When one writes a book, as I often do, one also has an ideal image in ones/his mind. I can’t say that I have this image in my head; I would rather say that I carry it in my heart. This ideal image wants to be described. The difficulty is though, that the theme is perfect in a way, it is a comprehensive whole, carried in the heart. But it can only emerge in a line of thought. Human thought that is put into words cannot be comprehensive; it has to be surrendered to time. Thoughts and words pass in the element of time, there is no other way. So it has to be the diversity, the abundance of thoughts that can only approach the original fullness of the theme.
Whenever one starts writing, one comes at crossroads where there has to be chosen in which direction one wants to go. While writing or speaking it is impossible to go all the ways together. One leaves all the other possibilities behind, and one follows that one road - and it restricts ones possibility to approach the ideal image. One can feel it as a human incapacity. One has to go into the flow of time and can only achieve something while flowing along with time. The line of time has to become an embracing movement; one must find a way to express ones thoughts in a different way.
Now that I have started to write short texts for a blog, I come across this problem in a new way. I have been in Paris several times. When I was young, people walked from the Champs-Elysées to the Place de l'Étoile - now they go from the Champs-Elysées to the Place Charles de Gaulle. Whatever the name of the place is, it has the shape of a star. From the Arc de Triomphe one can choose a lot of roads. The same thing occurs to me while writing the blog texts. While writing about the reverse thinking about evolution I had to think about two flows of time, a proceeding flow of time and a reverse flow of time. But while writing this, I imagined how one could think the development of the different kinds of animals up to the human being also in a reverse way. I will try to write about this idea in a following blog. Besides, people also react to the published texts that could also be a subject for a new blog text...
In the course of my thinking life, I have experienced how confined human thinking is (I never exclude myself in examining this). It is not even the content of thought, it is the tense way in which we form and combine our concepts. At the moment that we have chosen a special road, the other roads are forgotten, and our thinking has become a little bit more restricted. We don't even notice that in maintaining all our opinions we maintain our pettiness. That is why discussion is such a hopeless undertaking. For it is the modern mind that is restricted, and that wants to be restricted.
After this interlude of reflection on the process of thinking and writing, in the next blog I will try to reflect on a development of the living beings that evolve from perfection, from the ideal of evolution to a finished, an exquisite moral human being.
Place Charles de Gaulle, ParisAbout writing. From perfection to restriction by Mieke Mosmuller