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 prompts*—that an “I” is something we can only know through relationship with another, and that this relationship is only describable with the language and customs we hold in common—take a panoramic portrait of your figure. Conjure them as the hub of a wheel, each spoke the reciprocal space of a different relationship. Each spoke opening a different space of possibility for your figure to understand themselves. 

Write a short piece as a holding place for this panoramic presence that combines portrait and text. 

*A compilation of the pith of the first five considerations:

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. 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. 

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. 

Consider the idea that we want to be recognized by others as singular beings—which we are, because we are each this and only this body—but we have to use the language and to some degree the norms and identities of the world we are born into in order to become recognizable to others. 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? When we make ourselves intelligible to others—make sense of ourselves to others—by choosing one form of logic from the array of available ideas (a contingent array that depends on when and where we are born and live), is there a cost?

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 answer deeply? What kind of call invites me to speak?

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 pattern, for coherence, for continuity. This coherent, continuity-possessing heroine is someone I am imagining for myself, even as I tell about her. Perhaps this is an occasion for me to change my life, to become her. Have I ruined the truth of my own story by allowing this narrative self to charm me? If this narrative self isn’t entirely true, is there a different kind of truth that pushes through my telling when the seamlessness of my story is interrupted, perhaps by my own lack of knowledge about what makes me who I am, my beholdeness to a social world that extends far beyond me? 

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?