Sudden Wind and Moonlight

“Observing that there’s always something of value in a piece of writing, Matson encourages his students to trust their creative impulses.” (East Bay Express, 2006)

Assessing what’s of value may be chancy, since we filter out so many impulses in our writing lives, and advanced writers filter out more. They’ve learned what works for them and what doesn’t. But when we’re on a developmental spurt, or when we’re beginning, it’s useful to have no filters.

“It feels like vomit. Just vomit!” one beginning writer stated, and then added, “That’s when I know I’m doing well! There’s vomit all over the page.”

This is extreme, and the slightest tinge should remind us that writing may be neither mild nor safe. Violent and soul-wrenching forces lurk beneath our words. The image speaks both to how much we have invested in our day-to-day personality and to how much that personality may differ from our authentic self. We could be committing a huge amount of energy to maintain a fiction.

It took forty years or so for me to work through self-images and allow the Chalcedony poems to emerge. My journey is not a smooth one, more like a wiggly trail, being a hipster, an intellectual, a political radical, a lay psychologist, an ordinary male – I don’t remember what all, on the way to the raw honesty and full passion of Chalcedony’s voice.

The question, “Why so vulnerable?” doesn’t have a single answer. When it’s asked, though, the territory displays its ubiquity and its difficulties. Integrating our authentic self, which probably includes some of what psychologists call “the excluded self,” can release as much pain as it is possible for any human being to feel.

That’s only the beginning. In Western culture, with its emphasis on linearity, human myths have been submerged, though of course they’re operating as strongly as ever – in the strata beneath our awareness. They evolved over thousands of years and express the stories we’re born to fulfill or born to contest. As we write, they send chunks of energy through our bodies and onto the page.

This could expose us to the total sum of historical pain, to as much human pain as exists. How to deal with it is an individual problem, and changing the twelve-step maxim “one day at a time” to “one breath at a time” is helpful to me. If we accept some of our vulnerability as valuable, or link it to a mythological source, we continue our development. The beginning writer did just that, acknowledging the feeling and recognizing that it means she’s doing well.

David Whyte asks if vulnerability and humility are close first cousins. He suggests, “There is a lovely root to the word humiliation – from the Latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being.”

Is my journey painful? Yes, I go through a lot, humiliation and shame, as well as fear, and panic, along with a trembly astonishment when a glimpse comes through of the reward. The beauty we earn and inherit, when we finally start to become who we are.

Looking at the question from a positive angle, Don Miguel Ruiz comments in The Four Agreements: “Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are. Just being ourselves is the biggest fear of humans.”

(With help from Carrie Mercy, Lonner Holden, and Kalaena Pertofsky)

“Do I have to?”

Just that quickly this elegant, confident-looking woman backs off, the moment I announce that we’ll be reading our writing aloud. The raw, corrosive fear in her voice surprises me.

“You don’t have to,” I reassure her, “but we’ll twist your arm just a little.”

New writers are often shy, but, since this lady mentioned she’s an actress in classical theater, I assumed she’d be at ease on the very small stage of our writing workshop.

“Do you do Shakespeare?”

“Yes,” she says and pulls her jaw back in a frown, as if she’s not happy where I’m going.

Some of Shakespeare’s women run through my mind. Feisty, smart, principled, and at the same time expressing a range of emotion quite fluidly. Like Juliet, who’s beside herself with desire and frustration. And Lady MacBeth, what about her? How strange she must feel, haunted by one drop of blood.

“Have you played Lady MacBeth?”

“Yes.”

“Now there’s a frightened woman, aware of her family’s murderous intrigue. ‘Out, damned spot! Out, I say.’ She’s frantic with anxiety.”

I slow down, looking her in the eye, and set up my punch line. “Correct?”

“Yes.”

The punch line: “Do you think reading your work aloud could be worse than playing Lady MacBeth?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

I build the strongest platform I can, and she destroys it with one syllable. Now I’m at a loss.

“Why?”

“Lady MacBeth is someone else.”

She waves her hand in the air as if shooing a fly, then sighs and pats her breast.

“What I’d read would be me.”

And she’s right, of course. That is the rub: your very essence, your heart and soul, are likely to be revealed. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve been on stage, perfecting the art of being someone else. It’s just not easy to maintain any safe or serene or confident or grand image of yourself. And your writing will somehow broadcast the truth, the very truth no one has seen before: who you really are. Your frailty, your stupidity, your funkiness, your fuzziness, your general unworthiness, how poorly you write – and oh, how touchy, how very vulnerable you are to any word that could be construed as criticism.

Does this sound troublesome? It’s the short list.

One writer, as she prepared her novel for an editor, dreamed she was in the wings of a theater. While waiting for her cue, she wrapped the curtains around herself and suddenly she realized she had no clothes on. How could she go on stage without a costume? She was stark naked. She woke up, sweating, from the nightmare.

Bob Dylan’s line, “A poem is a naked person,” applies as well to any creative writing. The good news is, in workshop, you don’t have to take your clothes off. The bad news is, it can feel worse than if you did.

(With help from Linda Cohen, Kalaena Pertofsky, and Lynn Sugayan.)

Writing is an adventure, and the excitement it generates comes from more than getting words on the page. When our writing chooses its own way, or even just meanders, it can take us to surprising and provocative places. I see these journeys emerge in workshops often, and their origin is something of a mystery.

It’s easy for me, the facilitator, to give permission to write freely, to write your most passionate thoughts, your wildest images, your most fantastic ideas, your deepest feelings. But that doesn’t make it happen.

I watch for a mischievous glint in someone’s eye, and then wait for that glint to ignite a spark that goes all around the room. The spark does this on its own, as if everyone is already primed for something interesting. “I’ll let out my wildest thoughts if you’ll let out yours,” the spark seems to say. “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”

A few moments into it, though, the game changes. That wild idea or that passionate thought – whatever we started with – has another thought following close behind, a wilder thought, or one that’s nastier, or one that’s more vulnerable. And that’s followed in turn by a whole string of thoughts, and they could be heading somewhere very dangerous.

We’ve been on a high-dive platform, egging each other on, and our first negotiation now looks way mild. It should be something like, “I’ll take this hazardous journey if you will, too. I’ll follow through to the end if you will, too, no matter what happens.”

The pool we’ve jumped into turns into an ocean and the ocean sucks us in. The current will take us, well, who knows where? To another universe, a dark forbidden room, a plethora of disturbing thoughts, a light movie of our own life, a carnival of mythic passion? We risk a lot more than getting wet.

We are brave adventurers. We’ve dived into the source of our creativity, somewhere in the unknown 99 percent of the brain’s province, where the creative unconscious lives – though the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?” suggests the figure should be 99.999999995 percent. That’s a lot of strange territory and, by definition, it’s all operating with unfamiliar logic.

Perhaps we knew where we were going, perhaps we had some idea what our material might be, but when it’s on the page, it’s a different animal. Scruffy, full of energy, slightly or almost totally unfamiliar, there’s no denying where it came from and it’s  looking us in the eye. Now begins the challenge to understand it.

We’ve been on one heck of an adventure.

“Oh God, thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small.”

We could be overcome with fear and trembling but, usually, we are pleasantly excited. Could it be we’ve misread the origin of our arousal? Our conscious mind, this tiny boat, has a way of persuading that we understand how things work, and it could be in error. That excitement might be transmitted directly to our bodies and psyches by the material itself.

Hair rose on my neck as I wrote that sentence. I wonder if this is the source telling me, in its own way, that I’m hitting the bull’s eye. Our material has been residing in unlit halls, unacknowledged and untouched, and there’s suddenly a crack of daylight. A door is opening. Our material has a chance to push itself into the world for the first time.

Maybe it’s overcome with excitement at the possibility of finally being seen.

(With help from Katie Amatruda and Jeff Karon.)

“Appreciation” is a sweet, inadequate word. And it’s my usual answer when I’m asked why our workshops are productive: “Appreciation is key,” I say. “We appreciate each other’s writing.” Gracious enough and correct for the ambiance. But “appreciation” doesn’t identify the engine that makes the workshops powerful. And doesn’t indicate the scope of the enterprise.

Both got clear this year at my 70th birthday party. During the evening I spoke with a variety of writers who benefitted from our approach. Their writing had become fulfilling practices in their lives, and they were all different: poets, storytellers, singers, novelists, playwrights. They wrote in different styles, too: surreal, satirical, oblique, humorous, direct,  lyrical. Could “appreciation” stretch far enough to foster such different abilities?

What I do is simple. I hold mind and heart open far enough that the writing moves me as much as it can move me. To its full extent, in whatever manner it’s capable. Arriving at this sort of listening took courage, but now it’s mostly automatic.

Along the way I needed to discard some notions. Being cool had to go, and the particular way I write, that had to go too, and also a whole packet of dictums. To discard received wisdom about what makes for effective writing — this took courage. The dictums are accurate all right, the problem is they’re too powerful. Too persuasive. Like being revealing enough so the emotion is palpable, or precise enough so the picture is unencumbered. As dogma, these stultify. Whitman exemplifies the first beautifully, and often misses the second. Emily Dickinson can do the reverse. But both writers are great. When we listen well, without preconceptions, we can enter the unique trance the writer creates.

This open frame of mind came about in the natural course of my life. My mother’s lively spirit came out when she talked to people, and she seemed to find everyone interesting, especially strangers. Herbert Huncke, my second father, made his way by establishing intimacy in conversation within a few minutes. I would follow him around, listening, stunned and half conscious, in awe of his talent.

Huncke and my mother would receive a commonplace greeting and hear the energy behind it. They could sense how it led into a private universe. Behind literary dictums, in the same way, lies a vast, unexplored world. When science informs us that 99% of the brain’s activity is unconscious, we see that this adventure has no limits. Those dictums, like greetings, live in the conscious mind, and the source of writing looms gigantic underneath, in the creative unconscious.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet could be pointing out that no philosophy dreams deeply enough. Literary innovation may seem huge, like Shakespeare pulling dynamic Latinate words into English, but these are tiny fragments of the available universe. Lines of a poem or story may be adroit and praiseworthy, and they are also hints of the huge, energetic place in all of us. A splash from an illimitable ocean. By letting go of preconceptions, we jump out of our rubber raft and into that ocean.
We have a saying in the writing classes, “Embrace your inspiration.” This sounds like putting your arms around something precious. It’s a contradiction, for inspiration is too large to get your arms around. The best we can do is turn, with appreciation, toward our inspiration. Turn in a welcoming manner toward that vast ocean, with our arms spread wide.

“Onto the side street with worn cobblestones underfoot, following the clacking steps of his younger sister, but a man looks out the iron filigree of a café window and shouts….”

Pedro’s writing captured us, moving into this European land and then he upped the ante, bringing in a figure like a ghost. The narrative froze at the picture of a cape-like, billowing shirt. We waited for more action but time was up, that was all Pedro wrote.

We recited back to Pedro the lines we liked, our usual procedure, and he took notes dutifully. I had an agenda in this workshop, though, to get writers to bring copies of their drafts to the next meeting. It was a WordSwell event at the Unitarian Universalist Church, and people could bring their pieces to a higher level. Pedro nodded agreeably but wouldn’t commit even to looking at his piece again, or continuing it. Let alone revising it.

I was in a sidewalk café after the meeting, talking with the editor of our small journal THE SCRIBBLER. She commented how she liked Pedro’s piece, and would print it if Pedro brought it to completion, giving it a middle and an ending. Of course, at that moment, Pedro sauntered by, ordered a coffee, and sat with us.

“Oh, I never revise my pieces,” he proclaimed, “I just do them and leave them lying around.”

“Not even once?” I tried to provoke him.

All that garnered was a smile. Someone had commented that Pedro worked as a political editor and probably didn’t want the heavy weight of his editor on this slight piece.
“I just write them and put them away.”

“You heard that we liked it, didn’t you?” I leaned forward, almost into his face.

“Oh yes,” he seemed to make his way through the world with an agreeable smile, which he flashed again, showing a chipped front tooth.

“Your piece was speaking to us.”

Pedro nodded.

Will this guy to connect with his inner world? And what did I imagine was there, among Hobbit genes and Neanderthal cave paintings drifting through his DNA, 35,000 years of myths finding expression through our lives? I have no idea. Mermaids and dinosaur souls? My sense is only of a vast, shadowy world, entirely unknown until we start exploring. And mostly unknown after we start exploring. But the exploration begins with recognizing it’s there.

“I think it’s speaking to you, and I want you to listen.”

Same smile from Pedro, the tooth chipped at an angle, and a small head-shake.

How can I make this more forceful?

“I think it wants you to listen.”

A strange expression crossed Pedro’s face for once second, a brief shock, as if he had looked inward and saw a dark animal. He noticed.