Read and write a lot.
This is a universal advice for anybody who wants to get involved in active writing. I am not sure if I want to write a fiction but definetely I want to be capable of articulating what’s going on in my body. Specially about the so-called gut feeling.
I am fiddling a hypothesis now: the brain merely translates what the body says and it does not create any thought.

Every thinking process is done somewhere in the body, lower than the neck: the stomach or two legs or even the buttock. Let’s search for an example. A lot of people have good inspiration when they are fighting with No.2 in the john. I have never had such an experience but it does help me making my head clear. The problem is that I cannot control that by myself. I cannot hold back for long, so I can only enjoy that moment when accidentally I miss the everyday routine and have something more dramatic in the later days.

I admit the above example is very far away from a convincing one, even for me. Anyway I appreciate that we take pleasure in the act of excretion so that even in the most depressing time, we have something to enjoy. The other example – yes, what about this.. whenever I realize I am not doing what I want to do or what I care about, I sense it in my thighs or the upper right corner of the surface of my forehead. It is never inside the brain. At least I don’t feel that way.

My conclusion is that the thinking is done at the body, because the signal always comes from somewhere but inside my head. Then what does the brain do? I think the brain is just “translating” the thinking into languages. Zillions of neurons and nerve cells exist just for the sake of translation. Think of heart or kidney transplant. I read a story of a kid who suddenly started to play violin skillfully without any training – his heart was donated from a professional violinist. Now I believe in such stories. We never heard of brain transplant, have we? I bet even if the operation succeeds, it is the body’s part which dominates the personality, not the brain part. Suppose we swap the brain between Robert De Niro and the president of the United States, the latter still cannot act at all. But since his translation skill has improved, he will amuse us even more by providing much more political blunder by slipping his tongue. It’s time to embed a tiny speakerphone to his ears and let him repeat exactly what’s been read in the background.

While in Africa I experienced a couple of moments when my priviously cluttered thoughts suddenly unite together to form a coherent, independent piece of theory-like thought. Those were fantastic moments and I didn’t create the thinking in the brain. I did use it to put together the thought and translate it into languages.

In the next entry I will write about what I found out in that moment.
The title is taken from one of Yoshimoto Banana’s collection of her short stories.