Curtis WestbaySome people have minds who wander. Or do they wonder? Both? In this style of brainstorming, lean into it. Indulge your attention deficit. Let your mind go where it goes and document the journey in written form. Where is your mind? There’s something to focusing on what preoccupies you.
I don’t know if I can describe to someone, step by step, how to follow a stream of consciousness, but I can show you. For me, right now, I am preoccupied by linguistic differences between Latin, Attic Greek, English, and Chinese (I may or may not have a lesson to plan for this afternoon). In Latin, there are six verbal tenses. In Chinese, so far as I know, there is only one. Adverbs and modifying words help a listener or reader understand when the action of a sentence is taking place. In English, ironically, I don’t know exactly how many verbal tenses an English teacher might say there are. If I try to enumerate them, I think I could: present, past, future... but then, do we count past progressive and simple past as different tenses, or are they just different ways of expressing the past tense? In Latin, there are three different ways to show action in the past via a verb: the imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect tenses. Even so, when translating them into English, the imperfect tense, for example, could be translated as “was [verb]ing” or “used to [verb]” or even, when the intent is clear, “[verb]ed.”
Then there’s Greek. In Greek, there’s the aorist verbal tense, which is like simple past tense in English. I wonder if the Romans were embarrassed about the lack of the aorist verbal tense in their own language, the way they must have been embarrassed to not have a future passive participle like the ancient Greek language does.
Language is super interesting to me. How we bridge the gaps between languages (via translation) is interesting to me, even though I can’t personally translate much of anything important (unless my time machine starts working and I can head back 2,000 years to Classical Antiquity... but even then, it’s a time machine, not a physical transportation device. I think. If I were transported back in time, could I only transcend time with this miracle device, but not place? If so, how would I get to the Italian peninsula, where my previously limited use of Latin could be made quotidian?)
If I set my time machine back 3,500 years, I doubt my Latin would be useful at all, unless there were some very rudimentary phrases I could piece together from the proto-Latin that I might hear the Etruscans uttering in modern-day Italy. Still, who wants to stay in Italy when things could be interesting further east, where the Mycenaeans and Minoans and Hittites and Akkadians and Babylonians and Canaanites and Egyptians and Mitannians are flourishing. Of course, for them, Akkadian would be the language that bridges divides. I wonder how they’ll feel about distinctions among the past tense. Does a dearth of a written record (at least one accessible to most people in largely pre-literate societies) lead to a linguistic disregard for or preoccupation with the past? If the Greeks are any indication, I would suppose it’s the latter.
In high school, it would pique my interest to hear where words came from. The love for history didn’t accompany this interest, though. I’m what someone might call a philologist, which etymologically means a love of learning, but now it means someone who studies the origins of words. I’ve never been too interested in visualizing the histories of the places and people who birthed these words that fascinate me so much. But the other day, I saw something really interesting. I know that Google Translate works (more or less). But I saw someone make two columns in a Google Doc, the first containing words of one language and the second with a simple Excel formula: “=GOOGLETRANSLATE(A1, “English”, “Spanish” )”... then, as I’ve done hundreds of times, the user just dragged the formula down to fit the length of the adjacent column, instantly translating hundreds of words.
The past and present have seen consistent industry for those who could translate (i.e. carry one language across to someone else, as “trans” means “across” in Latin, and “late” comes from “fero, ferre, tuli, latus” meaning “to carry”). What might the future bring? Could we be on the verge of apps that surpass persons as translators? What about local dialect and pronunciation differences? How long might it be before my phone knows more about translating from Latin to English than do I, if it doesn’t already?
That’s 10 minutes! In Stream of Consciousness brainstorming, you have no goal. You have no objective or target. Just set a clock and let your mind go. In these words, you (and a counselor) can find personality, interest, obsession, and principle. Sometimes, when you’re trying to do something really important (like write a personal statement), the best thing to do is stop trying so hard. When you have something interesting in your mind, put it to paper and build from there.