Hypercompendia

Sometimes, you will read something you’ve written a while ago, a sentence, a phrase, and say, damn, that’s good. Sometimes you’re not even sure you wrote it. Where did it come from? How did you even think of it?

Even better, someone reads your work and brings up things you didn’t even see in it yourself.

Maya Zalbidea just sent me a link to a Psychoanalytical Interpretation of Blueberries which she had written up and published in Caracteres. I need to read through it again, but a quick read brought me up short. Her insight into the piece saw so much more that I myself, as author, wasn’t aware of putting into the story even as I wrote it. And now, a few years later, it makes me wonder if writing fiction in particular is done half with an awareness of writing and language skills and half with information stored in our minds through experience–often not personally our own but rather an accumulation of things we’ve seen, read about, heard about that automatically became important enough to save.

Do we make our own metaphors in our subconscious as we call these memories of information we likely would not be able to recall if asked? Is it just there and by some magical process brought to the forefront to find its way into our stories? Like the black bear as metaphor for my spouse (I suspect) that shows up in my dreams?

I’ll get more specific with this as I read Maya’s intriguing interpretation and may be able to make some links within my own mind as to the story, the characters, and my experiences. I can see very clearly how she came to her suggested conclusions by her exploration of the story. I may need to read Blueberries again to get back into that mindset, that place closer to whatever past data I must have drawn from. The pool of the mind. Fascinating.