Whale Fall: Enrichment-Opportunists

The mobile scavengers, having gotten everything they could use from the fallen mass, have departed. But there is so much still there that has been broken up or scattered or lightly buried. In the enrichment-opportunist phase, a new group succeeds the last. This is a new community made of different kinds of participants. Smaller, with different skills and tools, so they can get at what the last left behind. Of special note in this phase is the entry of a particular type of being who can extract living sustenance where others could not. These beings arrive by the multitude and from a distance it might look as if they are the only ones there, although from a distance, you would not perceive them as a multitude of beings but almost like a mat or carpet or fabric covering the entire site. Though multitudinous, these beings are also unusual: they are never seen outside of these depths. Remember this fallen mass, far from where most life teems, makes life possible out here. Without it, these beings could not survive. 

The radius of this community has expanded a little from the last. Whereas the mobile scavengers worked in a concentrated site, right where the mass was deposited, these opportunists now add the area below and around that site to their region of life. 

There is enough matter here to support these opportunists for a few years, about the same amount of time or a little longer as the scavengers made use of the fall. 

CONJURE/COLLECT

(perhaps taking most of the week, a gentle sidebar held open)

Spend time with the image of the departure of the last mobile scavengers and the vacancy in their wake. Spending time with the image might be an act of thinking about it while walking or cleaning the house or some other activity that can engage your body while leaving some amount of your attention to float. Spending time with the image might mean sketching or writing notes. Spending time with the image might mean freewriting a description, almost an ekphrasis, of the scene as you see it, emptied. Or a combination of all those ways of spending time.

After you have communed with the emptiness of the image, allow it to begin to repopulate. What shifts? The participants, the agents in the scene, shift, yes, but what else shifts? Something new is entering into a scene that, while gleaning the leavings of the last community, is not dependent in any way on that last community for their rhythm of life, their energetic qualities, or their modes of interaction. Spend time with this image attuned to this shift. Maybe replay the possibilities of entry until you find a new community that interests you. Does this phase involve the co-presence of several different kinds of beings or the predominance of one? 

Spending time with the image is a form of conjuring. To collect, if you would like, a few different proposals: if your conjurings have led you to a specific real or historical type of being, you might collect solid objects (by which I mean shiny things that are specific and that please you) in particular categories: ten proper names, a few recipes for dinner, a short set of captions for images or names of tools used… Or, if you are wading into a fiction less anchored, you might collect solid objects along other paths. Would it help you to look at ten different designs for tents or caravans? To collect images of bags or bowls? Would it help to find the historical spellings for the verbs that describe the common activities of your participant-opportunists? 

Whatever you need or intuit, try pairing conjuring and collecting here, so that you are both grounded in a suffused image, and equipped with specificities. 

ASSEMBLE

(perhaps done lightly and swiftly, in one or two sittings)

Once you are satisfied with your conjurings and equipped with your collectings, spend a session or two assembling them into a story of a new way of being in an old space: succession. Let yourself be led by the idea of assemblage: fitting the parts you already have into each other, so that they make a pleasing composite. If there is an action or machinic quality to your assemblage, it is somehow about enrichment: about processing the gleanings.

Think about two forms of continuity between this and the last phase of the story. One form shows itself through opportunity: the opportunity of an emptied field, the opportunity of the abandoned detritus of the prior. community. The second shows itself as place, the physical location not just conceived as backdrop or setting but as a deep presence in its own right.

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?