The clouds are sort of permanent- as they are filled in, whatever degree of detail it’s at is where it stays in my head, wherever they’re “stored”, and it just sort of sticks in there. It feels a lot like just putting energy into some sort of “progress bar”, my best thinking I really do in just a meditation sort of behavior- closed eyes, relaxed pose, slow breathing [I’ll shift back and forth into this as I’m reading challenging books for instance, or when working on a project there’s a lot of “lean back and sit quietly for a moment, staring into the middle distance], but there’s diminishing returns (you can’t make a bad idea better than it is by thinking it harder, and very simple ideas even just… “finish”). Then it’s just sort of “in there”, available to be translated out into the word in various physical forms, be it a sentence, an Excel sheet, a process design, a sculpture, a music video, etc. It feels like the underlying “data” is multimodal or maybe even typeless, and it’s the expressions of it I create are all imperfect models of it, but can all be different and make different features visible or not, or obvious or not. But the line gets blurred, because those physical manifestations themselves, my memories of speaking them, etc. do end up getting fed back in and become part of the cloud.
And really, even the above is simplifying, because it doesn’t feel like I have separate clouds for separate thoughts, I just have one gigantic internal cloud of everything I’ve ever thought, and I’m just adding to that with what ‘comes out of the mists’. And I use that metaphor ‘comes out of the mists’ only to describe the feeling- the thoughts don’t seem like they are literally coming from “nowhere”, they feel like they come from me, they just come in very diffusely in across a lot of different conceptual dimensions besides just words, all at once and gradually and in a very “diffuse but coming into focus” way.
The clouds are sort of permanent- as they are filled in, whatever degree of detail it’s at is where it stays in my head, wherever they’re “stored”, and it just sort of sticks in there. It feels a lot like just putting energy into some sort of “progress bar”, my best thinking I really do in just a meditation sort of behavior- closed eyes, relaxed pose, slow breathing [I’ll shift back and forth into this as I’m reading challenging books for instance, or when working on a project there’s a lot of “lean back and sit quietly for a moment, staring into the middle distance], but there’s diminishing returns (you can’t make a bad idea better than it is by thinking it harder, and very simple ideas even just… “finish”). Then it’s just sort of “in there”, available to be translated out into the word in various physical forms, be it a sentence, an Excel sheet, a process design, a sculpture, a music video, etc. It feels like the underlying “data” is multimodal or maybe even typeless, and it’s the expressions of it I create are all imperfect models of it, but can all be different and make different features visible or not, or obvious or not. But the line gets blurred, because those physical manifestations themselves, my memories of speaking them, etc. do end up getting fed back in and become part of the cloud.
And really, even the above is simplifying, because it doesn’t feel like I have separate clouds for separate thoughts, I just have one gigantic internal cloud of everything I’ve ever thought, and I’m just adding to that with what ‘comes out of the mists’. And I use that metaphor ‘comes out of the mists’ only to describe the feeling- the thoughts don’t seem like they are literally coming from “nowhere”, they feel like they come from me, they just come in very diffusely in across a lot of different conceptual dimensions besides just words, all at once and gradually and in a very “diffuse but coming into focus” way.