Whale Fall: The Sulfophilic

The area has been cleaned of matter. All that remains are the bones, the thing that made the deep structure of the now-dead massive thing. Mats of tiny worms capable of burrowing into those bones and releasing their deep stores of energy now become the catalyst for the existence of a new community. The released energy of this deep, slow decomposition is enough for others to live on. A new community colonizes the remains of the mass. They will be here for almost as long as the mass itself was alive. They live on bones, but are themselves invertebrates. Their existence is made possible by the partnership of symbiosis. This is the third succession, the third and last known community that will live on these remains. Elsewhere, the loop will restart, as another whale dies. 

CONJURE/COLLECT

Spend time with the image of the site enfolded or enclouded or misted through by a new kind of living energy source. To perceive this new energy source, you will need to zoom in, occupy a different level of scale. The structure that the scavengers and opportunists gleaned, from this other scale, becomes monumentally vast, a country of its own. The language in the science is “colonises.” Let that word invite you to pause, but don’t automatically equate it to (or reflexively unlatch it from) our own sordid colonial history. Find the right ethical valence for your story, consider all the ways a community can grow where it didn’t exist before. What does it mean to find life in the remains, and not only that, but to love life in the remains, for this is the sulfophilic, the sulphur-loving stage, when the energy released by breaking apart this old mass makes new life in this place possible. What is the energy and how is it converted into life? Remember this phase of the whale fall is marked by symbiosis. 

Perhaps try this game of conjure-collecting, a question and response, posed and answered, posed and answered. What is the energy and how is it converted into life? [You record your answer.] What is the energy and how is it converted into living energy? [You record your answer.] How is the energy released and who releases it? [You record your answer.]

And let the questions drift from there, either through restatement of a term that changes the question slightly (“life” becomes “living energy”) or through a movement to an adjacent question. 

If this doesn’t appeal, try something else. The balance suggested is between sitting with an image and collecting its effects, thinking of collecting numerically: twenty questions and answers, fifteen portraits of the sulphur lovers at work… 

Whatever you do, take time in this phase to think about bones as a storehouse of resources.

ASSEMBLE

When it comes time to assemble this stage into a portion of story, remember that the scale of things has shifted quite profoundly. Perhaps this relates to how much time is contained by a sentence or a paragraph. You may choose to zero in, take a-day-in-the-life mode for this phase. Or you may choose to zoom way out, to present a chronicle that collapses years and multitudes into a single sweep of time. 

Possibly your conjure stage has left you with with sets of things (question-answers, portraits, or anything else you chose), and this prods the poetics of this last portion of story into another rhythm, one of enumeration or listing.

As before, let yourself be led by the idea of assembly, fitting parts into each other in order to create an articulated whole. 

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?