Jorge Luis Borges viewed Mark Twain as “one of the really great writers”, despite being or because he was “rather unaware of the fact”. He muses:

But perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact.

Bearing in mind Borges (to his frustration) never wrote anything longer than a long short story, and that he is a truly great writer, the concept of ‘really great book’ needs some unpacking (somewhere), but of more interest for now is the distinction Borges goes on to make between writing and cheap imitation:

You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes. I remember what Bernard Shaw said, that as to style, a writer has as much style as his conviction will give him and not more. Shaw thought that the idea of a game of style was quite nonsensical, quite meaningless. He thought of Bunyan, for example, as a great writer because he was convinced of what he was saying. If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it. In this country [Argentina], though, there is a tendency to regard any kind of writing—especially the writing of poetry—as a game of style. I have known many poets here who have written well—very fine stuff—with delicate moods and so on—but if you talk with them, the only thing they tell you is smutty stories or they speak of politics in the way that everybody does, so that really their writing turns out to be kind of sideshow. They had learned writing in the way that a man might learn to play chess or to play bridge. They were not really poets or writers at all. It was a trick they had learned, and they had learned it thoroughly. They had the whole thing at their finger ends. But most of them—except four or five, I should say—seemed to think of life as having nothing poetic or mysterious about it. They take things for granted. They know that when they have to write, then, well, they have to suddenly become rather sad or ironic.

In his autobiography (Words), Sartre modestly confesses to being able to imitate most (all?) of the French classical authors from a young age. The films of Lynch (especially when viewed under the appropriate conditions) are masterpieces of cinematography precisely (though not just) because they near-seamlessly shift in their imitation of different genres, often within the same scene, with magical effect. Imitation is not anathema to creativity, but it is a tool to be employed toward a greater end rather than the end in itself.

When I was flailing around on the floor of a [backwater town] apartment, trying (and failing) to pass my MA, I discovered that I’d forgotten how to write. Completely. It would take an hour to write a sentence (and it still wasn’t ‘right’). The mistake – my mistake – was to view this as a problem rather than having the epiphany it was trying to induce. It’s not uncommon, so I’m told, for MAs and PhDs in particular to throw or wipe you out of the system completely. Mark Fisher talks of “PhD work” that “bullies one into the idea that you can’t say anything about any subject until you’ve read every possible authority on it.” But the reality that was trying to make itself manifest was that I’d never been able to write (a few – very few – drunken words aside). Ever. This – now – isn’t good. But it is better. Which is a start. That’s the point of Bukowski. Bukowski is the literary equivalent of excrement. But it’s real shit. None of your stylised, imitation shit. What’s the point of imitation? There isn’t any. So stop (I did, involuntarily).

Galileo, with a point which is also well made by the author of The Philosophy of Teaching, ties the notion of writing as here discussed in with its twin – thought:

The only people who oppose this point of view are a few rigid defenders of philosophical minutiae. These people, as far as I can see, have been brought up and nourished from the very start of their education in this opinion, namely that philosophy is and can be nothing other than continuous study of such texts of Aristotle as can be immediately collected in great numbers from different sources and stuck together to resolve whatever problem is posed. They never want to raise their eyes from these pages as though this great book of the world was not written by nature to be read by others apart from Aristotle, and as though his eyes could see for the whole of posterity after him… (Galileo, The Assayer)

We may individually never think as far as Aristotle, but we can still embark on the same adventure. I’d not done that before.

It was like flicking a switch. He erupted in an outburst of shouts and wild, theatrical gesticulations, waving his arms in the air as he cried: At last, at fucking last, Jesus fucking Christ, at last … It was stunning, stupefying. My first impulse was to search for some kind of question, for additional information, but fortunately I suppressed it. Instead I began to think, and it was then that I realized that I hadn’t even been trying before. To think, I mean. It hadn’t even occurred to me to think, at all. That was already to cross a line, seeing that stupid unreflective obstinacy, which I had been. I still remember the moment – the instant – vividly, perfectly…(Duzsl)

–

Time is best investigated using mathematical language. It is the independent variable.

As it happens, physics is a system of equations, and to fit those equations together properly, it is necessary that the equations are strictly functions. Functions require an independent variable. We experience it as time.

Come to think, this may be a consequence of the law of identity. For a thing to be itself, it can’t have more than one set of properties.

Houdini is reported to have said that, though he had often met people who had met people who had seen the Indian rope-trick, despite all his extensive inquiries he had never succeeded in meeting anyone who had seen the Indian rope-trick.

Philosophers: “long on promise, short on performance”
http://pervegalit.wordpress.com/2013/04/27/philosophers-long-on-promise-short-on-performance/