busy geekin' out
Geekin' out big time. When I haven't been performing tricks with MS Excel at work, I've been writing a PERL script to download most of the vital information from all of the emails the TV-B-Gone website has received. The script part of things has been quite a lot of fun and if anyone out there ever needs a PERL script to log on to your email account and download all of the email addresses along with the plain text content of every email in your account to a comma-separated text file, I'm your guy.
In other news, I've started taking a somatics-based class on becoming an "embodied writer". One of the ideas behind somatics seems to be that our bodies, in childhood and in certain deeply formative experiences, initiate certain postures and patterns of movement as forms of self-defense. Usually these postures are intended to interrupt what would, in less threatening circumstances, constitute a normal flow of action or feeling. The problem is that these interrupting gestures often become habituated, outliving their usefulness while remaining below the level of conscious attention. Our bodies are so used to reacting in certain ways to certain cues that we don't even realize a reaction is taking place. At any rate, one of the points of somatics work seems to be that of unlearning those reactions which have become needlessly inhibiting -- in this case, needlessly inhibiting to writing.
One exercise last night required someone to stand behind us, almost-but-not-quite touching, and remain silently standing there for somewhere around 30-60 seconds. The woman I stood behind reported feeling quite unnerved and I expected that I'd have a similar reaction. Instead, I couldn't even tell whether or not she had really moved behind me. I felt no difference whatsoever, save perhaps for a vague warmth from her body. The instructor found my lack of reaction puzzling. Apparently almost no one has no reaction. I mentioned that my partner, Jerry, sometimes worries about me walking home at night because I seem unaware of my surroundings -- and it dawned on me that I might really have a diminished sense of peripheral space, and that this diminished sense might account for a certain inability I've always had to precisely mimic the movements of others, and for why I always sucked so badly at team sports like soccer. Whether it's learning dance steps or learning how to throw a football (which an extraordinarily patient friend taught me how to do in college) -- one has to literally position my limbs the way they should go. I'd always just shrugged it off as me being clumsy or absent-minded, but maybe there's a kind of physiological perceptive phenomenon at work. Weird.
3 Comments:
I practice a meditation which is primarily body-based--uses traditional chinese terms such as qi and yi and so on, but the basic sense of opening somatic channels which have been closed by intentional reflexive behavior is similar. I'm curious as to how your experience with this class affects your writing. Me, with my writing, I've been pretty confused, and while in some ways the meditation has helped me write in ways I never would have, in other ways, it's kind of removed some of the tension I used to write from--which is a good thing holistically speaking, of course, but like I said it leaves me silent, in a way. At least at times.
Thanks for the comment! I'm not sure I've seen an impact on my writing (I've only been to two classes so far) but last week I noticed for the first time that my breathing changes significantly when I read poetry. The inhale/exhale seems to happen between lines . . . and if I consciously change my breathing patterns to something more normal, my mind just glosses over the words . . . they cease to communicate.
It's interesting that you say meditation has removed some of the tension you write from. I wonder whether Buddhist poets like Norman Fischer have faced a similar difficulty . . .
You mentioned that meditation has helped you write in ways you never would have otherwise. How so?
Jay--good questions, I've been trying to formulate some pithy response and am having trouble putting it in words. I guess I'd say a) your experience with your breath as you read is really interesting; b) I remember when the soviet union broke up, reading stories about these once-revered writers who were being ignored by their once-public and, even worse, felt they had nothing to write about. Their writing-consciousness had built itself on a foundation of dysfunctional government. Not that they wanted it to return, but they wanted a similar fit of purpose. So, in a less-grandiose and more neurotic (read--Woody Allenish), fading of an old consciousness-order, with me. Like, where I used to write, basically, about wanting to transcend my limitations through perception, now I'd transcended, without words, those tensions. What to write about? so to your next question/poit, c) I think I'm kind of writing about the difficulty of letting what is around me through me, trying to figure out how to do that. Hence my interest, recently, in Spicer, I guess. I don't think I could have conceived of the necessity of such a poem five years ago--because in a way, I felt that such a thing was much easier.
So I think this'll be a generative confusion. Mostly now, though, I just feel silent often, without a need to speak like I used to. Strange. Thanks for asking. I may post more at my blog, at some point. I remain curious as to how your somatic work plays out, too, of course.
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