silence

I'm enjoying a rare few seconds of silence. My office door is closed. There are workmen outside in the hallway who have been knocking down a wall all morning to make a new doorway. A sensible person would have skulked off to another part of the building, found an unused workstation, and picked up the pieces. Something possessed me to want to sit here, surrounded by hammering, sweeping, effortful grunts, to see what effect that might have on my writing. It certainly slowed the pace below 21 words/hr, but also made me edit more carefully. No idea why. Perhaps the noise prevented my imagination from kicking in, but didn't affect my curmudgeonly critical sense. So the nasty, detail-oriented, critical parts of my mind are impenetrable to chaos, but the nice, holistic flowing bits are knocked off kilter by the least disturbance. Seems about right.

When I was an undergraduate student, I remember a room-mate once commenting on my ability to read 16th century English verse while Led Zeppelin belted out of our giant floor to ceiling speakers at volumes loud enough to cause heart arrhythmia. I've assumed that this kind of focal attention requires substantial neural resources, and as the brain cells begin to thin during the 4th decade of life, that kind of focus becomes a bit more of a challenge.

Many thoughts early this morning about the small crescendo of research suggesting interesting cross-cultural differences in perception. The latest news is that, compared to Westerners, the East Asian tendency to process wholes and contexts corresponds with some differences in brain activation in areas that are also involved in finding one's way around in space, recognizing landmarks, noticing objects. I've been wondering whether these kinds of differences are reflected in architecture, the emphasis in Asian architecture on placement, proportion, and orientation (feng shui, in other words). Like leaf rolling weevils, bowerbirds, compass termites, and subterranean mole rats, our dwellings cast shadows of the shapes of our minds.

The workers are coming back. This is probably the best writing I'll manage today.