Endless Roll – Page 6 – the pelagic school

ENDLESS ROLL // SITE ARCHIVE

in descending chronological order

Saint Cards 20

Call the patterns and habits of thought that stabilize into a self-sustaining “I” a dance. Call thinking a dance of symbols, and the thinking of

Saint Cards 19

Consider the idea that “I” today am not precisely the same “I” that lived here yesterday. Our language casts us into implied continuity of identity,

Saint Cards 18

Consider the proposition that what we call a self is the name for the emergence of a point of view. That wherever the strange loop

Saint Cards 17

Replay yesterday’s prompt but toward permission. What of you could live in me? What would happen if I embraced the deep pattern of you, not

Saint Cards 16

Proposal to think about influence or commonality as ways of describing the inflowing of other loops into our own. The possibility that each of our

The extra beauty and strangeness and danger of the loop is that the story part, which is temporarily untethered to physical body, can branch and multiply and transform, and loop back into many bodies.

Saint Cards 14

A strange loop is a feedback loop that perceives itself. Its strangeness comes from the feedback’s level-hopping attribute, with causal chains moving from microscopic to

Saint Cards 13

In Saint Cards 12, the prompt looked at a person’s personhood as pattern (really as a knotted cluster of patterns), pattern as a phenomenon that

Saint Cards 12

Here’s a short chain of propositions that lead to today’s prompt: 1) Proposition that pattern—the emergence of pattern and the capacity of pattern to sustain

Saint Cards 11

This installment takes a breath, an empty space with no philosophical thickets in it. Today, conjure a figure by making their portrait. Make it descriptively

Saint Cards 10

This installment has two separate elements, one linking back to yesterday, one looking elsewhere. If you’re just looking for the prompt, scroll down. 1) An account

Saint Cards 9

The next two days are a pause to digest the sequence of last eight considerations. As a reminder, these considerations were drawn from Judith Butler’s

Saint Cards 8

If I am fundamentally open (susceptible, vulnerable, unavoidably responsive) to others, then some unmeasurable part of me will never be transparent to me or truly

Saint Cards 7

Consider the idea of susceptibility—that a condition of every life is an unchosen, foundational susceptibility to the presence of others. Because of this, we can

Saint Cards 6

Conjure a figure in mind, their presence registered as a push or pull on another. Today, feeding forward the distilled idea of the last five

Saint Cards 5

I am telling a story about myself, attempting to tell the truth. But the form of the story pulls me into its own needs: for

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?

Saint Cards 3

Do we risk illegibility (refusing the sense-making power of norms that come from beyond us, that did not begin with us and will not end when we end) or risk a loss of our singularity by speaking of ourselves, understanding ourselves, through these norms?

Saint Cards 2

Consider the idea that no one can fully tell the story of who they are, not having been present at the scene of their beginnings, not having language for the early years, those beginnings anyway activated by and held in the actions of others, everyone in relation to someone else—we cannot ever fully narrate what brought us into being or draw a hard perimeter around our self-understanding of how we came to be who we are.

Saint Cards 1

Consider the idea that one can only tell one’s life story to another. That there is no understanding an “I” outside of being addressed by another, even if that other is only a hypothetical audience. Consider further that this situation—of being addressed and addressing ourselves in turn—structures the story of ourselves that we can tell and so the way we understand the question of who we are.

Speaking Voice Digging

Use this exercise to grow and specify the poetics of a speaking voice in your story. This is especially useful if you have a character who feels generic or stereotyped.

Information Feeding Tube (knowledge, aperture, distance, surprise)

Do this exercise before you dive into a revision, but after you have a sense of where your story ends, as the considerations are holistic.

Grafting (new appearances, alignments or alliances)

Use this exercise when your story needs just one thing more.

Genealogies

Use this exercise to discover pressures and directions that can manifest as you revise your story, and to reflect on what kind of narrative intelligence it grows out of.

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks.

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now.

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment.

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”?

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them?

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others.

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it.

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?

ENDLESS ROLL // SITE ARCHIVE

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