tunings – Page 2 – the pelagic school

TUNING EXERCISES

Tuning exercises are designed to clarify what is important to you today. They open space to mark the subtle or not subtle changes over time in your temperament, commitments, and sense of self as a writer.

here's a tuning exercise dialed up at random:

Something from the Empty

There’s a song by Dan Melchior* that goes isn’t it empty sometimes / isn’t it empty sometimes? / you gotta try and make some thing out of the emptiness.

What’s a way to think about emptiness that doesn’t bog down with bad implications? What’s a way to attend with curiosity to some kind of emptiness that is an occasional or even a steady presence in your life? A dropping-away of obligations or relations that once were there. Or maybe an emptiness you perceive somewhere adjacent to your life. An empty parking lot you pass, an emptiness in a certain kind of rote transaction or professional hoohaw you have to occasionally perform.

Choose a specific emptiness that interests you.

What would making some thing out of this emptiness entail?

As preparation for this tuning exercise, sketch, in words or in drawing, the map of this empty zone.

Then write in a notebook, for five or ten minutes, tuning yourself toward what kinds of making and what kinds of things you could make out of this emptiness. What would matter to you as you turned empty into something? What is the emotional, relational substance of the way you would approach this hypothetical creation?

You might think of it as a kind of repair, a restart, a gift, a ceremony, an acknowledgment. Or you might think of it with a little more wildness, a kind of decreation of decreation, an undoing that becomes a doing, an act of negation that turns a negative charge to positive. An act of presence or insistence.

Read over what you’ve written about your hypothetical emptiness conversion. Look for tasks or assignments or reminders — about what matters and how you want your making to be — that you can port into your writing day. Write some of these tasks down on an index card or post-it you can put in view of your writing space, so you can occasionally, cyclically remind yourself of these tasks while you’re working. Maybe the reminder will create a space to follow a different impulse or invitation than you’re accustomed to. Or maybe it will lend you a useful commitment.

Optional add-on: trawl your writing and turn it into a song. Borrow an old tune or trope. Embrace repetition. Play dress-up if you feel like it and write in the style of one of your heroes. Now you have something to hum as you write.

*The song is Bureau of Neurotic Grins.

here's the full tuning exercise archive:

human observations

Set a timer for five minutes and write into what you’ve observed or come to understand lately about how humans act or feel. This could

arrival

Instead of writing, today do you your tuning physically. Take a walk, lie down and breathe for two minutes, or just sit in your chair

caption meditations

Set a timer for 6 minutes and cull images or scenes from your last few days. Give each one a simple descriptive identifier (i.e. letting

tuning your monster

Somewhere once, I came across the phrase “he gave birth to a monster of his imagination,” I think in reference to a philosopher. As a

walking inventory

Take a walk. It can be around the room, your apartment, your house, your neighborhood. Find at least ten details you’ve never noticed before. Make

self-interview with borrowed voice

Do a self-interview—an exercise wherein you fully perform the role of both questioner and answerer. Start by asking yourself what’s been surfacing in your writing.

letter of questions

Read over what you’ve written so far, and then write yourself a letter full of questions. Ask about the things that haven’t been included. Ask

week reflection

Reflect on your week of writing. What has surfaced that surprised you? What approaches to the practice (time of day, duration of session, writing implements,

sounding line

Imagine your writing can work like a sounding line, going from a surface to a depth and back up again. You can think of that

the social yesterday

Set a timer for 5 minutes and try to record all the thoughts you had yesterday about your own experience while navigating any social, communal

contents of your mind

Set a timer and write for 4 minutes trying to articulate the contents of your mind as you are today—the recurrent questions, habits of understanding,

soft edge of present mind

Write one or two full pages that try to braid together your own running mental monologue with an account of what’s happening at this moment

rest and energy interleave

Do a timed writing (suggested 7 minutes) reflecting on things that give you energy and things that bring you to rest. Interleave the two directions,

Retrospection–Prospection

This is a timed writing for arrival into your day’s writing mind. Set a timer (duration up to you: 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes).

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?

TUNING EXERCISES

here's a tuning exercise dialed up at random:

here's the full tuning exercise archive:

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