ThoughtBox #1 - The Pyramid and the Hurricane
Also, Sand Dunes, Shock, and “Priest Charged for Biting Arm of Woman”
Have you ever realized you were doing something out of order?
I hesitate to get into this, because most people find Writing About Writing boring and Attempts to Explain Oneself tedious in a similar way, and this constitutes both.
But I have a bunch of half-finished pieces sitting in the folder labelled “Substack” in my documents, and the reason why is because I’m changing my approach to writing. One way to write is to have an idea, then pull in evidence that supports the idea. Another way to write is to collect quotes and thoughts, one by one, and look for patterns—then, an idea emerges from the evidence. I’ve nicknamed these two modes of writing “The Hurricane” (have idea, pull in a whirlwind of evidence that supports it) and “The Pyramid” (collect evidence from good sources, idea emerges over time).1 And during the past month of struggling to write anything, I’ve realized that I’ve been leaning too hard on “The Hurricane” method.
This is where the ThoughtBox comes in (yes, I *did* name it myself, how could you tell?). My ThoughtBox is a collection of quotes. It is a literal box, roughly shoebox size, with lined 4x6 index cards arranged in loose categories. The thing that makes it different from a conventional commonplace book is that my own observations and thoughts are nestled into it, too,2 alongside the quotes from books and articles.
Copying down a quote or a thought by hand does take a good chunk of time. It’s adorably analog. Building a pile of evidence could absolutely be done a different way. But I derive a lot of joy from the exercise—I imagine this is how some people feel about knitting—and I’ve already started seeing the benefits. I’ve never been able to spell the word “receive.” That second “e” and “i” got flipped in my mind sometime in childhood, and I’ve just been letting spellcheck fix it for me ever since. But—but—after copying the word “receive” down for something for the ThoughtBox a few times, I could spell it on my own. The ThoughtBox is helping me improve my writing at the most basic levels.3 And my evidence pile is growing, slowly but surely, and connections are turning up all over the place—between Madeleine L’Engle and Father Mike Schmitz, Psalms and Sacraments, Caryll Houselander and Saint Francis de Sales.
So, I still want to write pieces about family life, faith, and the Saints. The point of my ThoughtBox is to get better at that very thing. Plenty of the evidence I collect will be my own thoughts and experiences. While those pieces percolate, I want to share some bits from the ThoughtBox, along with relevant Hinds family updates.
Here are a few things that went into the ThoughtBox last week:
“Florida Priest Charged with Biting Arm of Woman He Says Was Desecrating the Eucharist.” So, the reason this seemingly-made-for-clickbait story wound up in the ThoughtBox was because I first heard it via word-of-mouth, and there was one significant misunderstanding I wanted to address. When I read the National Catholic Register account of this story as a follow-up to that conversation, what stood out was this: if we’re going to take Fr. Rodriguez at his word, we need to recognize that his actions had nothing to do with the woman’s appearance or with the way she was dressed. The woman was unfamiliar with the way to present herself for Communion—that was why he began asking questions. Here’s a quote from the article:
The parish’s video of the 10 a.m. Mass shows an interaction between the priest and the woman, who neither presents her hands to receive the host nor opens her mouth to receive on her tongue. The priest and the woman speak for about 45 seconds, holding up the Communion line, though their conversation can’t be heard over the music and singing.
As for the rest of the story, you’ll just have to read it.
Jonny and I have a running conversation going about shock—particularly, shock as a detrimental response to sin, our own sins, or anyone else’s. So it was fun to run across this in D.S. Carne-Ross’s The Poem of Odysseus, which introduces Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey:
“Homer takes it in his stride. He finds people too interesting to be shocked by the things they do.”
Carne-Ross’s quip, though it wasn’t really intended for a religious context, speaks to the problem with the “shock response.” Shock skips over the reality of the person and goes straight to the perceived enormity of the problem. This is an unhelpful way to respond to anyone, especially yourself.
We went to the Great Sand Dunes National Park this past weekend.4 Three days and two nights of tent camping were made possible by a cadre of Jonny’s siblings (and their associated children), who helped us carry our tiny people around the campground and the dunefield. The largest sand dunes (700-800 feet at their tallest) in North America are in Southern Colorado, of all places. Prevailing winds pick up tiny particles and carry them across the San Luis Valley. The particles drop right at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Roughly half a million years of this routine resulted in miles and miles of sand dunes, stacked right in front of a jagged mountain range. It is both odd and spectacular. It beckons, “Here, come play!”
In Reed of God, Caryll Houselander wrote,
“To children it seems perfectly natural that God’s thoughts should become snow and water and stars; and creation itself is simply His meditation on Christ.”
This weekend, because of those strange and beautiful Sand Dunes, I was reminded that in Christ’s infinite character, there is whimsy. And it is His voice calling: “Here, come play!”
The dichotomy only goes so far. Writers of all stripes use (and mix) both of these methods, and at times, they are both warranted. All I’m saying is that pyramids last longer and I want to start trending that direction.
Including my own thoughts is a tactic borrowed from the Zettelkasten method, but I wouldn’t call what I’m doing straight “Zettelkasten” either. Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method • Zettelkasten Method
Best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago. Next best time to start a commonplace book? Today.
And we may have been there at the exact same time as J.D. Flynn, but alas, no sighting.
I really love your Thought Box idea! Mine is the Google Keep version of this in which random things get copied/pasted and/or screenshotted and then I have to go on a digital treasure hunt to find them. I really *want* to have an analog version but so far that has not been very successful. But, I think the having a place to put things is maybe the key, and allowing the different things you’re reading and thinking about to sort of have their own conversations in the background. That sort of thing takes time, and I think the intention of noticing them in the first place allows the necessary idea cross talk to happen :)