Written in my notebook during a poetry class last semester. I told my professor that I wanted to write how I watercolor—intuitively, trigged by a curiosity with material, handled with the levity of suggestion. The tact and trust required to let a piece sit, and float, and dry. A drop of ink on page. Now that, but with language.
I wanted to be a priest, an empty vessel, to abdicate control in the service of flow. But I cannot pretend as if my hands move freely. They do not. With effort, I strain every word.
Loosen. Let the poem write itself. Or: don’t let grasping, precious projections desensitize the subject from the form. Attend to the unknown on the page.* Leave a space so God can rush in (Anne Carson, via Maggie).
*How? C.A. Conrad’s So(matics) come to mind, rituals to enact presence in the process of composition, so that a poem isn’t produced, it’s divined. In one ritual Conrad described interpreting a Shakespeare poem by feeding it line by line to a chosen crystal, placing said crystal under his pillow, and asking it translate the line’s meaning to him in his dreams. He would wake and place his collaborator on his Third Eye, and write. Attend to the unknown might mean: come with humility.
Or Gertrude: “Stein shut her eyes and travelled where the sentences led her, and didn’t describe the destination but rendered instead the systematic movement of sentences toward the unspecified.” (Wayne Kostenbaum)
Or Fanny Howe: “I was trying to explain that I let the words write the poem. That is, as you said, making meaning, but at the same time I have this other side, which seeks what’s unknown. I see it come to meet me if I let the words do the work and write the poem”
Attend to the unknown might mean let the words do the work. Which reminds me of my most beloved writing credo, from Reginald Shepherd: attend to the senses and sense will often attend to itself.
**from Trihn T. Minh-ha’s Women, Native, Other (read it!), and possibly, my next tattoo.
(Conrad also describes sending students to commune with trees in a writing workshop. The returned dismayed because, “trees hate us … The hubris of our species is that we don’t believe a tree has any thoughts until we cut them down and grind them up and put our own thoughts on them with pencils and pens.”)
A soft spot for philosophies that extend conscious beyond the matter encased in our skulls, matter made of the same matter made of all else. Humility. Decentering the mind as a first step towards unlearning dominion. Our hubris. This both appeals to whatever Zen sensibilities I inhabit, but more importantly, acts as a foundation for an ecological ethics. A decolonization of the spirit.
If God is infinity, then everything that exists is in God; therefore, all creatures and things are part of the single substance that is variously called Nature or God (Jackie Wang on Spinoza).
Or Yusef Komunyakaa: I am the space my body believes in (A kind of material faith).
Such expansiveness undermines any (false) sense of self-containment. Blessedly—
We seemed to be alone but I knew we weren’t. Skin was some temporary solitary confinement. I assumed things would ratchet up to a better version of awesome with my death—at which point I would resume the ecstatic, breezy, primordial bustle of simply flying around with everything.
A stew of everythingness. Or, like Wang on “oceanic feeling”—an experience of expansiveness where one’s illusion of a bounded self dissolves into an experience of infinite communion. Freud’s denial of such oceanity as a dissociative regression gives away his dismissal of an infant’s (our) sensorial envelopment with the Mother. However—Freud coined the phrase from his correspondence with Romain Rolland (a Spinozian) who, rather, described oceanic feeling as a mystical encounter, “the affective state underlying all religious experience,” limitlessness, unbounded.
Wang asks: Is our experience of ourselves as bounded, discrete selves just a trick of the ego? Is it an effect of language, which operates through differentiation and naming? Or is the self a construction or mode of perception conditioned by an idea of the “individual” articulated in the discourses of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis, and liberalism (which locates freedom in individual choice and agency)?
And, more importantly: How does the disintegration of the ego alter one’s orientation to the world and to others?
A hunch: inhabiting a flesh, a space, beyond the body might (must) deepen an empathetic experience of the Other, of all other beings, of the world. A communion of feeling. Or—
Hapticality, the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you… (Fred Moten & Stefano Harney).
And, finally, hauntingly, Clarice Lispector: Am I free? There is some thing still holding me. Or am I holding it? It’s also this: I’m not entirely unbound because I am in union with everything (She was a Spinozian too).
Slowly reading through Julia Kristeva’s fictional analysis of St. Teresa de Avila (thank you Fi), a marriage between my preferred modalities: mysticism and psychoanalysis. Kristeva reads Teresa’s mystical testimonies as halting approximations of the (inherently) inexpressible mystical experience.
Teresa is Lacan’s poster-girl for the Other-jouissance: the ineffable, unspeakable, coming. Upon seeing Bernini’s Teresa, agasp in ek-stasis, Lacan concludes that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it. (Again, attend to the unknown!)
Wang applies this to oceanic feeling and writing: if oceanic feeling is a regressive state, akin to a return to immersive child’s play, the artist/writer can, in a process of concentrated creativity, oscillate between this “incommunicable world” (a mystical state) and a sobered consciousness that allows for the mystical experience to be (haltingly) assimilated into signification.
I would also add that oceanic states animate writers and artists precisely because they are inexpressible. If we agree with Lacan’s assertion that the subject’s desire is animated by lack, then the impossibility of expressing the oceanic state may paradoxically incite the subject’s desire to symbolize that state (Wang).
Enter a poet’s fetish of the failure of language: to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail (Beckett). Still, it’s idle to fault a net for having holes (Nelson).
I do not feel constrained by language’s disappointments. They keep me humble. And hopeful. The fact that our perception is delineated and thereby inherently limited allows for something else, for the beyond-words, for, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s phantasmic: something (or, more properly, some non-thing) that escapes our attempts to…survey it…a register characterized by an ungraspability.
The phantasmic may or not be material. It is not necessarily invisible, but it is indefinable, rendering the phantasmic as that which cannot be encompassed by our knowledge of it*, rather than that which cannot be perceptually grasped (Gayle Salamon via Dodge).
*A fine expression for (of) God.
