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 a particular person their particular way of dancing. 

Accept, for the sake of the thought experiment, the premise that we each learn, to greater or lesser degrees of exactitude, the dances of those people who mean something to us. 

Imagine that each dance produces a kind of light, a certain color of light, so that each person is a kind of sun, giving off their particular glow. 

When they die, the main hub of the glow stops emitting light; there is no more thinking there. 

But all the people who have learned that person’s particular dance still give off a weak copy of that light, the corona around the eclipse. 

One of my favorite parts of Hofstadter’s book is his proposal for the purpose of a funeral or memorial: A light’s principal source has gone out. So all those most likely to house copies of that light in themselves gather. They collect their memories and by doing so, strengthen the light of that remaining coronal glow. 

And something of the person who is gone survives, until all those other people are gone too. 

The afterglow as consolation. 

Say the task of memorial is to gather the people who carry the strongest traces of that person, and to consolidate the pattern into something that can be carried forward. This gathering and consolidation understood as collectively choreographing a memorial dance.

So:

Write a choreographic notation, conceived as a vehicle for the dancer to embody the traces of another. Embodying who they are or were, or embodying what they left in memory. 

Take “choreographic notation” into as much or little detail as you want.

Here are a few ideas: 

Describe a gesture, or a series of gestures. (The gestures might be symbolic: if someone was habitually welcoming, maybe the gesture is turning hands open and out. The gestures might be habitual: a way of twisting hair while thinking. The gestures might just have a tone with no apparent translation: little wiggle of the fingers, draw a circle in the air.)

Think about their spine.

Think about their speeds, their rhythms. 

Think about their favorite song. 

Think about verbs that hold their energy or habits. (To lean, to follow, to scatter, to glow, the wiggle, to pause and soften, to hide, to show up, to push back. And there’s always the option to invent compound verbs (whether compounded of two verbs or of a verb plus another part of speech): the slivernick, the silvernick, the swivelpoints, the flashgrab, the flowpool.)

The dance might have no interpretive connection at all to the person whatsoever, might just be any set of dance moves designated as an occasion reserved to remember and to imagine that person near. 

Or maybe it’s a duet, a partner dance; you write out instructions for a little ballroom dance and conjure the presence of that person as your invisible partner, scooped into your open, curving arm.

But however you do it, take some delight in the pattern of your invented dance. 

The dance you notate today is a pattern to hold a pattern.

As a way I hold you near, you who I miss. 

Turn on the light that beams your color.

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?