I have never been a strong believer that there is a single "I". Those times when you get in the car to go to the grocery store, and find ten minutes later that you are pulling into your office parking lot: who--or what--has been driving the car in the meantime?
There is a story that Neils Bohr's wife once at the start of a party sent him upstairs to change his tie; an hour later she found him, asleep, in bed; taking off the tie had triggered the going-to-bed subroutine[?] reflex[?] entity[?] and had overwhelmed the express conscious purpose. I remember author David Brin once saying that he could not switch from finger-typing to voice-writing, because the raconteur who spoke through his mouth was vastly inferior at plot, characterization, and structure to the writer who communicated through the hands.
My daimones--as Walter Jon Williams calls them--do boring things like drive to the office. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, however, has a daimon that makes good omelettes:
Posted by DeLong at July 26, 2002 09:52 AM | TrackBackMaking Light: July 2002 Archives
Omelets from the beyond: There's a weird thing that happens to me when I'm immersed in a text: I sort of absentmindedly cook while I'm thinking about what I'm working on. This is not a normal value of "absentmindedly". It's more like Patrick comes home and surprises me by asking about the quart jar of preserves that's cooling on the kitchen counter. Preserves? When did that happen? And then, if I think about it, I can vaguely remember that yes, at some point I was standing in front of the stove, stirring a pot of something-or-other. I have no memory of thought or volition; just a hazy sense that it happened.
It happened again yesterday. What you'd have to know is that the knack of making omelets has always eluded me. But late yesterday morning when I was working at my table in the kitchen, I suddenly got up and made a perfect three-egg cheese omelet with bits of spinach, green onion, and tarragon snipped into the egg mixture. It not only folded in half properly, it quartered, too; and there I was, blinking and bemused, with a plated omelet in my hand.
Reader, I ate it.
This morning I made omelets again. They didn't come out as easily and perfectly as the last one, but my wordless memories of what my hands had been doing yesterday were very helpful.