Thought bubbles

Thoughts are a tricky thing to pin down. How much does a thought weigh? Can thoughts be found under the bed? In comics, they sit within clouds as if they live in the heavens. They don’t take up any space or posses any physical body so when someone ‘gathers their thoughts’ something between the dimensionless and the solid must be happening. To collect your thoughts, you first have to convert them into something physical. It could be a voice recording, a journal, a drawing, a video. More often than not, it takes all forms of documentation to collect thoughts effectively (and why cinema is our most powerful medium).

This is because thoughts exist first as non-physical abstractions. They don’t exist as words or images alone despite how visceral they feel. Thoughts may occupy a metaphysical space closer to our soul than our synapse. Even our most primitive sense, smell, occupies space when we harness it. So for thoughts to be collected there must be a transformation. Though even transformation doesn’t describe what’s happening properly. For something to transform, there’s an origin. For translation, there’s a likeness in form. For conversion, there’s a formula to relay it. Instead, collecting your thoughts takes conjuration. Conjuration is to summon into existence and that’s exactly what it takes.

It’s a historical magick that takes place when you gather your thoughts. Once that’s happened, you can share the bounty with someone else and have the words, pictures, sounds, conjure the same thought in their own head.

Like all things magical its not an exact science. People will transfigure your thoughts in their own manner. The duplication of your thoughts will be different. To make conjuration worthwhile, the gathering has to focus on the right essence. Something Plato was obsessed with is the essence– true essence. Words can’t be that. They’re a spell (re: spelling) being cast every time they’re read. For someone more adept in collecting thoughts they can even compel someone to act. This is why politicians and advertisers are actors of dark magic. Dark magic here being the supernatural used for nefarious reasons— the nefarious reason being to control others beyond consent. Did you want to buy that new thing before being compelled to do so?

My favorite place where we dwell in the unreal of thoughts is animation. Think about Winnie the Pooh’s best friend: Tigger. Can you imagine his coiled tail bouncing around the screen? That never really happened, nor did it ever exist. Animations are separate and distinct drawings, flashed together in a sequence to bring to life. To animate is quite literally Latin for ‘bring to life’. Tigger is a living soul within our thoughts but never bounced around our dimensional world. As all our thoughts, bouncing around our minds, we have to decide what to do with them. Collecting them is a double-edged sword. You could collect them to make space for new thoughts but unknowingly diminish their power. A Buddhist might suggest letting them pass, a decision that would leave the physical world unaffected by their existence but leave us without evidence they ever existed.

A few days ago my beloved and I were debating the fate of a vintage magazine in our collection. Two mimes from San Francisco conjured their own thoughts into a children’s magazine intended to be cut up and played with as cards and posters. She wanted to embrace the magazine’s spirit and enjoy the activities laid out in the magazine. I wanted to conserve the magazine in the hopes of someone another sixty years from now enjoying it as we did. In retrospect, both options render the magazine a thought. Either it exists as a thought of our own, or is forgotten about for some imaginary audience in the future. Both scenarios leave the book in a purgatory of thought, waiting for the author’s commands to be fulfilled and transfigured into play. Applying this to our own works, perhaps its better they exist first physically as art first before deciding their fate.