Here’s my idea, not a new one in terms of its approach, but an approach non the less that will certainly always produce different results. I thought I’d give it a try to see if it would stir my creative juices and hopefully result in a poetry style song.

The idea:

Select a series of random lines/sentences from randomly chosen books. Hmm, books…I’m definitely in the right place for this.

I wanted to have some kind of control for the random choices (yes, I know…random control), and needed an accomplice. Ah, Kelly Hughes, my unsuspecting victim. I had a series of questions planned and fired them at Kelly.

First, choose a category (no Kelly, not a Jeopardy category, a category of books). Then it was a series of “pick a number between”, in this order:

Choose a shelf – between 1 and 8

Choose a book – between 1 and 30

A Page – between 1 and 300

A paragraph – between 1 and 5

A line – between 1 and 15

Now, these numbers didn’t always work, so when they didn’t I picked the closest substitute. Remember…random. It’s not like I’m trying to come up with the cure for something, other than maybe writer’s block. And besides…my project, my rules.

I repeated the above process for 5 different categories (that’s all I had time for that evening), all of which I had Kelly choose, which ended up being:

• Philosophy

• Mystery

• Theology

• Medical

• Poetry

Here’s the result, word for word, no editing…that comes next. And really, the idea is not to use exact phrasing (can you say “plagiarism”) or even to use in exact order necessarily, but to spur idea flow. Anyway, the search resulted in this:

- …all the time (Current Directions In Psychological Science)

- I breathed oh so shallowly and cupped my hand over the mouthpiece.

- …to concentrate exclusively on positive law and to treat the concept…

- …practice, but find that lack of familiarity with the…

- …taught is that the human person is precious and unique.

Hmm. Well, really, the possibilities here are far reaching and this is just the beginning of this exercise. See you next time.

Time

Shallowly breathed in

And in a cup held with practiced hands

The teachings precious and thin

Marcel Desilets

May 24, 2011