Before there was Lichtenbergianism

I’ve been reading back through 20 years of blog posts over at dalelyles.com, my personal blog, and I’m way back in the mid-2000s at the moment.

What has struck me about the posts about whatever creative project I was working on at the time is the unmistakable presence of what we might call proto-Lichtenbergianism. The concepts of ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS and others that eventually became the Precepts are everywhere.

Somehow I had created this myth about my having just whiz-banged the Precepts out of my head into a slide deck for that student seminar in 2013, like some kind of divine inspiration. I should have known better. My only excuse is that obviously those Precepts had been percolating in my brain for quite a while, even before the formation of the Lichtenbergian Society in 2007, and when I had to have something visual for the seminar, they obligingly swam to the surface for retrieval.

Do I have a point? Not really, just a musing. But it probably bears mentioning that you ought to pay attention to your process, your RITUAL, and to make your observations explicit and concrete. Note what stops your flow; note what happens when you walk away and come back; note what happens when that shinyperfect shows up. Remember it. Use it.