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A couple of days ago I was threading up my loom, listening to my Zen (similar to an iPod) which was randomly selecting tunes from my collection of classical, jazz and popular music.  It’s a great way to listen, never knowing whether the next track will be some Brahms, or Muse, or Frank Sinatra, or Sting, Malpais, Santana, Tchaikovsky, etc….  I love it!  Then you have some of the tunes running around in your head for the next few days. 

This morning, I had a couple of them popping up during my walk with Charlie, and then, out of the blue, an Elton John track (which isn’t on my Zen) of Daniel.  Just before I’d gone out on the walk, I was reading another of the articles from The Philosophers’ Magazine – Sublime Confusion – about the filmosophical view of David Lynch.  Part of it is about watching something that vaguely follows the disjointed random thinking patterns we have – at least, that’s the way I interpreted it.  It got me to thinking (as these things often do).  I wonder how we would feel about viewing something that works in a similar randomly generated way that our brains do.  Would it feel just a little crazy and hard to follow?  After all, most of what we think about, we’re not actually really conscious of thinking about.  It’s sort of just there, similar in fashion to a computer’s running things in the background, mostly hidden behind whatever else is going on, but occasionally coming forward to be seen or recognised, as when a sudden thought pops to the forefront of your mind.

In the last couple of weeks, on WeaveTech – one of the weaving yahoo chat groups that I belong to – there has been a discussion of accidental weaving, and this struck a chord with me and the film article this morning.  I love serendipity – the sudden connections or pathways that occasionally unfurl which lead you to something really exciting, or life-changing, or stop you in your tracks.  Accidental weaving can be a tool to generate ideas like that.  In fact, several people suggested randomly generated check programmes that develop stripes, checks, tartans and plaids.  For me, accidental weaving is something I engage in a lot.  I can be pootling along, working on one particular technique or development, when all of a sudden, a completely tangential thought elbows its way in, demanding to be heard that can lead to a whole new path of investigation and experiment. 

Our minds are largely randomly-generated thoughts anyway, aren’t they?  Or is it only mine?????  I don’t believe that for one minute!  When we suddenly become aware of something that we’re thinking, that’s usually because it has come up with an association of ideas, juxtaposing ideas that suddenly have a relevance for us.  But what would it be like to experience someone else’s random mind patterns through watching a film produced in this way?  Perplexing?  Interesting?  Frustrating?  Fun?  I guess we’ll have to watch David Lynch’s output to see how it develops.  It led to today’s random ruminations anyway!