Zap to Zero D-1 | Thought Compiler
Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself.I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer, in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life, a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on. Like the world-evolution, it is endless. It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself. It is this quality about all art which gives it a metaphysical hue, which lifts it out of time and space and centers or integrates it to the whole cosmic process. It is this about art which is ‘therapeutic’: significance, purposefulness, infinitude.From the very beginning almost I was deeply aware that there is no goal. I never hope to embrace the whole, but merely to give in each separate fragment, each work, the feeling of the whole as I go on, because I am digging deeper and deeper into life, digging deeper and deeper into past and future. With the endless burrowing a certitude develops which is greater than faith or belief. I become more and more indifferent to my fate, as writer, and more and more certain of my destiny as a man.
— Henry Miller, Henry Miller on Writing
Hey you! Hey! You! That's right you stupid kraut bastards! That's right! Say hello to Ford and General fucking Motors! You stupid fascist pigs, look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking?! Dragging our asses halfway around the world—interrupting our lives—for what?! You ignorant servile scum, what the fuck are we doing here?!
See also: How Ice Cream Helped America at War
In 1942, as Japanese torpedoes slowly sank the U.S.S. Lexington, then the second-largest aircraft carrier in the Navy’s arsenal, the crew abandoned ship—but not before breaking into the freezer and eating all the ice cream. Survivors describe scooping ice cream into their helmets and licking them clean before lowering themselves into the Pacific. By 1943, American heavy-bomber crews figured out they could make ice cream over enemy territory by strapping buckets of mix to the rear gunner’s compartment before missions. By the time they landed, the custard would have frozen at altitude and been churned smooth by engine vibrations and turbulence—if not machine-gun fire and midair explosions. Soldiers on the ground reported mixing snow and melted chocolate bars in helmets to improvise a chocolate sorbet.
It's relieving and motivating to know that in my situation, I am definitely my own worst enemy. And this doesn't have to be a problem if I am in control and not my enemy. Unlike all these years before, I not only know but also experience that I am my own savior. I don't have to work against my own nature. In fact, the only way to "salvation" is probably to work with it.
However, I wonder if it's possible to take too much inspiration from war time stories. I have never been in combat (and hopefully never have to be) so no matter how "inspired", "intrigued" or whatever the right word is for why I am so ... "interested", I know it will always feel incomplete and can never be a replacement for "the real thing". All I can do is to soak up as much information as I can to ever so slightly get closer to understand what it must be like to be or have been in combat and develop an irreplaceable bond with your squad, platoon or even company (200 soldiers) and battalion (1k soldiers)1. A bond so strong that you would rather go back to the front line and face death on a regular basis than to continue life as a civilian and face survivor's guilt.
I also have to admit that it feels a little weird to share so much from Band of Brothers and The Pacific as if I got inspired the most by them. They are very well-made series that I strongly recommend anyone to watch but they don't replace reading books from veterans. And searching for specific scenes that augment what I want to write about is a lot easier than finding the pages in which something I vaguely remember are described in excruciating detail.2 So far, I have only read Chickenhawk from Robert Mason and With the Old Breed from Eugene B. Sledge but both books have changed me in profound ways. I started reading Heart of Darkness today which isn't a novel about war but the movie Apocalypse Now is "is loosely based on the 1899 novella [...] with the setting changed from late 19th-century Congo to the Vietnam War."3
Heart of Darkness examines the horrors of Western colonialism, depicting it as a phenomenon that tarnishes not only the lands and peoples it exploits but also those in the West who advance it. Although garnering an initially lacklustre reception, Conrad’s semiautobiographical tale has gone on to become one of the most widely analyzed works of English literature. Critics have not always treated Heart of Darkness favourably, rebuking its dehumanizing representation of colonized peoples and its dismissive treatment of women. Nonetheless, Heart of Darkness has endured, and today it stands as a Modernist masterpiece directly engaged with postcolonial realities.
Compiler a computer program that translates an entire set of instructions written in a higher-level symbolic language (such as C) into machine language before the instructions can be executed
— Merriam-Webster, Compiler
Thought Compiler The act or process of compiling (looping) thoughts into a text with a start and ending; for example to analyze and free oneself of them.
— me, Thought Compiler
Guess I am entering a (writer?) phase (?) where you need to make up new words for what you want to write about.
Yesterday, I started with H4L as recommended by @elvismercury here. I think I failed since I actually just wrote down bullet points about my day but I didn't really focus on the story part. But I think today's story could be this: I've seen a pigeon with a white spot on the head. It looked like another pigeon emptied its bowels on the head of that pigeon.4 Oh, the irony. But that pigeon didn't care. But maybe it did care (assuming that's even true and wasn't just a white spot, nothing more) but what could it do? Why care about things you can't control? Or what could a pigeon do? Do pigeon take baths?5
I also started with partitioning my day into four sections à 4 hours: 8-12, 12-16, 16-20, 16-24.
This should give me a better sense of time so I can focus more easily6. If I know I only have 4 hours per task per day, I feel some pressure to get things done since I don't want to be the guy that didn't finish a task in 4 hours that should probably only take 15 minutes. This immediately brings up the question if it wouldn't be smarter to have more but smaller partitions for maximum pressure then? That's a good question but I have no definitive answer to that yet (and I am not sure I will ever). Or the answer is in the question: I would say that unfortunately, I work well under pressure—at least when it's not for longer periods of time—but I don't like it.
I also think that four partitions is easy to handle (less mental overhead) and I want to only use these partitions for "major tasks" that can take multiple hours (like writing this post) anyway. And I think after 4 hours—assuming you did indeed focus—, you should probably take a break from whatever you do and however deep you were into it anyway.
I got the inspiration for this by thinking more about how computers work and what I can learn and apply from them for my own organization—basically reusing all the engineering work we put into computers since at least Margaret Hamilton:
Margaret Hamilton in 1969 standing next to listings of the software she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo project
When I first came up with the term, no one had heard of it before, at least in our world. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. It was a memorable day when one of the most respected hardware gurus explained to everyone in a meeting that he agreed with me that the process of building software should also be considered an engineering discipline, just like with hardware. Not because of his acceptance of the new 'term' per se, but because we had earned his and the acceptance of the others in the room as being in an engineering field in its own right.
— Wikipedia, Legacy of Margaret Hamilton
Song of the Day
Somewhere out there in the vast nothingness of space... Somewhere far away in space and time.. Staring upwards at the gleaming stars in the obsidian skyWe're marooned on a small island, In an endless sea, Confined to a tiny spit of sand, Unable to escapeBut tonight, on this small planet On earth, we're going to rock civilization
Footnotes
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If you are as confused as I initially was about the differences between platoons, companies, battalions, regiments etc. is, here's the official link for how the individual service branches are organized. You can tell it a site from the federal government by setting new bars for worst UX. ↩
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However, I certainly remember mental imagery from paragraphs I read. For example, in With the Old Breed on which The Pacific is based on, Eugene Sledge mentions a war photographer that didn't listen to him that the vehicle on fire that he is taking photos of is about to explode since it's full of ammunition and he should thus take cover like the rest of the platoon. Just seconds after, the vehicle exploded and that photographer was blown away with fortunately no major injuries. ↩
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Wikipedia, Apocalypse Now ↩
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While writing this, I wish I had taken a picture. It really looked hilarious. ↩
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The last partition is actually for leisure time like playing piano, reading a book or maybe even playing games like Factorio in the future. ↩