-
Speaking bodies III. Language and wholeness:
the transformative practice of language
- In this concluding session of the Speaking
bodies minicourse we will look at practical applications for the embodied
understanding of language laid out during the two previous sessions. We
can use language to restructure ourselves and other people, sometimes very
comprehensively. What does this imply about an ethics of language?
What does it suggest about the art of language? What does it suggest
about language and therapy, or language and spirituality? Does an embodied
understanding of language give us a way to understand what ethics, art,
therapy and spirituality have in common, in our practices with language?
-
- 1. Unbearable language
- 2. Principle: language changes the
structure of bodies
- 3. Delightful language
- 4. Language, trauma and wholeness
- 5. Another word for structural wholeness
is love
- 7. Language and 'transformation'
- 8. Diagnosis
- 9. Methods
- 10. Summary
-
- Speaking bodies III brief bibliography
- Supplementary notes for Speaking bodies III
- Language can make us smarter and it can
make us stupider; it can make us lovelier and it can make us uglier; it
can make us more alive and it can deaden us; it can make us more competent
and connected, and it can disable us. This is true of the language that
comes to us from others, and of the language we send out to others, and
of the language we use to ourselves.
-
- We already vaguely notice it doing these
things but we have mostly learned about language in ways that don't support
these vague noticings, and so when language is harming us we don't feel
we have a right to defend ourselves against it, and when it is pleasing
us, we don't take that pleasure seriously either.
-
- In this last workshop of the Speaking
bodies minicourse I want to talk about the significance of the pleasure
and discomfort we feel in relation to language.
-
- 1. Unbearable language
What is the worst language you have ever
read or heard? What was it about that language?
I immediately think of three examples.
One is radio broadcasts of Hitler's speeches in the late 1930s. Another
is lectures of a philosophy professor I used to TA for. Another is structuralist
academic discourse of the 1970s and 80s. Hitler's speeches were screaming
rants that worked up hatred, fear and blind obedience. The professor's
lectures were dully complacent drones that made his captive audience writhe
in their seats with a blanked-out kind of boredom. The academic discourse
was abstract insider jargon that made its readers feel hopelessly outclassed
and subtly paranoic.
We can think of hundreds more examples.
The taxi driver who talks about herself on and on without any sense of
who she is talking to. The big city novelist whose books seem always to
be saying "Aren't I the cleverest guy on the scene".
There are kinds of language that harm
intentionally:
- lying
- manipulation - intention to control,
mislead, falsely impress, ingratiate, set hooks
- violence
-
- Kinds of language that harms because
it is (more obviously) coming from harmedness:
-
- fear
- irrelevance
- convention, dullness, formula
- confusion
- dreariness, energylessness
-
2. Language changes bodies
Q: Why do the badness or goodness of
language matter? How do they matter?
Here is a summary again of the basic principles
of language as something a body does:
1. Embodiment. We feel and perceive
and imagine and think by means of our physical bodies. Every change in
our cognitive state is accomplished (not 'accompanied') by means of a change
in our physical structure, ie in the way materials making up our physical
bodies are arranged. This is true both at the scale of the whole body,
and at the scale of the nervous system and the brain.
2. Consciousness and unconscious.
Conscious function is by means of a widely distributed network of activity
in the nervous system, probably mostly the brain. Quite a bit of our nervous
system isn't involved in consciousness, but those nonconscious parts can
have an influence on conscious function.
3. Integration and segregation.
Parts of the nervous system that could be, or have been, integrated as
part of the conscious wide net can be made nonconscious: that is, certain
kinds of feeling, memory, perception, and understanding can be cut off,
segregated. This can happen as response to trauma, or just as a result
of fairly normal decisions made in childhood or later. Whatever the reason,
a network that has lost some of its parts is less able: less perceptive,
less intelligent.
4. We speak (and write) from the structure
we are at the moment of speaking or writing. This structure may be
more or less integrated, more or less coherent, intelligent, relaxed, sensitive,
balanced.
5. Language has structural effect.
Sometimes the effect is observable - we say something and our hearer blushes,
or laughs, or does something. Sometimes the effect isn't visible, but it
is always there: no one can understand speech without being physically
changed. At the level of the brain we can think of it as a sort of bloodless
brain surgery - we change the other person's wide net, temporarily and
sometimes permanently too.
6. Self-talk. When we speak, think
in words, and write we hear ourselves and we influence our own structure
too.
A: Language is a powerful form of mutual and self-structuration.
It literally reaches into our bodies and rearranges them.
- What are some of the ways it does
this?
- a. By rhythmic entrainment
-
- We understand speech by tuning in to
it, becoming dynamically like it.
- Speech is acoustic energy - language
sounds are waves made by one body to strike another body - in conversation
we are like drums being played by other people's voices
Entrainment in physics is when two systems
interact to begin oscillating in the same rhythm. The term was invented
in the 1600s by someone who was studying the way pendulums brought near
each other would become synchronized.
Entrainment in biology: synchronization
of organisms to an external rhythm, usually produced by other organisms
with whom they interact socially. Examples include firefly flashing as
well as human music and dance.
Martha Davis 1982 Interaction Rhythms:
Periodicity in Communicative Behavior Human Sciences Press
Clayton M, R Sager and U Will In time with the music:
The concept of entrainment and its significance for ethnomusicology
online at: www.open.ac.uk/Arts/experience/InTimeWithTheMusic.pdf
b. By intonation
Speech sound includes a range of frequencies - fast and
slow (high and low) waveforms. We can hear some of them and some are inaudible.
Different frequencies have different effects. We can feel these effects
- we know whether we like the sound of a voice or can't stand it. These
likings and dislikings aren't trivial.
Voices are produced by the physcial structures of a body,
so the frequencies in a voice can also tell us exactly who someone is,
as a body, at the moment of speaking.
A voice we don't like to hear may be a voice that is being
produced by a body we don't want to be like - for instance a frightened
body or a secretly angry body.
c. By word choice and sentence construction,
which are a subtle form of brain surgery
We usually talk about language comprehension
in terms of 'content' or 'meaning,' but without going very far into what
'content' and 'meaning' actually include.
I described in Speaking bodies I
the way a sentence or a whole conversation or a text evokes a wide network
of perception-action or imagining activity in the cortex. Language reaches
into the cortex and rearranges connections. Some of its effects may be
noticed consciously, and others are likely happening unconsciously.
The wide network evoked includes emotional
aspects and global neurotransmitter concentrations. A text can soak us
in a mood: we can call it a drug. There are contact highs and lows.
In sum:
Bad language is structural violation.
Boring language, whiny language, manipulative
language, paranoid language - any of the kinds of bad language - are forms
of harm.
And when we have to defend ourselves from
them by shutting ourselves down, we become less able. We are disabled in
relation to other things that matter to us.
3. Delightful language
- Vices of language / structural flaws
of people
- Virtues of language / structural rightnesses
of people
- Think of instances of speech and writing
you find good.
- "Brutally honest, so fucking
real, grace in the twists, careful observation" - student Amanda
about what she likes in language
-
- Order: focus, truth, coherence, clarity,
well-foundedness, thoughtfulness
- Responsibility
- Energy, freshness, invention, liveliness,
freedom, play, relaxation - Jeanne's responsible funniness
- Relaxation
- Simplicity
- Complexity
- Heart
- Directness
- Articulation
- Skill, intelligence,
- Presence, mutuality, empathy, intimacy
- Cleanness - ie without manipulation for
purposes of the defensive/limited self
- When the speaker is mutual and high-functioning
you instinctively like being with them - you like being them.
Good language has the effect of maintaining
or improving structural wholeness of self and others.
It therefore also has the effect of building
and maintaining community.
4. Language, trauma and wholeness
- What does 'wholeness' mean?
What difference does it make to bodies
to 1) consciously feel what they are feeling, and 2) speak and
act truthfully from that integral presence of body?
- Dissociation: segregation, shutting down, limited self, false self.
-
- What are the costs to health and beauty
and intelligence of dissociating internally and hiding externally?
-
- Reactivation - body tries unendingly to integrate structurally. Conscious
selves battle continuously to contain reactivation. Addictive behaviors
is one way they do that. Moral of the story: learn how to let it happen
- safely.
-
- 'Integration' has specific physical-structural meaning. We don't know exactly
what it is, but we can feel it when it happens.
-
- What are the signs of integration?
- a. sanity, contact
- b. sacrifice of limited self - giving
up the limited self - defensive self - fearful self - being willing to
be larger
- c. flow, energy
- d. deep order, integration
- e. generosity, transparency, sincerety,
easy selfness, courage
5. Another word for structural wholeness
is love
What is the meaning of pleasure,
organically?
It has something to do with early love: what we were when we were infants gazing into
our mother's eyes.
How much of ill-health, stupidity and
ugliness comes from suppression of early love?
Wholeness is connected:
- Language and universe - withness, intimacy
- Language and silence
- Language and youngness - early love,
attachment
- Language and the unconscious
- Language and trust
Love and living as the universe
The brain and body are a simultaneous
structure of great complexity, which summarizes everything we have been
and known, and in which everything is fitted into place with exquisite
logic. But any act, or language act, must issue from that great complex
whole in a limiting temporal sequence. So we gradually and over a lifetime
unfold the whole we already are. Its implicate order.
6. 'Transformation' (Discussion specific to TLA)
Language CAN be be used to recover feeling,
intelligence, responsiveness, realness, mutuality, but does it have to
be about trauma to have a mending effect?
Is there a difference between writing
as therapy and writing as art?
'Transformation' is a physical change
of state / structure. If we use language to shift our state into one that
is smarter and more connected we are transformed whether or not we have
literally relived traumatic events.
7. Diagnosis: careful listening and
reading
Diagnosis of the language is diagnosis
of the structure of a body/person.
We model this as advisors - ad-videre,
we look toward.
What does it mean when language has
grip, what makes it seize and
hold attention?
Noticing we're suffering of other people's
language is helpful.
People who are sensitive to qualities
of language use are sensitive to qualities of whole persons.
Learning to feel discomfort diagnostically.
Defensive language: segregated language
Isolated left hemisphere language shows
in the rhythms and diction.
When people seem insensitive to language
the sensitivity may actually be there. We are socially trained to ignore
bad language and override it and blame ourselves for it.
What is one looking for?
- Spots of blur - conventionality, cliché,
nouns false, verbs true
- Tone - energy or not, when does it come
alive -
- Manipulation: charm, impressors
- Hedging
- One's own instinct
8. Methods:
Gendlin focusing - felt sense
Joanna Field: contact gives energy, gestalt,
joyfulness of speaking misery accurately. Verbal sketching
Spinster and teaching writing, Sylvia Ashton-Warner
Writing love and contact rather than anxiety
Journal writing as if to one's ideal lover
Freewriting, morning pages
9. Summing up the relation: what is
good language?
It makes good people, both in the long
term and in the moment.
Good structure: good state. Intimacy.
- a. ethic of language - is about making
a good being
- b. art of language - same
- c. therapy using language - same
- d. language and spirituality - same
Short bibliography
for Speaking bodies III
Embodiment studies web worksite pages on
dissociation: http://web.goddard.edu/embodiment/divided.html
Ashton-Warner Sylvia 1961 Spinster
Bantam
Clynes M 1978 Sentics: the touch of
emotions Anchor
Gendlin, Eugene T. Focusing. New
York: Bantam, 1981.
Gilligan, Carol. The birth of pleasure.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Griffin, Susan. Woman and nature: the
roaring inside her. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.
Milner Marion / Joanna Field 1990 On
not being able to paint International Universities Press
Ong W 1982 Orality and literacy
Methuen
Rich A 1975/2001 Women and honor: some
notes on lying, in Arts of the possible: essays and conversations,
30-40 W W Norton
Valery P 1958 The art of poetry
Bollingen
Whalley G 1985 Studies in literature
and the humanities McGill-Queens
Woolf V 1977 The diary of Virginia
Woolf Hogarth Press
Supplementary notes
for Speaking bodies III - reading notes and student correspondence
Dawn Prince-Hughes on gorilla speech
They didn't look at one another, and
they didn't look at me. Instead they looked at everything. They were so
subtle and steady that I felt like I was watching people for the first time
in my whole life, really watching them, free from acting, free from the
oppression that comes with brash and bold sound, the blinding stares and
uncomfortable closeness that mark the talk of human people. In contrast,
these captive people spoke softly, their bodies poetic, their faces and
dance poetic, spinning conversations out of the moisture and perfume, out
of the ground and out of the past. They were like me. Dawn Prince-Hughes,
Songs of the gorilla nation
*
Favor's annotation of Adrienne Rich
Rich, Adrienne 1974/79 "Women and
Honor: Some Notes on Lying," in On Lies, Secrets and Silence,
185-194 New York: W.W. Norton.
I carry this essay wherever I go, in
all my interactions and all my challenges. When I make a new friend, one
who I think I might be able to trust, I ask them if they know this essay.
If not, I worry until I have given them a copy. The truth that Adrienne
Rich talks about is a truth that holds us accountable for our own lives
and loves. This truth allows us our fears, but demands we acknowledge where
the fear takes us in ourselves and in our relationships. She writes of the
silences that are born of fear, which are at their clearest, lies, and at
their most complex, obstacles to truth telling. This essay, this thinking,
is how I learned to tell the truth. It is the most important thing I have
ever read. Favor Ellis
*
Language and silence
When we are silent we can feel our bodies
and we can feel other people. So it seems that evasion of silence can very
often be taken as a sign of evasion of body feeling.
*
Language as attention rather than presentation
What I'm talking about is a difference
of state that is apparent in writing as a difference in diction,
in tone.
Let me say a couple of things I don't mean.
I don't mean academic writing as such.
In my experience academic writing can be extremely beautiful. (One of the
things that makes it so is clarity.)
I don't mean critical reflection, self-criticism.
Monitoring oneself is intrinsic to good writing; any of the voices do that.
(Their rules are different though.)
What I do mean is segregated left-hemisphere
language - language that doesn't much consult emotion, sensation, perception,
and therefore comes across as formulaic. The tip-off can be a fancifying
of lexicon: choice of more educated-sounding words and phrases. See whether,
when you go fancy in that way, you are cutting off in some way. Right-hemisphere
language is earlier: plainer, more direct and more genuinely creative. Also
slower, often.
When language is not segregated/distanced/cut-off
it can be thought of as a sort of attentional organ rather than a presenting-organ.
*
Amanda on pleasure and writing
acknowledging, lately that my relationship
to processes of discovery is highly sensual/erotic
that these records, as fraught with
confusion and pain as they may be, are really, at their essence, acts of
pleasure.
This statement seemed to me to be the
highlight of your packet, the moment where you find the platform of truth
in your own project. You are in love with being. You want your writing
to honour it. Hold onto that, don't let anyone talk you out of it.
*
Anna's VW quote and trusting the telling
A thing about both Virgina Woolf and Coleridge
is that as writers they trust themselves unconditionally. They can be freaking
about this or that about themselves, but they trust the telling of
it always. For instance this:
this goes on; several times, with varieties
of horror. then, at the crisis, instead of the pain remaining intense, it
becomes rather vague. i doze. i wake with a start. the wave again! the irrational
pain: the sense of failure; generally some specific incident, as for example
my taste in green paint, or buying a new dress, or asking dadie for the
week end, tacked on. / at last i say, watching as dispassionately as i can,
now take a pull of yourself. no more of this. i reason. i take a census
of happy people & unhappy. i brace myself to shove to throw batter down.
i begin to march blindly forward. i feel obstacles go down. i say it doesn't
matter. nothing matters. i become rigid & straight, & then sleep
again, & half wake & feel the wave beginning & watch light over
the house whitening & wonder how, this time, breakfast & daylight
will overcome it; & then hear L. in the passage & simulate for myself
as for him, great cheerfulness; & generally am cheerful by the time
breakfast is over. does everyone go through this state? why have i so little
control? it is not creditable, nor loveable. it is the cause of much waste
& pain in my life.
She's describing psychic torture, but
look at the relish with which she writes it.
Objectivity. She has a very thorough morality
of exact confession, telling her story as that of a sample human.
She is not ashamed of her thoughts.
*
Anna on language and love
I can see that Virginia Woolf has fallen
in love with reality, and with the process of discovering it and expressing
it accurately. This is what she is talking about in Room when she says that it is the writer's responsibility to
find, live in, and communicate "reality," "now to be found
in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil
in the sun It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the
silent world more real than the world of speech - and then there it is again
in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly". She has fallen in love
with thinking of things in themselves; this love creates a vivid life and
a numinous reality. Her spiritual philosophy doesn't eschew this world for
a dark silent cave in which to seek transcendence from this world and the
body; she is immersed with the joy of walking through the marketplace of
ten thousand howling and silent things.
*
Anna on body state evoked by tone and
style
Welwood's tone feels quiet, warm, and
unusually human and accepting. while reading his words, I become silent,
still, grounded, and physically centered in my heart.
*
With Favor on self-division in language:
I resent that's what I'm taking in,
and I resent that's what I've put out.
So you should resent. But the struggle
with the language we have taken in is exactly what writing is for! I'm
half remembering a line of Gertrude Stein's (I think in The making of
Americans), talking about why she writes slowly: "There is so
much one doesn't want." We learn to speak by hearing speech. We learn
writing by reading. The language hemisphere is the trained, indoctrinated,
colonized hemisphere. It is the Other installed in us like a rogue program.
Insofar as we live in that hemisphere it is the father we are swallowed
by.
My guess is that you'll probably have
to let go of knowing anything about how it should be. You'll have
to let go of 'being a writer.' You'll have to let go of being able to compete
in the arena with other writers. You will have to care for nothing but
telling your own story as truly as you can, in a voice that as much as
possible is the voice of the other hemisphere - the hemisphere that isn't
swallowed by the father. The young hemisphere. The here-and-now hemisphere
that hardly is able to read.
The word I want to emphasize is loyalty:
you have to be more loyal to your own self, your own story, your own truth,
than to writing, to succeeding, to hiding, to being safe, to anything at
all. If you are not loyal to that self, there is no one else who will.
She will be nowhere. But she isn't nowhere, you know exactly where she
is and how to find her. You don't know all she has to say, or how she will
want to say it, but you can let her know you are willing. You can be
a father come to find her. Another way to say it is that the language hemisphere
has to be willing to become the helper and supporter and champion of what
is not language.
*
Reading and writing as addiction
I don't read for a few days, and I feel
numb and lifeless and so thick in whatever is keeping me stuck, I can't
move.
So reading and writing have been defenses
against depression. We knew that already. But it means being swallowed
by the father has been a pleasure to you, you volunteer for it. We could
say it's addictive.
Here is a question: within depression,
can you locate some sparky neutral little being who is interested in what
it is like to be depressed? That sparky little being is your thread.
*
Anna on writing and thinking
As I don't know exactly where to begin,
I think I'll start from where I am.
I'm working on this flow of packet to
packet in my thoughts on the work, on a flow of essays and books
what I am learning I can do - to think
on the page in writing, and then see if it strikes a true note of resonance.
I am learning, I think mainly in these
two most recent packets, that I can think on the page, that in writing I
also discover things, and that if I allow myself to meander and discover
and hold my perceptions of imminent judgement at bay then I can have a lot
of fun writing. Did I really say that?!! I did.
once I get past my initial strong hedging
of beginning, I start discovering and finding new ideas, or finding that
the ones that were rattling in my head for two weeks take unexpected turns.
It's also a question of input-output; if I take in a lot of reading and
information, I need to digest it in the writing, and then more ideas and
understanding will develop.
*
With Anna on writing for whom, and styles
of thought
Virginia Woolf's diary ... did she have
some fictional audience in mind?
how to create that resonance more and
more for myself, so that when I'm no longer at Goddard, I will know how
to write, how to write my truth, how to create my own audience that will
evoke my deep truth. Some way to write and develop what Virginia Woolf calls
a prose style which is completely expressive of my mind. Anna Hawkins
The relation of self-intimacy and other-intimacy
is so interesting a question.
VW has self-intimacy to a remarkable degree.
Where did she learn it? I think one answer is that she was lucky in her
family, and later very lucky in her marriage. She grew up among people
who were interested in each other's experience - artists and many of them
brilliant - and then she went on providing herself with friends of the
best kinds. Writing in her journal was not so different from talking to
her sister Vanessa, or Leonard later, I think.
She was a studious writer too, and she
read with a swift eye to anything another writer could show her about how
to express feeling and thought. That's another answer: she studies intimacy
technically.
But the real truth, the core, I think
- the central answer to your question about audience and prose style and
thought - is that she's very hard-working: not lazy. Even writing in her
journal she is always pressing to get it right. Not being satisfied
with conventional expression, not being satisfied with the half-true, not
being satisfied with frightened evasion, always always pushing to say what
something is, what something is like. For her, writing and thinking are
moral crises: she knows that any cheating shows. We can't depend on even
an imagined audience to give us the permission to be great, we have to
care enough to be great even if no one will ever see that we are great.
We have to care because that's what we want to give to the greatness of
life.
creating a space so loving for yourself,
so open, that you can unfurl yourself to yourself, without self criticism
and judgment.
There maybe is a place where loving the
greatness of life and loving yourself are the same thing. If you love the
greatness of life enough to be willing to do anything you have to, to be
able to do it honour, then you will treat yourself with the same honour
and willingness to know, since honouring your own reality will make you
more capable of honouring all else.
I shall here write the first pages of
the greatest book in the world. this is what the book would be that was
made entirely solely & with integrity of one's thoughts. VW
See - she is not ashamed of her thoughts.
*
Integrating:
The work you are doing is not fretting,
it is restructuring. It is essential. It is making the platform from which
to give and create correctly.
If fear arrives this way at night I would
guess it's because there is old fear structure built into your brain and
when you are asleep you aren't able to keep it suppressed. You get the dream
when the brain is trying to be undivided. The implication would be to find
ways to feel the quality of the fear, every shred of it, as consciously
as possible, but in safety, while you're awake, so the brain can get the
wholeness it's trying for.
It's about gradually rebuilding your own
structure so that whatever has been segregated can rejoin the conscious
self. For this to happen the child-you needs to freak out fully in whatever
way it does, so that its nonconscious structures can let go and be integrated.
At the same time you need to not exactly identify with the freakout - you
need to keep a sense that it is the child freaking out.
*
Visual writing
I also wondered whether you might be interested
in doing some specifically visual writing.
I am thinking that because one of the things
I value about journal writing is that it seems to allow a very private,
and perhaps even unconscious, visual perception to speak. When I start writing
I might recall something, from the day before for instance, and as I'm recalling
it in the slow private moment of writing, I seem to see more. So
it seems worthwhile to set up a trusted connection between the primary perception
hemisphere and the speaking/writing hemisphere by exercising that connection
intentionally. You can write visual sketches the way you make pencil sketches,
simply by looking at what's in front of you and trying to write it. Just
a thought.
*
Journal writing and tuning
I've been writing my journal in pencil
for years, because there seems to be a tuning-in process, where I start
out writing from a surface/social voice and then by seeing that it isn't
right, switch to something realer. There's something also about the feel
of pencil.
Something else I discovered is that if
I am hesitating when I sit down with the journal, I write down what I can
hear at that moment. It seems to help the switch into a deeper attention.
*
Journal writing and defensive thoughts
writing can also be very destructive
to myself if I'm writing interpretations of my self or others
This is familiar. Especially if I'm hurt
I can use the journal to make up a position that is falsely defended. After
many years, I don't do that any more, but it was seeing it written down
in the journal that showed me I was doing it. - But it's the defense not
the acute vision that is destructive.
Have you noticed different handwritings
in your journal, as if (sort of) different people? I have noticed in my
journal that love woman and work woman can be distinguished by their handwriting.
*
Journal writing as wider connection
I describe events in my journal because
I am in some ways too fast and too preoccupied with concealment and suppression
to really see them when they happen - I have to experience them again in
the slowness and connectedness and privacy of writing to know what that
other half in me was noticing and concluding. I sit down and say to myself,
now what do I really think about that?
Looking at something again helps me know
more than I did the first time. Invariably. It feels as if there has been
someone silent who was present and observing and feeling at the time, but
not exactly conscious. When I write in my journal she is able to say what
she knows, which interests me a lot.
Write about things you want to understand
not about things you already have something to say about. That way the writing
becomes a way of tapping your feelers (it's Virginia's image) into the wide
air like a moth scouting pheromones. Watch how Virginia does it - you can
see her throwing out bait and then staying very alert while she watches
an image rise like a fish (her image too) to answer it. Make it so writing
is a way of having a conversation with the lover who lives invisible as
the silent half of your brain.
*
With Layla on writing as day-processing
I started journal [writing] to process
my day so that my dreams would be more free for intentional work.
When you asked me in your letter if
I had the experience of a silent observer who is able to say what she knows
when I am [writing in my journal] I was going to answer no, but over the
course of the packet cycle I began to see that a little bit. I would just
suddenly know things (mostly about myself and how I was feeling) that I
hadn't consciously known before I was writing.
Processing a day - yes - getting rid of
the residue of the day. This can mean a couple of things. One is that just
writing down what has happened seems to lay strong events to rest, that
otherwise will keep getting chewed on like cud. The other has specifically
to do with connecting unconscious and conscious parts, for instance consciously
noticing what the uncon registered but the con didn't, in some of the moments
of the day. It might be feeling something or understanding something or
just consciously seeing or hearing some quality. That kind of processing
has a feeling of resolving. I love when it happens. I think the
ability to do that is something that a journal builds, because the speed
of writing is different than the speed of first experience. In writing
there is time to let the experience re-form slowly and maybe more fully.
The essence of it is I think that the focus, privacy and slowness of writing
can connect the two hemispheres in ways they aren't connected in ordinary
experience.
*
Using journals and notebooks later
The other thing I use my journal for
is to record insights (mostly just because writing them down helps me internalize
them).
Do you go back over them too? Synthesize
them? Make notes from your notes?
*
Not everything is text - replying to
Barbara Mor
Consider Text/Context. For circa 45-50,000
years of preliterate homo-sapiens time on earth, our Human Text was the
same as our Human Context: the Natural Worldthis contextual world - all
there was, 24/7 and your dreams - was read as simultaneous pragmatic and
sacred Text. Barbara Mor
I have a large quarrel with that manner
of speaking, which I know is fashionable. A context is not a text. It is
important to keep the difference clear. There are no texts until there is
writing. Texts have a derivative mode of being: they rely upon and are wholly
dependent upon a real world which is not text. We do not read the world:
we respond intelligently within it. Speaking of that response as reading
is a category mistake: reading is actually a tiny subcategory of the larger
category which is intelligent response. I believe the wish to call the real
world a text is profoundly patriarchal in impulse, a desire to negate what
precedes and continues to be greater than male defensive mentality.
Again, it is a category mistake to conflate
knowing with scientific data or 'information': use of scientific data is
a tiny subcategory of the knowing built into bodies of all kinds (and not
just human).
What's Left, literally, is The Sinister:
the Body's Left Side (Dark Side of the Mother, the Flesh & the Heart):
the nagual. This realm which
hyper-rational males, positioned along all points of the ideological spectrum,
have Dexterously (righteously) marked off as profane, errant, forbiddenEschewing
the Dark Side, the Left has no Vision Females are the Original Left
Yes, but this is spoken very dichotomously.
Male defense often involves refusal to feel and know the body as such (the
whole body and not just the left side) (and since there really is nothing
else, this implies that it involves a commitment to fantasy), but women
use this defense as well. Everyone does. It is in fact a defense against
early love and its vulnerabilities, and anyone's ego consciousness is premised
on some form of that defense. When women see it only as a male aberrancy,
they are doing what men do - projecting.
*
With Layla on what writing is good for
In a way I am not sure what place writing
holds in the world, how important it is if we are all living in touch with
the Earth.
Here I have been thinking: why am I
writing? Writing: arrogance and often to flee to the head and out of the
body, or out of the head even out of body altogether to some other world
free of these problems. I think it is only worth it as a gift. It is only
worth it if I write what the Earth herself wants people to hear.
This is a good doubt to start with: understanding
that a moment writing is a moment away, so that the cost has to be considered.
I think of the best writing as making
a mind. The writer makes a mind that's out-of-the-ordinary, by means of
struggle, dedication, sacrifice of ego's weaknesses: many gifts given to
writing itself. And then that mind becomes a gift to anyone: readers can
become it, for a while, or for longer. And if it is a mind that is more
able to see and feel and defend the world, then that is how writing becomes
a gift to Earth - by making able people. So I don't think it is about saying
something in particular, it is more about making competent selves through
writing.
*
Slow language: Anna on language and
felt sense
Rather, the unconscious is a "holistic
mode of organizing experience and responding to reality that operates outside
the normal span of focal attention"
What is unconscious, then, are the holistic
ways in which the body-mind organism experiences its interconnectedness
with reality, prior to the articulations of conscious thought"
Eugene Gendlin, teacher of the psychotherapeutic
technique called Focusing, which draws one's attention to a felt sense within
their experience.
The felt sense is the pre-articulate
fabric underneath a person's words and actions To be able to articulate
this non-verbal felt sense, our attention needs to "shift to a more
diffuse attention that allows a holistic scanning of experiential intricacy"(54).
Gendlin found that most forward changes
happened when clients were able to tap into and speak from their felt experience of the moment.
The felt sense is often diffused and
blurry; it is preconscious. The challenge is to stay with the unknown of
this felt sense in order to move authentically from it.
Welwood describes psychological inquiry
as an unfolding process, which may begin with this felt sense. We tend to
talk about our felt sense, instead of speaking directly from it. The unfolding
happens when we zig-zag back and forth between our pre-articulate felt sense
and our speech.
Unfolding in therapy has three main
stages: widening into the felt sense of a situation, direct inquiry into
this sense, and articulation from various angles until its crux is discovered,
thereby relieving the stuckness.
Max Picard's suggestion that speech
is powerful and affective when it originates from the large space beyond
words; speech that moves "from silence into the word and then back
again into the silence and so on, so that the word always comes from the
center of silence...Mere verbal noise, on the other hand, moves uninterruptedly
along the horizontal line of the sentence...Words that merely come from
other words are hard...and lonely" (93).
I started with a diffuse felt sense
of what I wanted to say
This is me learning that there is, in
Welwood's terms, a holistic organizing principle that sees and comprehends
a larger field than my conscious awareness.
The "x" is our conscious awareness,
but we actually have access to the rest of the circle, we just don't know
it.
Becoming connected to one's felt sense
is, I think, a critical component of engaging in education in this unconscious
exploratory manner.
the felt sense, and unconscious process
in general, make it possible for a path to emerge, one step at a time.
I think a deeper understanding of this
felt sense was something I was craving, and is what is transfixing, surprising,
and shocking me as I read fiction this semester.
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