Hello all,
I hope you're doing well - long time, no write! The MA's encouraging a different kind of thinking around writing: the self as subject, what going deeper means, the exciting possibility of playing around with form.
It seems that much of writing is thinking you're writing about x, when really you're writing about y. And that's when the 'real work' begins. The stamina of thinking needed!
I'm learning that writing is a lot of letting yourself write that first messy draft, to let the thinking develop, and then cut out what's not needed, and go deeper. That's my next challenge.
But while that percolates, I wanted to share something, unfinished, regardless. To say, hey (!), I'm enjoying the process.
This was the first piece I wrote for my writing workshop. It came out of me when I was struggling to write anything else, and that surrender to what's really here worked very effectively. I'm now considering what direction I'd want this to develop in. A wider study of speaking in the nervous system, perhaps?
Each week I'm finding what I write on speaks to using the self - itself - as a source of research. That age old question of what it means to inhabit a body and exist.
Take care,
Eden
When it reaches, vast and unknowing, I become a rock. I am clenched and the thought of letting anything out is simply off the menu. Some kind of primordial shutdown begins and I, a digger of myths, have tried to canal down to the root of what it all might mean. Give it a name, does it lose its power? Depression, anxiety, fuck, I do not know, but its experience remains. I detest it, this clenching that I know gnarls at the very core of my being. Makes breathing near impossible, saying anything of emotional depth, connection, even harder. I do not know how to be with it, guide it back to a light. My experience being a shuffle up and down that polyvagal ladder, but my weight distrustful of the rungs. God, I have to remind myself of its rockish impermanence, that its calcified nature can crumble or thaw, that breath will come and stoicism is not forever. But how to be with it, how to acknowledge she is there and she is utterly terrified. Closer than close, my fear nestles.
What can it mean to articulate from a place in the nervous system which negates the very desire to speak? According to Dr. Stephen Porge's Polyvagal theory, all humans experience a biological order of response to stimuli. The automatic nervous system is separated into two strands and moves between three states which can be helpfully mapped onto a ladder. At the bottom we find immobilisation. Down in that place of freezing, the body holds itself in a survival mode of limited breathing, restricting sensation. A checking out, of sorts. It is an effective and necessary mechanism to regulate our response to danger. The challenge comes when an individual feels they do not know how, or that it is not possible, to soothe themselves through the triggers that spiral them back down again. The challenge comes when an individual gets stuck in a feedback loop between immobilised and fight-flight, where for one reason or another there is a miseducation around what is (or should be) safe and what is not. How does writing from such a place *exist* when its core bodily aim is to shut down? Or, indeed, if it is possible for such words come without a violent forcing of breath and dissociative agenda. If we were to thaw it open, what might the voice of such a state teach us about ourselves? Perhaps, one might hope, a ladder upwards through which to go to ground and heal.
Eden had sat in her office chair, wheeled in from the other room, racking her mind blankly over that week's class exercise. She had been ruminating over the task, the very action her tutor had suggested she avoid. The nearby burning candle, haughtily labelled 'Calm', was failing to live up to its promise. Disappointing, but unsurprising. Hanging over the precipice of the course she had so desired to undertake, Eden suspected she was not alone in her fear of falling. Perhaps her peers - a seemingly incongruous group of people united by their passion for the written word - may too be experiencing a numb to blind panic at the first jump. Yet as much as her desire to 'just do it' whispered in the background, she knew that grabbing her metaphorical pick axe and hammering at her brain would only cause a larger emotional haemorrhage later that day. It was thawing that was needed, water a more amenable liquid than blood. How to position language as an act of flirtation, to melt herself in place of bludgeon. Maneuvering from the chair to the safety of her bed, she wrapped herself around a nearby pillow and picked up the pen. Fear clenched its jaw, offering no doorways in. She sharpened her teeth, took a brief inhalation, and let the tension have the floor. Given over to acknowledgement, the words starting pooling. Fear, she considered, I am learning to write with you.
Other Things:
Emily and I headed to the RA to see the Marina Abramović exhibition on until January. You can listen to our thoughts on the show over on MEDUSA’s Spotify.