Not that the thoughts which I capture in this way are very often crude or distasteful in a nasty way. Nor are they nonsense: these thoughts are well formed and do respect the real world, at least up to a point. They could have been right – but it is just that they are not. At least this is the lesser evil, at least at the personal level. Being wrong is, of course, more important in a public figure: I don’t really care what she does in private, just so long as she gets it right in public.
It may well be that the sampling drags thoughts out into the open which would never, unaided, have made it into consciousness. The censor, whom I like to call the super-ego, usually blocks inappropriate content; insists on it going through due process before it is allowed out. Psycho-analysts try for something of the same sort with their analysands, try to arrange things so that their super-egos are turned down, if not off, during free association – remembering here that part of what one is paying the analyst for is discretion: what might be said on their sofa, stays on their sofa. In any case, he is not interested in all the surface rubbish, rather he is interested in the deep meaning which comes to him, cloaked by your rubbish, deep meaning which, to use a theological term, more or less amounts to your soul.
This may fit in with the rubbish that one thinks when one is dreaming, when the super-ego has gone off duty, or the rubbish that I remember thinking once when I was on a morphine pump for pain. Not that I can remember what I was thinking about on that occasion, although I am reasonably sure, once again, that it was not anything particularly crude or distasteful, but I can remember thinking, presumably when the pain was no longer the main issue, that I was thinking dreadful rubbish. Some part of me could watch the other part pumping out all kinds of junk.
With my having a slightly odd experience of much the same sort only last week, one which did not involve morphine, but waking up in the middle of the night, to find all kinds of (visual) images whizzing through my mind, too fast to make any sense of them, but rather disturbing nonetheless. Perhaps some subconscious process was able to generate feelings of anxiety and such like, even though the images were not there long enough for the consciousness to catch hold of them – just the feelings – the result of the chemically flavoured emotional system working to a different time scale to the neuronally flavoured consciousness system. Luckily, a whizzing which stopped once I had woken up properly.
Another sort of odd experience, an experience which I have both when out sampling and when not, is that one has a very clear thought, then a moment later when one tries to grab it, it is gone. All one is left with is the strong feeling, the conviction that there had been an interesting thought there. Maybe all that is left is a faint emotional trace. So some times, the bleeper slips under the thought and manages to land it, other times, the bleeper misses and the thought floats back down into the murky depths. From which it can be deduced that I have associated, once again, to fish, fishing and landing nets. There is also the thought, once caught, is not the same thought as it was. The act of catching does something to it – rather as, perhaps, that a fish in a landing net has lost most of the grace of a fish in the water.
But then I think of the times when people, sometimes even me, are able to speak well, to talk well, to lecture about arcane matters, extempore, without notes. Where is the super-ego then? One is not aware of a five second lag while it does its business, in the way that live broadcasts are sometimes protected. Perhaps the fact that one has probably worked the material up beforehand, perhaps spoken about it before, means that most of the work of the super-ego has already been done. As if the material has a proper manifest coming along with it and does not, in consequence, need to be checked too thoroughly at the point of delivery.
Next I think of the top down and bottom up processes which figure quite largely in the literature these days, with the idea being, I think, that most of what can be seen from the outside of people is a blended product of bottom up and top down processes: what I experience when I look at a cow in a field is driven, in part by in-bound photons, in part by my deciding that there is a cow out there. Decide first, see afterwards. Think of all those times when you thought you saw something important in the bushes, something which turned out to be no more than a piece of litter, but which, for a second or so looked very like the head of a polecat. Or a badger, or whatever. Sometimes bottom up might dominate, sometimes top down might dominate, but generally they just get along. Maybe the super ego is just another name for some of those top down processes.
To close, I invite readers to remember that rubbish is not the same as detritus at all. See, for example. reference 2.
PS: the law, on this point at least, is sensible. It does not criminalise thought (although it strikes me as coming close with some sexual offences), while it does sometimes criminalise speech, and, rather more often, action.
Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.
Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=couper+crafts.
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