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 emerges—the loop that gives rise to consciousness because its symbolic system is complex and flexible enough to hold a symbol for itself—there is a here. That to mark one’s place in the world, one’s particular place, of my being this one in this place, is a hallmark of consciousness (think back to Day 14’s location-relation; the loop is always a loop in the world; place (or relation) is a necessary element).

At the same time, add the proposition that there is a possibility in all human, symbolic thinking to occupy simultaneous, distributed points of view—I am in my car responding to the other cars on the road, also seeing the hills and projecting myself hiking in them maybe this weekend, while listening to the radio and imaginatively occupying the scene described on the news, plus an overlayer of an association that comes from my memory, and I reach for the voice recorder I keep with me while driving so that I can capture a thought for the projected future when I write something down, and in the midst of it all I’m in the back seat aware of the crumbs cascading from my son’s snack and am imaginatively in the place of the mouse who will probably sneak into the car tonight to eat the crumbs unless I vacuum, seeing myself in the garage getting out the vacuum, etc. We call it wandering mind or stream of consciousness, and it’s a pretty recognizable phenomenon, right? Hofstatder’s weirdness is to propose that the experience of being in those places, once the sensory input has activated the ideas of them to dance around in our mind, is in the part of the loop that’s not rigorously attached to body, and that I (multiples of I) am actually in all those places. So to entertain the thought experiment, just say, “I” (the thinking me who knows my name) am in all those places at once, or gliding between them fluidly—there is an experiential reality to all of those places, not just the location where my body is, in the car, on the road. And all those places I am, and relations I have in in those places, feed back into my loop, my hands on the wheel. 

Conjure a presence, considered as a thing that knows where it is, that says, I’m right here. 

Write a short piece for that presence combining portrait and text, distributed at different degrees of intensity and perceptual feedback, across a multiplicity of heres.

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?

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?