It is an interesting question as to what actually constitutes “thinking”.
For some time now I have been puzzling over the possible title of a piece. This has not been troubling me much because until I have to exhibit it nobody needs to know. Now that I am making preparations to put it up for show, however, I have to make a decision.
The trouble is that, from the point of view of its subject-matter it kind of hovers between two groups of pictures. I believe that I have mentioned on several occasions in this blog my evolving “Beyond” series. In many respects it is not out of place there. Its subject, however, places it firmly within my “Malta Suite”, and in that case I have used references to the poetry of T.S. Eliot (particularly The Waste Land) as a source of suitable phrases. I spent a good part of the afternoon re-reading Eliot in order to see whether there was some additional image in his work from which I could borrow a phrase, but without success.
After some time I decided that I had to postpone the task, and I went off to do some other things, especially cooking the dinner, but while that was cooking I sat and read (a book review about a new work on globalisation …. so a very long way from Eliot.) I had nearly finished my preparation of the meal, and was about to summon my wife to the table, when out of the blue I had a sudden inspiration for my missing title. I will call it, “Beyond The Waste Land “, which is absolutely right at so many different levels.
It does seem that while my conscious thought-processes were entirely elsewhere something had been going on in my head that could be described in some sense as “thinking”. We do tend to talk about “thought” as if it has to be going on at a conscious level, but repeatedly in connection with creative processes I come back to the point of questioning this. At the risk of boring repetition I want to suggest that what we are dealing with here is a distinctive characteristic of “right-brain” thinking. (I’ll have to think about it!)