations, forces, relationships, processes etc. which have no substantive existence but clearly are as real as the matter which we can see and touch. When we are engaging with substances however, we routinely expect it to fall into one of the three categories or solid, liquid, or gas, and if we learned of a substance which was outside of this classification (as opposed to a mixture for example) we would be hard pressed to find a way to conceive of it.

Let us assume for a moment that such a substance exists. We cannot talk about it easily since our language of substances is restricted to the big three, and even thinking about it ties us in knots. The extent to which we can think or talk about it at all is only the extent to which we can say it is like one of the existing known substances. We can say it is ‘a bit like a liquid’ or ’something like a gas’, or ‘ it has some of the qualities of a solid’. Yet even while we do this, we know that we are not really talking about the substance at all, such expressions are ‘a finger pointing at the moon’. This imaginary substance is neither solid, liquid, nor gas, and yet we can use the properties of these substances to speculate what the 4th state of matter might be like. This substance may be neither more solid than solid, nor more gaseous than gas, but at the same time we can think of it being both these things. Inasmuch as solidity and gaseousness seem to define a spectrum, the ’solidity’ spectrum we might say, then we can imaginatively place substance four on this spectrum, and if we do this we find that it is both more solid than solid and more gassy than gas. On the one hand, the fact that it makes no impression on the sense seems to place it beyond a gas. The spectrum of solidity from solid to liquid to gas seems to indicate a gradual dropping off of the availability of the different substances to sensory awareness; we can touch, taste, smell, hold, and see a solid; a liquid may be less visible, less easy to handle and contain; a gas is more evanescent still and may barely register on the senses at all. This journey from solid to gas is one of increasing removal from sensory contact and a hypothetical fourth substance, given that it does not appear at all, if we are to continue with this logic, must inevitably be placed beyond the gaseous.

On the other hand, we could possibly conceive of this substance taking up a position at the other end of the spectrum of solidity. When we look around at the solid matter of the world, we may be impressed by its apparent solidity, but we are also aware of it ultimate impermanence and transience. A Keats put is, ‘things fall apart’, and this goes for the most seemingly permanent. We see the breakdown of bodies, buildings and coastlines and know in our hearts that all things must pass. We also know that the most solid and fixed of matter that we see around us and inside us does not stay in the same place but is in constant motion. From the stars to our own eyeballs, all the stuff of the world is constantly jiggling and shifting. And while this jiggling seems to be most acute with gasses, and is least in evidence with solids, even the largest rocks fly around the Sun at a thousand miles an hour. Surely there should be state of matter does not perform this wild dance, but is genuinely solid; not just hard to the touch but firm and reliable in its fixity. The logic of the gradient from gas to solid, when extrapolated onward, seem to lead to such a substance. Truly permanent, truly unchanging, truly still.

We could, at this point conjecture on the existence of not only a fourth, but also a fifth state of imaginary matter, one which exists outside the ephemerality of gas and another which is inside the glacially shifting surface of solids. It may be more interesting to consider to what extent these apparent opposites can be reconciled into a single substance. And if such conflation proves to be impossibly paradoxical, we may find that we can learn something from the attempt.

Posted in Liquid, Matter, Metaphor, Sense, Substance | No Comments »

Heart of Stone, Feet of Clay

October 5th, 2007 Fred McVittie

You are standing on the shore of an ocean, possibly a beach in some Northern English seaside town: Whitley Bay maybe, or Tynemouth, and since we are in the North of England and it is Midsummer, there is a persistent drizzle and a pale grey mist hangs heavily over a slightly darker grey sea. The horizon is indistinct, and there is no clear division between water and air, and because of the thickness of the fog there is scarcely any line between sea and sand.

Beneath your feet you feel the firmness of the Earth. Solid as Earth can be, which is only less presently certain in its permanence that the feet which stand upon it. These feet are, in turn, assured of their place in the temporal order of objects by the feltness of the body for which they act as pedestal. Here is solidity, this body, this rock, this anchor for the world. A heart of living eternal stone and guarantor of all the verities. If we can simply say ‘here is my heart’ then all else follows.

From heart to body to feet firmly planted on the sands of Whitley Bay is a small journey, but we may feel in the making of it a small softening, a catching of the time of the world in which the body at its Southernmost extremity slips slightly away. The feet are less certain than the heart, and may stumble or slip where the heart remains still.

And under the toes, the sand, shifting with the wind and taking imprint from every foot that passes. The sea, oceanic beyond the sand, and above it, and below it, and washing over and through it, has little resistance, even the stupidest fish can pass between. A rock thrown against the water encounters no resolve. It is there and it is not there, moving and waving like disappearing dancers boarding a train.

Sky above, grey as remembered sleep. There is nothing to say about the sky. There is just nothing to say.

Posted in Boundary, Centre, Imagination, Liquid, Substance | No Comments »

Flow of Creativity

October 7th, 2007 Fred McVittie

It is widely understood that individual creative processes go through several stages. Activities which mark the early stages of a process are different to those which dominate later. It is further noted that the creative process is not linear, beginning with a particular problem or stimulus and working in an orderly fashion toward a final conclusion or response, but is chaotic and lacking clear boundaries. Inasmuch as there is an end to a creative process, perhaps in the revealing of a product of some kind, this end is likely also to be the beginning of others. Moreover, it is noted that the stages of a creative process tend not to be sequential and singular, but rather are multiple and cyclical. During any period of creative activity, the individual is typically working on different parts of the problem simultaneously, and the results of one activity tend to be recycled into other parts of the process. Also, these cycles within the creative process tend to occupy different scales, with some involving large formations of material undergoing massive transformations, whilst at the same time small problems are being creatively solved and tiny questions answered. We can visualise the creative process, then, as a tumble of circulating material and ideas, rather like the flowing of a river through rocks, with currents entering and re-entering the flow.

Posted in Boundary, Creativity, Liquid, Re-entry, Transformation | No Comments »