Small mammal problems: managing the creative brain
In which I go down a musical rabbit-hole in my quest for a sustainable way to stay on top of errands without sabotaging writing or resting.
It was as if a pin had been pulled from a grenade in the jungle. There were chipmunks shrieking, everywhere. They were running in circles in the undergrowth, burrowing into the soil, and climbing the trees that lead to the sunlight canopy that is the creativity zone of my brain.
The lemurs had been sunning themselves languidly in a clearing labelled “lazy morning”. Now they darted about at the speed of vampires in Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy, teeth bared and fur a-hackling.
This is my brain on errands.
Well, this is my brain when too many errands appear urgent at once, and it decides to get stuck in “big picture, plan-everything-out, foresee-the-worst-and-prep-for-it” mode, trying to map each errand to the end, all at once, whether I want it to or not.
This is a setting best avoided, as it tends to flavour the whole day with burnt garlic.
I have long thought of my brain using small mammal metaphors. I imagine my “doing” brain, as it were, as a guinea pig. If I lay things out properly (using my strategic brain), my doing brain will patter through the maze to where I want it to go.
My metaphor for the panicked brain is discordant chipmunks running in circles, undoing one another’s efforts at fixing the simplest thing.
A few weeks ago, I experienced a startling illustration of what psychologist Daniel Kahneman described in Thinking, Fast and Slow as “priming”.1 The small mammal metaphor was on the mental back burner from earlier in the day: the guinea pigs had gone on strike, and the chipmunks had been running the circus.
As I relaxed while video-streaming an unfamiliar symphony, the piece suddenly turned into a soundtrack.
This-is-your-brain-on-errands.
The piece: Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie (written 1946-48).2 (Geek tip: the solos are more prominent and dramatic in the recording in the footnote.)
As I listened, the jungle-scene that had been playing in my brain during the day’s fevered task whack-a-moling came alive, individual instruments playing the animals. Somewhen when you are not headphoneless in a library, do consider a five-minute diversion to listen to the start (or more) of this 90-something minute symphony.
In my mind (you could start the audio now and keep reading), the symphony opens with a pair of worried tapirs blundering through the Amazon. Every so often they slow, stop, and smell.
There’s a ponderous poop of alarm. Small mammals start exchanging notes. Should we be worried? they ask.
A march of trombones announces a prowling jaguar: measured, majestic, and a little bit mean. Lemurs stretch, then raise an eyebrow, then stand stock-still, their teeth chattering, signalled by a high treble piano-crashing. Then the pounce, followed by silence.
A harp-snake glides calmly through the undergrowth.
At 4:45, all the animals LOSE THEIR MINDS.
Around 9:15, attention turns to a new-to-me instrument, the ondes Martenot. The first electronic instrument, its warbling is as eerie as it was hilarious.
I was diverted and delighted. Music had held up a mirror to the comic-book nature of my over-thinking in recent weeks - of catastrophizing potential outcomes, none of which took place.
If there’s a note-to-self buried in this story, it has three parts.
Guide the guinea pigs. Set things out so that it’s easier to do what I want to do when the time comes (papers filed, each days top priorities chosen the day before, etc.).
Let lazing lemurs lie. If there’s too much for the guinea pigs to get on with, do not ask them to multi-task. If I do, they will go and wake the lemurs, who will be really pissed off.
Listen to the chipmunks! Own to myself that I have Feelings about different things I have to do. Don’t pack all the horrors into the same day. The shrieking chipmunks had a point.
Takes and recs
Having obliquely maligned jungles and nature, here are some recommendations that celebrate them.
Between 1930 and 1945, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos composed his Bachianas Brasileiras - a nine-suite Brazilian Bach remix, if you will. The work infused classical form with Indigenous, African and Portuguese folk rhythms and melodies of popular Brazilian culture. The Bachianas, like Messiaen’s symphony, paints vivid sonic pictures by leaning into the distinctive tonal and dramatic qualities of particular instruments, telling stories that unfold and develop through their passage through instruments. There are times when I hear birds - and small mammals, naturally.
Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape is a lyrical journey through abandoned cities and battlefields, cadmium-filled lakes and sulphurous factory sites, a nuclear fallout zone, and even an island of feral cattle. Flyn shows how nature has moved in and transformed these islands of abandonment after the people left. Her message is at once stark and glimmering with hope: we may have precipitated our own endgame, but life will find a way, with or without us.
Richard Powers’s mammoth novel The Overstory lives up to the hype. The story is a tree: we start at the outer tendrils of many branches - the characters - and follow them, an episode at a time, jumping from branch to branch, and across time and space, filling in the jigsaw of the story of trees - and of the world. The prose is exemplary: elegant, with quiet gravity and beauty, unfurling a movie behind the eyes.
Bibliography
Deborah Harkness, All Souls series, Penguin Random House, 2011-2019.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Penguin Random House, 2011.
Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment, Penguin Random House, 2022.
Richard Powers, The Overstory, Norton, 2019.
Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 52-8.
My synaesthetic breakthrough came while listening to the Berliner Philharmoniker’s 2008 rendition, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. You can listen to a brief snippet of the Berlin concert for free here - or subscribe for a week, a month, or a year to gain access to their entire Digital Concert Hall (which is amazing). This is the best version I’ve heard of the symphony.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).