The blank page. The empty chairs.

What is a crystalisation of the mind?

The gaseous, evanescent process that is thinking, is entirely internal. I don’t have to worry about the incoherence of my thoughts if I don’t have to communicate them with anyone. But the moment I write, I create the first molecular bond: a dynamic of relations. Me and you.

You could be a stranger, you could be a friend. In the future, you could be me.

Do I know more than you? Do you find me interesting? Given that I aim to publish this on my obscure personal website, I have no audience in mind. Even if there are people who know me well enough to find this, I don’t want to think of them for whatever subconcious self-censoring that would effect.

So for whom do I write and why?

At the very least, I must write for me. Because it reifies a thought process that I can reference later. At any point in time if prompted, I can express a collection of opinions vaguely informed by whichever facts and feelings I have at hand. But it is a molten mantle, constantly recycling material between the subconscious and surface - a billowing cloud of recently listened-to podcasts, articles and memories. If I return to the subject at a later date, some new composition of intellectual priorities will shape how I express myself - in talking about veganism this time, will I frame it emotionally? Will I focus on climate science? Will I be activistic? - and so, to push this metaphor to its absolute limits, writing is ejecting lava from my mind and letting it set.

It preserves a set of decisions, a traceable line of reasoning, a crystal of beliefs that I can begin to commit to long term memory. In that way, writing is not about determining what I think, it’s about determining what I want to think I think. In another way it’s like a savepoint in a videogame.

The easy part is writing paragraphs of the lightly edited thoughts that breeze through my brain. The hard part is picking which of them I want to remember - is this paragraph important to my imagined audience’s understanding? Without knowing anything about them, it’s hard to decide.

But at the very least, once it’s all sprawled out, I can revise the document till it’s coherent for someone and save it. Then the next time I think about subject X, I will be able to recall the vagaries of this process and present them. In this way, an identity is formed for myself and for you.