Whale Fall: Mobile Scavengers

Something very big has been alive and now it is dead (but not gone), that is, something that made it move has gone out of it or stopped and now all that remains is the stuff it was built of. This is the starting point of the story. 

Almost immediately, enter the scavengers, who arrive from elsewhere and begin to dismantle the mass of stuff by taking it for (or into) themselves. Slowly the mass becomes less heavy, which, oddly, means it stops being able to hang around up where it was in the world, and its parts sink to the depths. Very little lives in the depths. It is not where the majority of the world-sustaining activity goes on.

More scavengers, slightly different ones, continue to take the stuff that once made up the very big living thing. This all happens at the site where the mass has landed. There is a small crowd, numbering in the tens. 

CONJURE/COLLECT 

(perhaps let the conjuring/collecting phase last for most of a week)

Something huge, something made of much matter. Something which used to sweep up large numbers of smaller things to feed its own body mass, now turned into food or resource for large numbers of smaller things. A turning of the tables. A reversal or boomerang effect. A re-dispersal or taking apart of an assemblage that once dominated an environment. A large single unit met by 20, 30, 40, 50 smaller units. 

Follow the mass analogy, the whale body, wherever your imagination takes you. It is a beast of a ___. Any category of thing can fill in that blank.

Conjure visions of it in its heyday. Conjure the opening feast that begins at its ending.

Conjure the participants in that feast. They’ve come from elsewhere, they are mobile. Where have they come from? 

You may conjure from your imagination or you may conjure facts, images, anecdotes from research. Let “conjure” here mean something not so much magical invention, but more like: summoning to mind, to the room of your imagination. You might dig for these things through research or by sitting with your eyes closed or a combination of both. You might go out walking and collect your cast from what you see out there, go hunting for scavengers or entities that can play the part of scavengers.

Then conjure a second cast of scavengers. There are the ones that meet the big thing right where it ended, and then there are those who meet its remainders where they have sunk into a place of obscurity.  

Or, for a different approach:

Inventory ways that the components of a large thing can be used. Follow tracks of use and re-use. Dis-assembly and remaking. Make lists of microstories involving re-use. Don’t attempt to join the stories yet. Conjure a landscape or a region that can hold all these microstories, a region that may seem obscure, a region without ample resources, a region whose inhabitants are, by necessity, resourceful. 

With these conjurings

Hold them however you need. In a notebook, in mind, in little scenario descriptions, on index cards in a recipe box, in post-it’s on your wall… 

ASSEMBLE

(perhaps assemble in one or two sittings, work quickly and intuitively, after steeping in the conjuring phase for a while)

Once you have conjured your stuffs, start to assemble them into a story of finding and using, of the dismantling or repurposing of something that has ceased to exist as an agent or force in the world. Let yourself be led by the idea of assembly, fitting parts into other parts so that together they can create force or action they would not be capable of, working separately. (A single scavenger would not sink that whale, but a hundred can.)

The timescale that belongs to this assembled story is not that long in proportion to the lifespan of the very big thing whose death begins the story. This part of the story is over when the scavengers have cleaned the bones, and they do work quickly.

Maybe before you write, decide on a size limit for this assemblage.

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?