Immersed in summer and studies, I find myself struggling with capacities of some purer form of origin beyond connections. The creativity that satiates me in relationship and studies is one of associations, extensions, combinatory experiments of life-experiences and informations and knowledges. Fiction and poetry, in a unique manner, seem to process the connectivities and associations invented somehow more within myself. Not so much in activities of external bonds and ties that loop within/without between concepts and voices, persons and family, and my own; but what bonds those activities and informations spawn within me. I am finding that these recognitions and constructions take a different sort of time and attention than the frenetic and immediate processings of conceptual knowledges and intimate relations. Those, of necessity, must be continuous, on the fly, in situ. Creative writing, in distinction, requires for me the ability for bracketing a space and time in which I am able to attend (somehow) to the recursive loops and dangling ganglia of my own organism of thoughts and emotions. A sort of internal processing vaguely distinguishable from reciprocal or social processing. It may not even be real, but only a sensation of process, a variant attention, a sidelong perspective. In any case, it emits something unique in my writing and reflection, feelings and sensations, and something that I cannot simply produce; something that must be prepared and allowed for, visited, beckoned, welcomed.
I recognized this as I struggle to create for a project, and also possess a yearning to be creating new fictions. The process art both provides and requires is unique and intense, difficult and serious. It calls to mind the “effortless efforts” of things like meditation and awareness, mindfulness and tolerance. The writings of Laura (Riding) Jackson piqued this recognition for me and I will share a couple of early paragraphs from her book The Telling.
“[1] There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait. In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old human life, new human life, fancied human life, avid of something to while away the time of unanswered curiosity. We know we are explainable, and not explained. Many of the lesser things concerning us have been told, but the greater things have not been told; and nothing can fill their place. Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an emptiness. Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.
[4] Everywhere can be seen a waiting for words that phrase the primary sense of human-being, and with a human finality, so that the words themselves are witness to what they tell. The waiting can be seen not only in the eager inclined posture of believers. It can be seen also on the faces of disbelievers, the idolizers of the evident: they are not happy in their impatient assurance of there being no cause but uncaused circumstance, they wear the pinched look of people whose convictions make them a meagre fare. In the eyes of all (in the opaque depths in them of unacknowledged presentness to one another) are mirrored (but scarcely discerned) concourses where our souls ever secretly assemble, in expectation of events of common understanding that continually fail to occur. We wait, all, for a story of us that shall reach to where we are. We listen for our own speaking; and we hear much that seems our speaking, yet makes us strange to ourselves.
[5] …A religion addresses the longing in us to have that said from which we can go on to speak of next and next things rightly, in their immediate time – the telling of what came first and before done forever…How our story has been divided up among the truth-telling professions! Religion, philosophy, history, poetry, compete with one another for our ears; and science competes with all together. And for each we have a different set of ears. But, though we hear much, what we are told is as nothing: none of it gives us ourselves, rather each story-kind steals us to make its reality of us.“
from The Telling by Laura (Riding) Jackson, 1967
All my Words are Silent 