I am a master of the unfinished.
This blog spends most of its day half done, with frequent breaks; there are half-read books on my shelf and half-written shopping lists on pretty heart-shaped post-it notes in a half-cleared box of sundry stuff waiting to be distributed.
Because activities are often suspended mid-play, usually to do something completely different.
Suspense of an activity is something we all do to a greater or lesser extent; and one psychologist and psychiatrist has come up with concrete research which proves it can be beneficial.
Bluma Zeigarnik graduated from Berlin University in 1927; and went on to study under Kurt Lewin.
He watched waiters as they served in restaurants. It appeared that as long as orders were open and incomplete, they remembered them perfectly.
But the moment the order was closed, they could not relate the order back with anywhere near the same accuracy.
And so was born the Zeigarnik effect. It works like this: tasks that are unfinished are held in our short-term memory. And that means we deal with them by rehearsing them over and over again. If we don’t, they disappear into a rather cavernous ether.
Her work seems to suggest that those who suspend a cerebral activity…blogging, for example….and go to do something completely different, will remember what they have been thinking about with much greater success.
So: suspense is good.
Psychologists have thought a lot about suspense; that delaying of the final conclusion to an issue. Storytellers have used it to their advantage for millennia, and film makers since the early days of Hollywood. But some have spotted something strange about how we deal with suspense in a nail-biting thriller.
Because even if we have seen Psycho before, we still jump six feet in the air at the shower scene. Our hearts pump just as fast the second time we watch Glenn Close, inanimate in a bath of water, sit up; or witness the boiling bunny in Fatal Attraction.
We might know the end, but we are still in suspense.
Why?
It’s a puzzlement.
Today I read a story which was as boys own and gung-ho as they come. It was a perfect lesson in suspense: the delay of the conclusion of an incident to create maximum effect.
And it comes courtesy of a creature I have adored for some considerable time.
I first espied a tapir as I strolled around a British zoo. The animals were limited and restless and I felt sad, especially for the dusty elephants in a small enclosure up on the hill of the estate attached to a Jacobean mansion.
As we trotted towards the maze and gardens for a little light relief, we walked past a long bendy-nosed prehistoric creature with such an air of affable gentility, I stopped to gawp.
The little tapir was just nosing round, seeming fairly happy with its lot. It exuded contentment with the universe. It was love at first sight for me.
After a chance sighting in an encyclopedia the other day, I began to research the gentle tapir. Perfectly equipped for its environment, they are the height of a large dog and feed on vegetation, beating tapir-tracks through the forests of South America. They have a flexible nose which can grab some succulent fruit or strip a branch of leaves. They can run fast at the first sign of a predator and submerge themselves in water.
Totally. Adorable.
And then I checked out cultural references and found that this little chap eats dreams, according to Japanese fairy tales. A dream-eater: fodder for the most winsome of posts.
Unless you believe the true-life tale of one of America’s most colourful.
Texan animal hunter and collector Frank Buck had many strings to his bow. In 1911 he had a most advantageous win at poker and travelled for 18 years collecting animals. Eventually, someone suggested he wrote about it: and thus was born ‘Bring ‘Em Back Alive’.
The tales of his adventures, dubious as we might brand them today, were a runaway success. And in among the tales was one about a tapir. The full account is here. Buck, too, is utterly enchanted by the gentle tapir. And whatever we think of his methods, he can sure write.
He suspends us there, in the little pen where he keeps the placid tapir. We know instinctively that his pen-portrait is far too good to be true. We remain suspended, waiting for what must happen.
When it comes, it is swift and horrific. Buck rubs stinging antiseptic ointment onto wounds on the animal’s back and it turns on him.
He describes his thought processes as he is knocked to the floor and brutalised by the hooves of the creature, unable to get up as, inexplicably, it seems to become heavier. And then, the tapir opens its mouth, just inches from his face, to reveal formidable teeth which could do irreparable damage. he says that the animal had murder in its heart and hate in its eyes.
Even writing about it again, that paradox of suspense makes itself evident and the heart beats faster. Somehow, somewhere in my mind and physiognomy, this is still unfinished business, and will continue to be, with every reading.
This amazing photo is courtesy of scoop102, whose flickr stream you will find here
Kate Shrewsday 
i think i have too many things in suspense, i can no longer remember them all at will
Me too 🙂
Adorable critter 🙂
Isn’t he lovely?
I don’t know what he is, but he’s almost as cute as Macaulay.
I’ll probably know what he is after I’ve had time to read the post.
😀 Hope you’re well, Kathy, and have received from that sunburn!!!!
You are so right: ‘The Village’ and ‘Signs’ still scare the heck out of me after many viewings.
I write 2-3 posts a day and I have no trouble remembering them while they’re unfinished but when I get comments in my inbox, I have to go back to my blog to see what they’re referring to because I can never remember what I’ve published.
Fascinating 🙂
It is a part of the blogger’s armoury, the unfinished post, isn’t it, Tilly?
A tapir youngster is unusually different, with a lovely stripy pattern!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/5099657/Animal-pictures-of-the-week-3-April-2009.html?image=3
I to butterfly myself around the day, flitting from job to job: sometime advantageously, sometimes not. It would be interesting to see the male / female difference here.
Wouldn’t it? I had never considered the gender issue here. Phil hates leaving tasks unfinished.
Aha! I am the master of the unfinished. Well, no, not really. My husband is the master at the unfinished. I am St. Penelope the Procrastinator. Like your post here. I read it at 1 am, went to bed, and finally am commenting on it now.
I do that too 🙂 I love the Master of the Unfinished and St Penelope the Procrastinator. Sounds like one of those Marvel comics I used to love so much when I was young !
If only I were given a dollar for every item on my “To Do” list…..
Love your blogs! 🙂
Hi Jennifer 🙂 Thanks for coming over to take a look! I have not used to-do lists for rather a long time….they became comically long…
I recall once putting my hand in with a Tapir, and allowing it to gently lick my fingers. If I’d known that it could have taken my hand off…! I did it with ring-tailed lemurs too. But I thought twice about allowing the spectacled bears loose on my digits.
Probably best, with their fearsome reputation 😀 The Tapir’s Mild Mannered Janitor look fools most of us most of the time.
But he’s Hong Kong Phooey underneath.
Hong Kong Phooey – all talk, and no trousers.
very true. And while the tapir does not wear trousers his teeth speak volumes 😀
Hah! What did those psychologists know that my Dad didn’t figure out for himself? Only he called it “Back Burnering.” Leave what you’re doing and having trouble finishing, get busy on something else, while what you were trying to think of simmers on the back burner of your mind, without even being aware of it! Go back to the task left behind, and boom! There is the answer before you! Works every time!
Your Dad was a clever man, Paula 🙂 Back burnering. I’ll remember that.
That tapir is adorable . . . especially at that angle.
I read the story by Frank Buck. Wow! What an experience and what a marvelously told tale. He’s a fine writer. Glad that he and the “meek” Tapir both survived the experience.
With me, it depends on the task.
While involved in a jury trial, every fact remained at my finger tips. Once a trial was over and I began working on the next . . . the board/slate was “wiped clean.” Just like an Etch-A-Sketch. 😀
Also, sometimes I go back and read something I wrote a year or two ago with mouth agape, I wrote that?!
The link to scoop102 took me back to Buck’s story, not to the flicker stream.
Whoops! And such a great photographer too! I’l put that right, thanks Nancy.
That happens to you too? The number of times I have been flummoxed by what I wrote. And your trial experiences are really interesting – I’d never thought of it being applicable in that context.
How can anyone take a creature with a face like that seriously? Therein lies the danger…
Quite 😀
Really interesting about things unfinished… but I’m often anxious to remember what I was going to say if I get interrupted and, unless I write it down, I forget!
I know what you mean, Earlybird! When I was a head teacher walking from one end of the school to the other was a challenge, because so many conversations were started along the way and so few finished…
I had forgotten all about the tapir (studied in a vert bio class back in the day). What I love more, however, is your life undone as my in always in a state of unrest. It tis curious what you write; for me, completed poems escape my memory completely unless they were composed on a walk or jog and later set to paper ~
Strange, isn’t it, Angela? I’m like that too. I can forget whole posts once they’re written 😀