Thinking, drawing and writing

 Eric Hoffer put it this way: The grass becomes the cow and not the other way around.

In terms of logical possibilities, it could go either way. A cow could become a big pile of grass. We learn by experience that the grass becomes cow.

That was Hoffer’s metaphor for thinking on paper.

He carried index cards and notebooks in his pocket and would write down ideas as they occurred to him. He’d fill up notebooks as he read. Then he’d go back and work through the notes, comparing an idea he’d had while picking peas as a migrant laborer with an idea he’d found in Montaigne. Gradually, the material would become Hoffer.

I have met people who didn’t absorb the material they were allegedly interested in. I remember preachers who’d managed to memorize large portions of the Bible. If you asked a question, they would recite, rather than think. They could deliver messages, but they couldn’t carry on a conversation.

Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper has a section on how notebooks shape how we think. His story involves artists, rather than writers. People who draw in notebooks change the way they use their brains.

Our instinct, when we first try to draw, is to use the part of our brains that helps with facial recognition. But an artist slowly learns to suppress that instinct and to use the part of the brain that helps us with spatial awareness — the part that keeps us from bumping into the furniture as we walk through a room. Allen provides the moral of the story: 

 

Use it enough, and a notebook will change your brain.

 

I would like to hear an explanation of what happens to people who use notebooks to write, rather than draw. I’m leery of mind-brain conundrums and would be less interested in the neurology than in practical advice on how to absorb the nutrients from books, conversations, observations and other experiences. 

• Source: Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper; Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2024, p. 371.