On Beginning to Write "Conscience"

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom (20090513).

okay, now it's time to write something. this time i have no vaguest notion what i'm going to write about. i take out a book of inspiration, which is one of the ways i do this, and turn to today's reading. read it, hoarding notions as i go along, waiting for any certain word or concept to suggest itself.

1. give no offense.

uh, new email. wait. . . .​another writer commenting on writing. nothing there. bloodhoundwise, i turn my nose back to the book.

2. conscience is the eye of the soul. i like that. has a bit of pungency, of bite. if i think about this, i can do something with it. probably my hindbrain will be mulling this over as i read on.

3. obedience and law, and why do some adhere reflexively to the law, and some disregard it?

4. conscience as something with a sensitivity setting i can manually adjust. like an air conditioning thermostat, i think.

5. god does not speak with a voice like thunder.

okay. that's it, from that source. five little ideas. i think i don't really want to talk about god today; at least, i don't want to name him. so i'm looking at something involving adjusting the sensitivity of the conscience sufficiently to hear faint voices. yes, the thermostat idea somehow is important. so i write:

i come and stand before the thermostat, closely inspecting the dial.

that sounds just crummy. the folk trope 'i come and stand at every door' feels nice, but it's clunky. and i hate 'closely inspecting.' need a synonym for scrutinize. how about 'take stock of'? that sort of feels more soul-searching. but then 'dial' has to go. try again.

i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience.

yeah. let's just get it out there: 'conscience.' that's a power word. so how about the sensitivity setting? no, that's premature. ahh. . . .the law:

i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed, but am i some witless minion of thermodynamics?

see, i connect 'law' to 'physical law,' and that's an important point. why do we treat human laws as though they're to be obeyed as staunchly as the equations of gravitation? the answer obviously is mixed into the question of conscience. what connection is that?

i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed, but am i some witless minion of thermodynamics? am i not a man with a soul, with a conscience?

a pulse of recognition. this is almost Hamletesque. and i've been thinking the last few days about some of shakespeare's tricks. let's appropriate one or more for these lines. why not? let's turn this into a modern-day shakespearean soliloquy in such a way that the reader, it is to be hoped, won't notice. at this point shakespeare would insert some crisp metaphor that you wouldn't expect but that would be perfect. i did this a few days ago with this line: '. . . .faithless melanthius,/your feet and hands shorn, clots dribbling/from thine uncrowned limbs. . . .​​' worked well then; let's try again, this time with reference to the wheel of the thermostat.

i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed, but am i some witless minion of thermodynamics? am i not a man with a soul, with a conscience? my thumb on the wheel may move cogs that jog more secret structures than mortal minds can guess.

sounds terrible, of course, but that's why god wrote the first thesaurus. the thing's to get the idea down first, and then fix it. let's risk some archaism and change 'on' to ''gainst,' and 'move' becomes 'engage,' (aural reflection of 'may'). i don't want to say 'secret structures,' but suggest an intricate microscopic gear works beneath the skin of reality. microscopical aggregates? that has a feel to it. and i see now that i want to break the compound second sentence into its components to break up the flow better. it's funny, though, how the act of adjusting the a/c, if that's what my narrator is doing, has been transformed into such an introspective, philosophical endeavor. ah, 'witless minion': suddenly i like that. 'can guess' should be shortened. okay:

i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed. but am i then some witless minion of thermodynamics? am i not a man with a soul, with a conscience? my thumb 'gainst the wheel may engage cogs that jog more microscopical aggregates than mere mortal minds may muster.

lot of m's, which is okay, but i'm dismayed by two may's in this last sentence. it's not that the thumb 'may'; the thumb 'does.' but that would kill the may/engage vowel echo. no. too many m's. let's lose the 'mere' (was doubtful about it already anyway) and change the end of the line to -- i know -- an unword, like 'unriddle.' the bard would be proud. now, having perceived the dilemma of setting off a chain reaction of unknowable consequence through his casual actions, my narrator must consider the morality of the thing, clearly, which brings us back to his conscience. i return to idea number three, for i've not introduced the morality of adherence to law yet.

i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed. but am i then some witless minion of thermodynamics? am i not a man with a soul, with a conscience? my thumb 'gainst the wheel may engage cogs that jog more microscopical aggregates than mortal minds unriddle. what shall guide me? the rule of the law, or my conscience?

yes, here's hamlet up against the pins: the question put to its limit. now i need a new stanza, in which my narrator considers the nature of conscience.

i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed. but am i then some witless minion of thermodynamics? am i not a man with a soul, with a conscience? my thumb 'gainst the wheel may engage cogs that jog more microscopical aggregates than mortal minds unriddle. what shall guide me? the rule of the law, or my conscience?

conscience is the eye of the soul, the vehicle for lighting one's way through the darkness called life. no guide itself, it is an aperture through which we admit in truths and falsehoods, and how closely we adjust its sensitivity determines our moral character.

again, very crude words, but it's the bones of the notion that now require the poetic adjustment.

anyway, you see how these things go.