Writing
Writing is yet another landscape, a place to be and play, a where in the world, but not limited to conventional reality. Writing is symbolic, transitional, creative, and liminal. It offers passage out of the ordinary and into the soulful.
Writing can be fiction or non-fiction, academic or creative, personal or abstract, poetic, matter-of-fact, seemingly "non-sense," a list of grocery items, or intimate journaling (among endless iterations) and may be typed, drawn, penciled, inked, crayoned, scratched with a stick in dirt, stenciled in blood, needled onto the body, traced inside flesh through depths of experience.
Writing is a landscape where the boundaries of our conventional reality may be subverted, bypassed, undermined, and mined. Even while language must serve its own structure and is closely guarded by cultural conventions, writing manages again and again to find passage of escape. Writing, though spun from the human hand, finds a way to come into being through entirely other fancies and intention. Writing is soul work. Thus, we may wish to write and then turn to our "own" writing to meet what within us is other. In this way we offer hospitality to our larger Self - a greater presence beyond the ego and its contracted, conscious stories.
Helene Cixous offers the following portrait of the writing landscape: “Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.” (The Newly Born Woman, p. 72)
Whatever it might be remains to be discovered by each of us in our creative endeavors - writing and otherwise. The "infernal repetition" too must be loved, for it is deeply related to the raw encounter with otherness that demands both escape and creative encounter. In writing, we creatively grapple with the limitations and freedom of our existence. We discover and create at the selfsame moment. We enter interstices within the established, dualistic order and play in the realm of paradox.
Cixous has written many texts in which she lauds, loves and offers gorgeous writings by her favorite authors who dare remake the world. One of her favorites is Kafka. She cites one of Kafka's letters to a friend: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy...? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief." (Kafka, 1978, in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, p. 17).
There is writing (our own and others) that can unfreeze our hearts, inspire us to die to our old, too-small selves and catalyze us to truly be alive, to wake up from the conventional nightmare that causes so many of us to want to escape "reality" rather than creatively find our way through.
Writing is a most potent source of soul redemption. It takes us out of the wormhole we have worded ourselves into with conventional words and soundbites, the dug-in familiarity that is our script, our barricade to fresh air, to light. There, in even deeper darkness, writing invites us into the unconscious - that flesh trembling and exciting unknown - and reignites our passion.
The literal word, once seen through, excavated, dug under, and clawed down to its root becomes form and energy, becomes symbolic imagination, becomes potent psyche juice. Writing becomes less the "writing on the wall" and more the door through which we enter into our own creative unfolding and play. The archetypal polarity of the world itself reveals along the literal and symbolic continuum. We must, through our creative speaking and writing, help to re-balance the resonant energy of the word (and world) in our flesh.
Recommendations for reading about writing and the creative imagination:
BOOKS
The Passion According to G. H., by Clarice Lispector
The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram
Memories, Dreams and Reflections, by Carl Jung
Playing and Reality, by Donald Winnicott
Stigmata: Escaping Texts, by Helene Cixous
Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, by Helene Cixous
ARTICLES
Corbin, H. (1972). Mundus imaginalis or the imaginary and the imaginal. Spring, 1-19.
Giegerich, W. (1984). Hospitality toward the gods in an ungodly age: Philemon – Faust – Jung. Spring, 61-75.
Writing can be fiction or non-fiction, academic or creative, personal or abstract, poetic, matter-of-fact, seemingly "non-sense," a list of grocery items, or intimate journaling (among endless iterations) and may be typed, drawn, penciled, inked, crayoned, scratched with a stick in dirt, stenciled in blood, needled onto the body, traced inside flesh through depths of experience.
Writing is a landscape where the boundaries of our conventional reality may be subverted, bypassed, undermined, and mined. Even while language must serve its own structure and is closely guarded by cultural conventions, writing manages again and again to find passage of escape. Writing, though spun from the human hand, finds a way to come into being through entirely other fancies and intention. Writing is soul work. Thus, we may wish to write and then turn to our "own" writing to meet what within us is other. In this way we offer hospitality to our larger Self - a greater presence beyond the ego and its contracted, conscious stories.
Helene Cixous offers the following portrait of the writing landscape: “Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.” (The Newly Born Woman, p. 72)
Whatever it might be remains to be discovered by each of us in our creative endeavors - writing and otherwise. The "infernal repetition" too must be loved, for it is deeply related to the raw encounter with otherness that demands both escape and creative encounter. In writing, we creatively grapple with the limitations and freedom of our existence. We discover and create at the selfsame moment. We enter interstices within the established, dualistic order and play in the realm of paradox.
Cixous has written many texts in which she lauds, loves and offers gorgeous writings by her favorite authors who dare remake the world. One of her favorites is Kafka. She cites one of Kafka's letters to a friend: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy...? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief." (Kafka, 1978, in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, p. 17).
There is writing (our own and others) that can unfreeze our hearts, inspire us to die to our old, too-small selves and catalyze us to truly be alive, to wake up from the conventional nightmare that causes so many of us to want to escape "reality" rather than creatively find our way through.
Writing is a most potent source of soul redemption. It takes us out of the wormhole we have worded ourselves into with conventional words and soundbites, the dug-in familiarity that is our script, our barricade to fresh air, to light. There, in even deeper darkness, writing invites us into the unconscious - that flesh trembling and exciting unknown - and reignites our passion.
The literal word, once seen through, excavated, dug under, and clawed down to its root becomes form and energy, becomes symbolic imagination, becomes potent psyche juice. Writing becomes less the "writing on the wall" and more the door through which we enter into our own creative unfolding and play. The archetypal polarity of the world itself reveals along the literal and symbolic continuum. We must, through our creative speaking and writing, help to re-balance the resonant energy of the word (and world) in our flesh.
Recommendations for reading about writing and the creative imagination:
BOOKS
The Passion According to G. H., by Clarice Lispector
The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram
Memories, Dreams and Reflections, by Carl Jung
Playing and Reality, by Donald Winnicott
Stigmata: Escaping Texts, by Helene Cixous
Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, by Helene Cixous
ARTICLES
Corbin, H. (1972). Mundus imaginalis or the imaginary and the imaginal. Spring, 1-19.
Giegerich, W. (1984). Hospitality toward the gods in an ungodly age: Philemon – Faust – Jung. Spring, 61-75.