What is Purposeful Groping?

Sometimes, an awkward translation is all you need to house some knowledge there hadn't been words for. It will always be just barely adequate yet completely inalterable to the person who latches on to the translation and the concept. I've latched on to this, from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget:


"...here is a series of observations beginning with those most reminiscent of the discoveries due to directed groping. It happens that the same problem, such as that of the stick to be brought through the bars, can give rise to solutions through real invention as well as to solutions involving simple experimental groping"
(The Essential Piaget, 235).

I wish I was better at "real invention." Real invention has been a lifelong goal of mine. Scratch that: real invention, or the ideal of real invention, has been a stick striking my backside since I first imagined I could make things with words as a way of being in the world, or (in other moods) of not having to be in the world and delegating that to the word-things I made. They could be my surrogates! Out there like paper dolls, or children, or robots, remotely controlled.

As it is, simple experimental groping seems to be my dominant mode, and I don't think that will change much. It is not necessarily a point of pride to recognize, at mid-life, that I have not been as in control of my life path as I thought I was. But it is not a tragic recognition scene, either. Considering that, for the past 25 years, I've been teaching creative writers to let go of conscious control, or real invention, in order to make better, more magical, writing possible, it makes a certain kind of sense that art and life share that "let's see what happens" quality for me. Who I am and who I am not have become more apparent to me in the past few years, and now I seem able to look at what I see, touch what presents itself to my groping. The thing about groping is I have to be there, with it; that's the purposeful part. Because, like any good subject (Piagetian or other), I need observers to be there with it, with me, I'm going to blog every so often. Or that's what I'm trying to do, anyway.