What Is The Flim Flam? What Is The Jim Jam? What Is The Well? What Is The Pump?

I am both the flim flam and the jim jam.

I am both the well and the pump.

I find it curious to think about the metaphors I use to describe my thought. Flim flam from the jim jam, while a potentially meaningless gobble of phrases, actually means something to me. I think of the flim flam as the things that I end up writing down here. I create this output, these words, I externalize them, and they become the flim flam. But they come from somewhere else. They exist before I put them on these pages. They exist in my mind in some way. The flim flam is my externalized output. The jim jam is the depths of my mind. I am both the flim flam and the jim jam.

And it is interesting, because the jim jam creates the flim flam which in turn changes the jim jam. When I write, I am expressing something in the depths of me, but when I write it, I change those depths. There is a feedback loop between the jim jam and the flim flam. There is feedback loop between my thoughts and my writing.

Another interesting metaphor is that of a well and that of the pump. My creative output seems to come from somewhere beyond me. It is like there is a well filling up deep inside me. It is sitting there waiting for me, and when I work, I tap into it, I pump it up. It is like my thoughts are hidden and my consciousness, my awareness, my mindfulness, pulls them to the surface. I am both the well and the pump.

This is slightly different from the idea of the flim flam and the jim jam. But similar. In that the part of me that pulls up my thoughts from the well (my writing, my effort, my 'pump'), is different than the part of me that was able to think the things that I write (my unconscious, my emotions, my 'well'). I am both the well and the pump. I am the depths of my mind that wait to be explored. I am the awareness and the effort that attempts to pump out my thoughts. But the well metaphor doesn't do much for explaining the feedback loop between thinking and writing. Maybe I could say that pumping the well changes the well. But it doesn't work as well as the idea of the flim flam/jim jam.

I am the flim flam.

I am the jim jam.

I am the well.

I am the pump.

In February of this year I read Guy Claxton's book The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History Of The Unconscious. A very fascinating book by a potent thinker. One thing that I remember jumping out the most is his call for new metaphors. He says that it is up to us to come up with new, more adequate metaphors to describe the way thought works, to describe the way that consciousness and the unconscious interact. I like to dabble in that realm.

And I thought I'd make this metaphor explicit to my readers. The flim flam is my writing. The jim jam is the depths of me that it comes from. I am giving you my writings from my mind. I am giving you my flim flam from my jim jam.

I think when I created the blog I didn't have that in mind as much. I just thought it was funny. But I've come to attach a greater depth to it. I was walking around today and I said to myself that I was both the pump and the well. That I was both the flim flam and the jim jam. And now I have shared. Thank you.

Now I will try and get back to my bigger writing project, which I have been making some grounds on tonight.