As usual, your missive kicked off a longish train of thought, some stretches more coherent but all interesting to (a) think and (b) record on the yellow pads that seem to follow me around these days. What follows is a more-or-less transcript of the morning's gatherings, written down as contributions to a long dated series of pensees and bits of commonplace text. There's also the perspective of the fascinating-to-self focus that comes from cannabis, and may be intransitive.

When I start to write, the words and phrases often simply APPEAR, slightly subvocalized but not taken down as if dictation from the inner Homunculus --in fact, rather read aloud TO the Homunculus once written, to get the expression, the sense, just right, and then to be launched upon the next train-of-thought segment. And I find myself yet again in the Mantra of the Writing movement: How can I know what I think until I see what I say?

And then there's the rather frequent experience of waking up with a word or a phrase which, if written down before it fades, may ignite and inspire a morning's exploration of something. Happens a lot, and very productively.

Where that waking thought comes from, and what in the awake mind RECOGNIZES and send to Memory that little package of Information certainly isn't clear at all. Once I'm awake, the faculty of NARRATION is awake too, and is entirely willing to go out for a run, or just to spend some quality imagining-time, or merely mutter in the background while the rest of the organism is performing the needful [...emptying the dishwasher...].

So the habit of writing, where the audience is oneself [and perhaps one's future self], is both a pleasure to do and a joy to look back on --to see how a stimulus or an idea or a question unfolds over time, and when one encountered this fact or that author and was inspired to note the fact... There's a sequence, a history, to such unfoldings, and the yellow pad is one of several media I seem to keep going [others include the blog, Moleskines, various purposive journals, etc.]

And why? Well to Keep the Mind Alive, but really because it's a pleasurable and constructive thing to do, and one I've been doing more or less all my life ... to no particular effect, outside my own purposes and enjoyment. But it's What One Does, and there are scores of journals in the barn and text snippets on computers and stuff in file folders...

And one knows one is Narrating, that there's a quasi-coherent STORY or TALE or FABLE emerging, but it's surely not LINEAR, or very rarely so, and is very likely to be shanghai'd by the TANGENTIAL's Siren Songs. 

The image of popping up of ephemeral bubbles, which then may be subject to Darwinian Evolution, either becoming (as you say) self-sustaining, or recycling the atoms into the common pool... I wonder if playing music in the ways I do isn't pretty much just that, a matter of coagulating ephemera that I sometimes try to write down what's arising as I play and listen.

It's the Tangential that's frequently been my downfall: being attracted to something else while working on a project. But I know I do that, and don't let it upset me, making note perhaps of the diversion on that yellow pad, and following my friend Hutch's advice to "Hang 10"

The thing about everything changing when one looks at it: pure Quantum. "and when you pay attention to it, it changes or appears [to?] so it's hard to remember whether it was present in the past..."

(at that point, drawn off into a piece from the Harvard Divinity School https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2021/10/27/fantastic-faiths-and-what-we-can-learn-them in the context of an invitation to watch Dune tomorrow with our Convivium buddies... which drew me into exploring the Gnostic tendency (and the heterodox) in all world religions that I can think of, then into wondering if William James had anything to say about Freethinkers and about heresy (from the point of the orthodox), and from that to reminding myself about the architecture of the plot of Dune, what the Bene Gesserit were up to, what parts Mentats play in the drama, what melange is really all about ("gifts the taker with the abilities of prescience and long-lasting life AND makes interstellar travel possible...") and so forth...

And then arrived a Harvard article about slime molds https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2021/11/right-now-can-slime-molds-think which has this as its last line: "Cognition is all around you. It really is everywhere, and really, it's not just for furry, brainy things."

So the Narrator keeps putting words together, spinning out the story, or the process of discovery that animates the story. Words are proposed to the PEN, and stuff gets put down, and here we are. I think the Narrator incarnated when I started teaching in 1973 and had rooms of students to talk to. Before then I was just practising, but since then the Narrator has been a pretty constant presence.

All of which may not address what your thoughts were proposing, but it's how I spent MY morning.