January 1:
Poem's how, fashioned
of wrens and rainlight, enters
an unsnowed winter.
978-157141-079-5 is the correct ISBN of Visio-Textual Selectricity, the anthology whose publication I announced yesterday. I point it out because I got it wrong on its title-page. It's not important since no one is likely to need to know it, but I want the correct number on record here. Now to what I hope is more interesting stuff:
Paul Crowley, my main nut antagonist at HLAS, where we debate who wrote Shakespeare's works, recently mentioned a book he ardently agrees with whose author (apparently) claims that good old hard work is what makes a genius (provided he has reasonably good genes): 10,000 hours of apprenticeship in his field, to put a number on it. Here's my retort: one big problem with this notion is that just about everyone spends that much time learning a trade, so it's almost as useless to consider it a cause of genius as calling having enough to eat a cause of genius. A second big problem is that most mediocrities in any field devote at least 10,000 hours to learning their craft. What makes Mozart different from them is not the amount of preliminary grunt-work.
A rigidnik like Paul has to believe in gruntwork as the route to genius because
that is all he is capable of. He has to devalue imagination--superior imagination, I mean--not only because his lack of that is what limits any progress he makes in life to the result of gruntwork (and also makes him unable to believe it can exist) but because the use of imagination (if it exists) seems not to be teachable. If so, and if superior innate imagination is the main source of genius, schools must lose much of their reputation for being a sine qua non of cultural progress. The rigidnik can't have that: he needs schools to carry out the indoctrination, regimentation, mediocritization of the masses required properly to combat non-conformity, something he is inalterably opposed to (unless it's a minor non-conformity whose purpose is opposing some large threat to A Well-Ordered Society, like the idea of a self-made genius like Shakespeare).
I claim (effective) imagination is dependent on one's innate accommodance, coupled with one's innate accelearance, with accommodance being by far the more important of the two. Accommodance is what allows one to go mentally passive (due to a lowering of cerebral energy)--to let go of what one's learned till then so external stimuli can flow into one's mind unrestrictedly and mingle with more or less random memories, also flowing in without critical interference. The mind thus opens to new possibilities. Most of them will be worthless, even idiotic. But some may click into place.
If that happens, accelerance will come into play, raising one's cerebral energy. That, in turn, will weld together the fresh connections that seem of value. The critical sense--consisting mainly of accommodance and accelerance working together, back and forth--will compare the "solution" one's has produced against reality--test it, that is--and either junk it or keep it, depending on how it scores in the test. To put it all very roughly.
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