Three Voices
Before this devolved into a Marathon / Resolutions / Sundance blog, people used to ask how I decided what to write about. The true and incomplete answer I would give was that writing is my way of getting tired thoughts out of my head. However brilliant an idea seems when it first comes to me, it will become boring if I let myself keep thinking it. There’s something about writing, like finally listening to that catchy song, that unsticks things from my mind. Thinking that thought which was an indulgence becomes a chore. I associate it with really having to get that essay finished. Once it’s done, it’s a relief to not have to think about it. If it’s too personal, I write it in a journal. Otherwise, it goes in the blog.
Usually that satisfied people. If they kept asking, I would talk about how, with a regular writing practice, you seem to have more thoughts. Ideally, if you’re clearing out old thoughts, you’re making room for new ones rather than keeping an empty mind. Or the same number of thoughts are more often directly followed by, “I could write about that!”
If they really kept pressing, which thankfully no one did, I’d be forced to talk about how it feels for thoughts to enter my mind. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time, and I may as well get ahead of it. My thoughts come from 3 voices in my head. Don’t worry. I have many more than 3. There’s the voice inserting dry remarks in all dialogue, the one singing a show tune, the one repeating, “oh no”, the one constantly taunting me by repeating words that sound cool that I don’t know the meanings of (adiabatic, peristalsis, and, most recently, Antofagasta), and plenty more. It’s just the 3 that contribute to the writing.
The first voice wears a neutral, unreadable expression and never speaks. If not the official leader of the 3, it holds the most power. One consequence of silence is that you answer to no one.
The second voice is a little lord. A philosopher king in the most pejorative way. It spews theses and declarations. Not all the time but at its leisure, usually while out on a brisk walk. It brings me such thoughts as, “living in a bigger city is like using a bigger dictionary" and “tactics and positional chess correspond directly to calculation and heuristics”, but also, “I can’t believe it’s impossible to read in the pitch dark.” It’s not concerned with truth so much as feeling right and enlightened. And yet it has such confidence that it doesn’t even stop to be awed by its own epiphany. It plows on through. It’s a good bet that any too-clever phrases are second voice verbatim. If it wasn’t clear, it was the second voice that pointed out the existence of the first.
The third voice is the yes man, tasked with the thankless job of justifying everything the second voice claims. A job it regards with the appropriate lack of respect, mostly rushing through to get back to its preferred pastime as my stream of consciousness. When I talk about getting tired of thoughts, it’s the third voice who’s really getting worn out being forced to explain things over and over. The second voice is content to repeat itself without loss of enthusiasm.
The third voice’s boss may be the second voice, but all its attention, respect, and, tragically, never-to-be-requited love are directed toward the first voice. The whole time it’s explaining why we learned about Stoicism too young, its little Peter Lorre eyes are shifting over to the stone-faced first voice for any validation or even acknowledgment. Seeing none, of course, it hallucinates a theory of mind based solely on the quality of the claim and the strength of its own argument.
Oftentimes, the second voice spews nonsense like, “I bet you could fit infinitely many roller skates in that van” (it has a weird problem with scale and limits). The third voice doesn’t usually bother with these. If it looks at the first voice at all, it’s only to roll its eyes. If a second voice decree is too trivial or trite, the third voice will start justifying it (that’s the job) but get bored halfway through and wonder why it’s even bothering.
In the best case, the second voice makes an interesting point, and the third voice has the wherewithal to justify it in the warm glow of perceived approval from the first voice. These are the thoughts that eventually turn into blog posts which I simply transcribe and then forget about.