Galena, Missouri: "Where life is worth livin'"
(Vanished sign on water tower during hard times)
Verbal Embellishment
Transitional Note
Vanished thinkers of the Ozarks started me out on a "right-brain" direction some sixty years ago. It has afforded a readiness to think in terms of visualizations ("archetypally" symbolic) in order to round out the "left-brain" thinkin' we're taught in school (with words as the main vehicle).
The result is holistic thought: combining the half-truths produced by words alone with the symbolic pictures needed to complete them.
Thinking in Pictures
We do it all the time. It facilitates turnin' right at an intersection, for example, without conscious deliberation. This visual capacity is furthermore an unrecognized source of information available for use to complete all our booklearnin'.*
*Carl Jung analyzed as "archetypes" the abstract images constantly streaming through our consciousness; as "building blocks" of all experience. We see them in dreams but pay decreasing attention upon "waking."
The pictures hook together symbolically into their own (unheeded) sense; comprising it seems what has been mythologically rumored as some primal "language" preceding the "articulate babble" of words.
Accordingly the following embellishment, shifting somewhat toward left-brain scholarship, is still designed mainly to "paint pictures" with ordinarily understood words. The idea is to provoke visual response as a basis for some advanced conversation -- beyond "categorical" definitions of words used as though they were reality itself.
In other words, they can settle into a realistic role as practical tools -- pointing toward the mental pictures needed to unify half-truths into a more adult method for understanding the infinitely ambiguous riddles of nature.
The big trick is that there's always more that any one-true way of interpreting the grand old riddles.
McCord
Stone County MO
October 5, 2002
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