In the spirit of Virginia Woolf, where description of luncheon is important, I'll tell you that I cooked my modest peas in miso, with rosemary, hot asian chile paste, bits of ribeye steak, and bay leaves, and I poured my intuitive invention over rice. Not only do I feel grounded in my body now, but I also had the insight I began this paragraph with. - student Anna Hawkins
Writing is an emotion. I write from writing. - Logan Burns
I know what I need to do is write according to the rhythm of what I want to say. - student Jessica Mueller
Susan's writing - the problem is it scares me to write that way; it scares me to read it but I'm drawn to it like a moth to light. I dance in and out of what she drives right straight through like a demolition car. She's in so deep with her imagery, senses, feelings with the wreckage flying all around her. I can feel it's in me but it just scares the hell out of me - and I thought I was tougher than that. I think I could write deeper if I didn't have to shift gears for the full-time job. If writing was my life, then I could find the supports to stabilize the deep dives of writing that style. I find it near impossible to manage both lives though. - student JA
I noticed that when I began to go through and change out all the masculine pronouns, I began to write more about my actual students, to tell more about them rather than write about an abstract or theoretical 'student', and I totally saw and appreciated that change. - student Heather Davis
How do I write in that integrated personal voice when I'm writing about theory? Virginia Woolf's A room of one's own is very theoretical while being lusciously personal. Another example that comes to mind is Sylvia Ashton Warner's Spinster which lays out her innovations in education theory in the form of a novel. There is also Joanna Field's A life of one's own which is psychological theory being discovered and described in personal terms. Carol Gilligan's The birth of pleasure is developmental theory. And just in general, non-fiction writing, which theory approximately is, is at a splendid peak of maturity at the moment, for instance any of the nonfiction published in Double Exposure, which if you don't know it is pure treasure both for pictures and fiction/nonfiction writing. Back issues at the library. - from packet correspondence
Walter Ong wrote a book called Orality and Literacy that talks about the way for a thousand years in Europe literacy was the exclusive property not only of male scholars but of male scholars reading only Latin - that literacy was literally the private enclave of a language divorced both from daily and bodily concerns and from the scholar's mother and all other female family members. The language of scholarly writing still I think carries quite a lot of the stylistic character of that heritage. One of the great benefits particularly of the modernist feminists has been their deliberate revision of this heritage through innovations of style. Sometime have a look at Dorothy Richardson's long novel sequence Pilgrimage which invented a sentence meant to better register female sensory intelligence. The politics of tone. - from packet correspondence
Sometime she stepped down effortlessly from one world to another. She would feel herself surrendering to the consciousness of what seemed to be another person. To look out on that brilliant world, until all signs of selfconsciousness vanished and she was no longer herself; and then disconcertingly it seemed to her that this other world had identities with a buried self dimly apprehended in states of revery. Her plunge had become a plunge in to her own unconscious. But once surrendered she could move freely. - from an interview of Dorothy Richardson |
And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle, and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself. - Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own.
Writing bodies
For examples of student thinking about embodiment and writing, see our spring 2004 semester magazine.
A mind, we say, that makes the world flower: that has denied nothing and transformed everything. Tantra the most dangerous way. Greed desire and anger turned slowly into loving power. ... your greed for fame, your greed to create, your greed to find significance. You should not believe there is no work possible that is not evil, no creation that is not in some sense the work of the deluded ego. The most beautiful is not always made from torment and bitterness. Often, from contemplation, joy, instinct or wonder toward all things. To create from joy and wonder demands a continual discipline. Severity toward all vanity and posturing of ego that loves its suffering and clings to depressions despairs and fears. A continual objectivity of spirit.
- Andrew Harvey, Journey to Ladakh
"Embodiment is the key:" excerpts from two of the essays in a recent collection of Ursula Le Guin on writing
I.
This book takes its title from a letter from Virginia Woolf's to her friend Vita Sackville-West.
As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year.
Woolf wrote that eighty years ago, and if she did think differently next year, she didn't tell anybody. She says it lightly, but she means it: this is very profound. I have not found anything more profound, or more useful, about the source of story where the ideas come from.
Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention beneath words, as she says there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move; and the writer's job is to go down deep enough to begin to feel that rhythm, to find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.
She's full of ideas but she can't dislodge them, she says, because she can't find their rhythm can't find the beat that will unlock them, set them moving forward into a story, get them telling themselves.
A wave in the mind, she calls it; and says that a sight or an emotion may create it like a stone dropped into still water, and the circles go out from the center in silence, in perfect rhythm, and the mind follows those circles outward and outward till they turn to words but her image is greater: her wave is a sea wave, traveling smooth and silent a thousand miles across the ocean till it strikes the shore, and crashes, breaks and flies up in a foam of words. But the wave, the rhythmic impulse, is before words, "has nothing to do with words." So the writer's job is to recognize the wave, the silent swell, way out at sea, way out in the ocean of the mind, and follow it to shore, where it can turn or be turned into words, unload its story, throw out its imagery, pour out its secrets. And ebb back into the ocean of story.
What is it that prevents the ideas and visions from finding their necessary underlying rhythm, why couldn't Woolf "dislodge" them that morning? It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries; but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps them too soon, hurries, grabs; she doesn't wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she's a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else, things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important ideas but she doesn't wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word.
*
Prose and poetry all art, music, dance rise from and move with the profound rhythms of our body, our being, and the body and being of the world. Physicists read the universe as a great range of vibrations, of rhythms. Art follows and expresses those rhythms. [pp.280-282]
Le Guin Ursula 2004 The question I get asked most often, in The wave in the mind: Talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination, pp.261-282 Shambala
II.
When I was young, I used to know that I had a story to write when I found in my mind and body an imaginary person whom I could embody myself in, with whom I could identify strongly, deeply, bodily. It was so much like falling in love that maybe that's what it was.
That's the physical side of storytelling, and it's still mysterious to me. Since I was in my sixties it has happened again to my great delight, for it's an active, intense delight, to be able to live in the character night and day, have the character living in me, and their world overlapping and interplaying with my world.
I still find embodying or identifying most intense when the character is a man when the body is absolutely not my own. That reach or leap across gender has an inherent excitement in it (which is probably why it is like falling in love). My identification with women characters is different. There is an even more sexual aspect to it, but not genital sexuality. Deeper. In the middle of my body, where you center from in t'ai chi, where the chi is. That is where my women live in me.
*
When I had a hysterectomy, I was worried about my writing I was able, with some pain and fear but not dreadful pain and fear, to think about what the loss meant to me as a writer, a person in a body who writes.
What it felt like to me was that in losing my womb I had indeed lost some connection, a kind of easy, bodily imagination, that had to be replaced, if it could be replaced, by the mental imagination alone. For a while I thought that I could not embody myself in an imagined person as I used to. I thought I couldn't 'be' anyone but me.
I don't mean that when I had a womb I believed that I carried characters around in it like fetuses. I mean that when I was young I had a complete, unthinking, bodily connection and emotional apprehension of my imagined people.
Now (perhaps because of the operation, perhaps through mere aging) I was obliged to make the connection deliberately in the mind. I had to reach out with a passion that was not simply physical. I had to 'be' other people in a more radical, complete way.
This wasn't necessarily a loss. I began to see it might be a gain, forcing me to take the more risky way. The more intelligence the better, so long as the passion, the bodily emotional connection is made, is there.
Essays are in the head, they don't have bodies the way stories do: that's why essays can't satisfy me in the long run.
*
Up there I said 'be' somebody, 'have the person,' 'find the person.' This is the mystery.
I use the word have not in the sense of 'having' a baby, but in the sense of 'having' a body. To have a body is to be embodied. Embodiment is the key.
My plans for stories that don't become stories all lack that key, the person or people whose story it is, the heart, the soul, the embodied inwardness of a person or several people. When I am working on a story that isn't going to work, I make people up. I know their function in the story. I write about them but I haven't found them, or they haven't found me. They don't inhabit me, I don't inhabit them. I don't have them. They are bodiless. So I don't have a story.
But as soon as I make this inward connection with a character, I know it body and soul, I have that person, I am that person. To have the person (and with the person, mysteriously, comes the name) is to have the story. Then I can begin writing directly, trusting the person knows where she or he is going, what will happen, what it's all about.
This is extremely risky, but it works for me, these days, more often than it used to. And it makes for a story that is without forced or extraneous elements, all of a piece, uncontrolled by intrusions of opinion, willpower, fear (of unpopularity, censorship, the editor, the market, whatever), or other irrelevancies.
So my search for a story, when I get impatient, is not so much looking for a topic or subject or nexus or resonance or place-time (though all that is or will be involved) as casting about in my head for a stranger. I wander about the mental landscape looking for somebody who will begin telling me their story and not let me go until it's told.
The times when nobody is in the landscape are silent and lonely. They can go on and on until I think nobody will ever be there again but one stupid old woman who used to write books. But it's no use trying to populate it by willpower. These people come only when they're ready, and they do not answer to call. They answer silence.
*
It is better to hold still and wait and listen to the silence. It's better to do some kind of work that keeps the body following a rhythm but doesn't fill up the mind with words.
I have called this waiting 'listening for a voice.' It has been that, a voice.
But it's more than voice. It's a bodily knowledge. Body is story; voice tells it. [pp.284-288]
Le Guin Ursula 2004 "Old body not writing", in The wave in the mind: Talks and essays on the writer, the reader, and the imagination, pp.238-288 Shambala
I am familiar with this anguish, both in writing and in film, but especially in writing. The lack of evident use for the work is excruciating.
There are several parts of this painful circumstance and things are more tolerable when they are sorted, I find. (Am mostly unable to use the term 'poetry' so you will forgive me if I just say 'writing'.)
The first part of the question of function is the straightforward question of what experimental writing does. It's different with different kinds of writing. I think you can answer the question in your own case. You can discover very exactly what it does for you, both when you read the instances that work for you, and when you do the work. You implicitly answered the question when you wrote in the last section of your process paper about the three qualities you are after in your writing. Your kind of writing evokes a state that is of intrinsic value. That much is clear. The question then becomes, what else happens that makes you or me or anyone doubt its value?
Something about social function, community, inclusion, social unhappiness and happiness. It is a fact that communities only really welcome people who serve them. If one is making what they are not able to use, one is cast out. The isolation is painful, but it is structural - I mean it is inherently part of the enterprise of experimental writing. I have had to see that there is a contradiction in me about it: I want both to head straight for the frontier and to have a friendly welcome when I get there. It won't happen. But it is depressing to be cast out. It is a kind of starvation, and it's a great unkindness to oneself to tolerate it for too long. One of my solutions is to get community inclusion and recognition in areas where my edge is closer in, more recognizable to other people, and just understand that it's not gonna happen where I care most. At least not yet, and maybe never.
Then there are practical questions about presentation: poetry readings, art openings - yes, they are unbearable. They are unbearable partly because they try to mix the two functions I described above: they are a contradiction in terms. Writing that is about achieving fragile states of consciousness cannot realize its intrinsic function in an atmosphere of social anxiety. It cannot achieve the social function of making one liked and included either. So these events destroy all sense of value. Then the question comes down to engineering: how should the work be presented? I once kept people in the dark for two hours listening to taped writing interspersed with slides of landscape. I refused to have booze at the intermission because booze had the wrong vibe for the work. It worked for those it could work for and the rest walked out.
But gee, you know, hard as it is, if you think of the lives people have lived, being in a position to be able to do experimental work, having time and talent, is a great, great privilege.
- from packet correspondence
In a quiet space, I make movements. They look like: a film of a dancer being played backwards, a plastic bag that's lost its way in the wind. I safely fill the room this way. I allow my particles to run free and clash. I let them loose. I want them to find their way into the world. I want the world to feel me. I say, "Go little atoms. Make your way as far as you can, to Mars. Better yet, make it to Venus, the planet that rules my heart." I stand still. I stand still and wait. I stand still, wait and breathe and then with my out breath I know it is time to bring them back home.
I make movements again. This time they look like: a cop directing traffic, a tight-rope walker keeping her balance, a child pretending to fly. I herd them back home, the particles, and allow them to linger in a bubble three feet in all directions from where I stand. They tingle my skin. They tingle the air.
I begin to imagine someone moving towards me. My breath quickens. The buzzing around me begins. My bubble feels tighter, thicker and if I am not careful, if I'm not paying attention
POP.
Control and abandon. It's like everything sticks. Lock jaw. Peanut butter. The way my feet won't move up a hill in a dream when I need to get somewhere fast. In the spring, all the trees, animals, people, cars, all of it has such purpose. It all has somewhere to go. Mustgetto the edge of the cliff NOW! And yet and yet the wind still comes and gently blows the pink blossoms off the trees. They drift in the air, nowhere left to go. They let the wind carry them, down. On the asphalt they have arrived home.
Arriving somewhere between. Finding yourself somewhere between the in and out breath. Somewhere between.
I abandon. I hear voodoo. I control. I see snakes. I abandon. I feel white cloth. I control. I sense stomping. I abandon. I control. But I never stop letting go. I see you. I see the way your army marches up and down your arms. They hold attention on your shoulders. They cross swords at your heart. They are at ease near the bones closest to your groin. It's easier for them to lounge there. The beach of your skin is salty and ready for a towel, an umbrella perhaps? Certainly, a cocktail. No I won't say it. Sex on the beach? Ok I did. They linger and watch the tide roll forward and back, forward and back. I envy them. Me? Sometimes it seems the 10pm curfew shuts down the bonfires right after dusk. The trucks drive up and down the side of the cliffs only to get stuck in the sand. I don't know how to take control.
FIZZ
I find my way back to my bubble. This time I gather all the particles and I try to just let them be. I just let them whiz around and move. I picture some of them shimmery like the edge of a cell and some of them pulsing like the mouth of a fish. They move together and I am with them. I breathe in and out, in and out, and this time as he moves toward me I let them out a little to say hello. They say hello like munchkins along the yellow brick road. They love to say hello. When my breath becomes too much, I say to them, please come back home. And for me, they come home. I let them out a little again and let them roam further beyond the white picket gate and then ask them to come home. For me, they always come home. The hills ahead of us are green. It is green where you stand and around you blue. I understand their longing to be where you are. It is beautiful where you are. I practice each day, to let myself be a little bit closer to where you are.
From my heart I spread my arms like wings. I know how to navigate from the waist up. I was taught that early on. Even then, my shoulders cave in to protect the heart, but if you challenge me with a sword, my chest would puff and there would be nowhere else for you to go. There's no need to run away from a brilliant light. The point is to always run towards. But my hips. My hips, so caught up in a maze of, you did this, and why did I do that? And, why aren't I this? and how come you didn't love me like that? It's a rocky sea between the natural bridges of my bones.
My ship's been out too long, an anchor is what it needs. I'd drive it into the soft, soft ground at the ocean's floor and let the salt water take control.
So I lie on my back. Feet firmly rooted to the floor. I breath in and introduce my heart to my groin. I breath out. Groin meet heart. Heart whispers hello, groin grumbles the same. Heart lets down a tiny beam. Shyly reaches to share a little of what she knows. Down below, unsure of what it is to even be there, down below, groin searches for a way to do the same. To lift up to fire and meet a flame. I'm still forming a way, a place, from which to reach a flame. A root, a rock, a screw, a stake? I roll back and forth to discover its name.
-student Carolyn Hauck, Control and abandon