Saint Cards 4

What—beyond the face of another (whether present or projected)—creates the conditions for me to sustain the work of telling the story of who I am? What kind of holding makes it possible for me to investigate, to answer deeply? What kind of call invites me to speak?

Conjure a figure in mind, their presence felt as a push or pull on another or on many others.

With your figure in mind, build the conditions they need to tell the story of who they are. Be the “you” to your figure’s “I.” Create an invitation; help the story expand. What do you need to do (as both author and interlocutor) to keep your figure moving forward in their story? What is it like to be with them as they tell it?

Perhaps add a consideration today, of the idea that even if your figure is speaking to a fictional other in a fictional world, you, the author, are also building an I-you relationship with this figure, that the writing you’re doing is a further space made in which to receive them—a wider circumference around the fictional scene. Even if you are writing of a real person, you are re-conjuring them through an act of your imagination, drawing a narrative scene but also registering their presence in your own body as you write.

Write a short piece that makes space for this presence combining portrait and text.

Open variables:

Presence: the thought experiment passes through a kind of story form (“imagine a scene”), but the endpoint of the prompt is toward a record not of what happened or didn’t happen, but of the presence of that figure; the thought experiment is a instrument for getting near in order to register the figure, their effects on others. What’s registered as presence? Think of this open variable as a continuum between radiance (as overwhelming outflow from one to another), reciprocity (as feedback loop between two or more), and withdrawal (of one from another). 

Short: invitation to treat this as a tiny daily exercise—limit it by minutes spent, word count, or page space. This workshop is not cumulative, so you can take up the scale and limit differently each time you choose to write.

Piece: you might write a microstory, a caption, a song, a dialogue, a commemoration, a tiny play, a choreographic score, a meditation or prayer of some kind, a list of images, notes for a character study, or any other form useful to you as a container for this presence.

Figure: is the figure real or invented; gone and remembered or still living; is the figure mapped onto the fullness of a person or does the figure appear as something different than “full” in this sense (a slip, a ghost, an allegory, a disembodied voice, a half-memory, a dream composite…)

Portrait: The portrait might be a description drawn in words, separate or integrated into the rest. It might be a drawing or a collage, or a performed photograph you take of yourself, in the style of Cindy Sherman.

Grammatical person: are you writing “I” or “we” in first-person, writing “you” in second-person, writing “she/he/they+” in third? Addressed to the past or addressed to the future?