Habits, Consciousness, Poetry, and streaming consciousness between it all

I took a (minor) poetry class with my pal Delray, who is cited sometimes on this bloggo. The class was rustic, strange and awkward and it didn't cost us anything. It was taught by Professor Scanlon from Lemoyne University (in Syracuse).

It has been said that modern philosophy is either poetry or grammar. This refers to the analytic/continental divide because analytic goes by grammar and the assessment of language as a portal to real Truth; and continental explores reality in an essay-style. But there's more interchange than that.

Poetry is supercharged language, and people are trying to be honest when they can. Something strange happens, often: when "being honest" people play to the camera. Cue in your favorite memory of bad poetry. Usually we associate bad poetry with the teenager who complains about how terrible her life is. Give me a break! we all say. In psychology, the name of this is the Hawthorne effect, that considering surveillance changes behavior. In other words, you will act differently in front of the camera.

I read a Men's health where they presented this as a good thing. They called this the Awareness effect. It might be said that Eckart Tolle's Spiritual philosophy is merely the Awareness effect applied to life constantly. I just lost The Game. Once you are aware of an effect, you change your behavior about that effect.

What I learned in David Kessler's The End of Overeating, and from subsequent conversations with my friend Mike Bennett, is that we have habits and that many times that's a great thing.

There are things that some instrumental musicians cannot do which jazz musicians can do while improvising. This applies because the jazz musicians are working as a sort of habitual newness. Meanwhile, when the instrumental musician plays, she doesn't think, "this is a note, this is a note, this is a note"; or even "F#, G#, C#," there's a point where consciousness or subconsciousness and habitual consciousness blur.

Same goes for us, when we do something like tie our shoes, we never say in our streams of consciusness, "Bunny goes through the loop," or "Right string over left string," and on and on and on.