Ironed for making love

Do the signs of auspiciousness reveal themselves only after?

Can ritual initiate the needed state?

Does writing, as verb, tell as spectacle in your body, writer?

I awakened early. It was a soft and slightly rainy Wednesday, not very different from others in my life, but I treasure that Wednesday as a special day, one that belonged only to me. … I poured a cup of black coffee and sat down at the typewriter. I took a clean white piece of paper—like a sheet freshly ironed for making love—and rolled it into the carriage. Then I felt something odd, like a pleasant tickling in my bones, a breeze blowing through the network of veins beneath my skin. I believed that page had been waiting for me for more than twenty years…

Allende, I. 1987/1988 Eva Luna

out from the real world

From Walter Ong:

“Once upon a time,” we begin. The phrase lifts you out of the real world.

Once lifted, where to, writer?

Ong, WJ 1975 The Writer’s audience is always a fiction. PLMA 90,1:9-21

On saying that

In searching for ways to fasten truth and meaning to the structure of sentences, Donald Davidson says that,

One trouble with such sentences [i.e. ‘Galileo said that the earth moves.’ and ‘Scott said that Venus is an inferior planet.’] is that we do not know their logical form. And to admit this is to admit that, whatever else we may know about them, we do not know the first thing.

That we do not know “the first thing,” for Davidson, is a deficiency, a lack; a seemingly undesirable position from which only wrong moves can be played. Isn’t this, however, the achievement we strive for?

Twists and turns make a story story. The less that is known upfront and outright, and the more “the first thing” can be obscured by you, writer, then isn’t it the case that your work pulls deeper?

On Saying That, Synthese 19 (1968-69) 130-146.

Demon

What is the name of your demon?

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

From Orwell’s Why I Write (1946)

Note well: Thank you for the books, friend.

The need-fire

A need-fire is a ritually produced fire that reverses illness, blight and malady afflicting a village.

An interesting precondition to an efficacious need-fire is that all other fires in the region must be extinguished. Only in a state of darkness can a need-fire be struck.

We must begin in darkness, writer. If we lack darkness we must create it. Only then can your words have the power of a need-fire for yourself and others.

If you want to strike your own need-fire this is the historical process as described by the well-read J G Frazer in The Golden Bough.

Two poles were driven into the ground about a foot and a half from each other. Each pole had in the side facing the other a socket into which a smooth cross-piece or roller was fitted. The sockets were stuffed with linen, and two ends of the roller were rammed tightly into the sockets. To make it more flammable the roller was often coated with tar. The rope was then wound round the roller, and the free ends at both sides were gripped by two or more persons, who by pulling the rope to and fro caused the roller to revolve rapidly, till through the friction the linen in the sockets took fire. The sparks were immediately caught in tow or oakum and waved about in a circle until they burst into a bright glow, when straw was applied to it, and the blazing straw used to kindle the fuel that had been stacked to make the bonfire.

(Drive your cattle or horses through the smoke of a properly lit need-fire, or, walk yourself through the smoke and put a little ash on your face to cleanse and protect from whatever misfortune is afoot.)

“Philosophy may be called a sublime ability to say the obvious, to exhibit what is closest.”

Is there a deep deep down, writer? Is that where we are driving with our words and sounds and paper and scratching?

Thinking on the process of thought, John Robert, the philosopher in Iris Murdoch’s novel The Philosopher’s Pupil says he, “descended into primeval chaos and rose grasping some encrusted treasure which instantly crumbled. He pursued quarries into thickets, into corners, into nets, and at the end found nothing there. … If only he could get down deep enough, grasp the difficulties deep deep down and learn to think in an entirely new way.” (Emphasis in original.)

Is it a folly, or mere romance, to contemplate thinking in an entirely new way? Not thinking ‘about’ but thinking ‘how’. How does the wind think? How does a galah think? How does thinking think?

Your herbs and flowers

Protect the garden patch of your sprouting creativity and fertile idea-seeds, writer. Heed Elizabethan poet, Isabella Whitney, when she advises in A Sweet Nosegay;

 

In any wise, be chary that

thou lettest in no Swine:

No Dog to scrape, nor beast that doth

to raven still incline.

For though he make no spare of them,

to such as have good skill:

To slip, to shear, or get in time,

and not his branches kill:

Yet bars he out, such greedy guts,

as come with spite to toot.

And without skill, both Herb and Flower

pluck rashly by the root.

 

Extract from A Sweet Nosegay, or Pleasant Posy: Containing a Hundred and Ten Philosophical Flowers (1573)

What do you write with your last year of life?

Ever reflective and tender, Keats, in a letter to his love Fanny Brawne,

“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.” (Feb. 1820)

Love the principle of beauty in all things, writer.

Gather inclination

Are you afflicted with weakness of will, writer?

Do you sometimes suffer the malady of acedia?

What can remedy the bind of listlessness when there is only the want of energy?

Baudelaire suffered acedia. In his journal he wrote,

“In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it. In refusing instant conversion one risks damnation.

To heal all things, wretchedness, disease or melancholy, absolutely nothing is required but an inclination for work.”

Can you muster an inclination, writer?

Trust me; it will be enough.

What makes no difference?

Have you left it too late for your writing? Too late in the day? Too late in your life?

No. Not conceivable.

Marcus Aurelius says, “Many grains of incense fall on the same altar: one sooner, another later—it makes no difference.”

Write now, writer.

A blue tailed coat, yellow waist-coat and trousers with high boots

He turned his eyes from her, paced up and down the room, and murmured, “Things cannot go on this way,” between his teeth. Lotte, who sensed the terrible state into which these words had plunged him, tried to divert his thought by all sorts of questions, but in vain.

“No Lotte,” he exclaimed, “I shall not see you again!”

“Why do you say that?” she replied, “Werther, you can, you must see us again, only be moderate. O, why must you be born with this vehemence, this unconquerably clinging passion for everything on which you once lay hold! I beg you,” she continued, taking him by the hand, “be more moderate!”

(The sufferings of young Werther, Goethe)

O, why can Werther not be more moderate? Why must be so relentless? Why does he fall, doubt, hurt, commit?

For the reason that he is Werther.

Let yourself be who you are, writer.

Suffering will come whether you do or whether you don’t.

Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen

Ich wandle unter Menschen als den Bruchstücken der Zukunft: jener Zukunft, die ich schaue.

Und das ist all mein Dichten und Trachten, dass ich in Eins dichte und zusammentrage, was Bruchstück ist und Räthsel und grauser Zufall.

Und wie ertrüge ich es, Mensch zu sein, wenn der Mensch nicht auch Dichter und Räthselrather und der Erlöser des Zufalls wäre!

Die Vergangnen zu erlösen und alles „Es war“ umzuschaffen in ein „So wollte ich es!“ — das hiesse mir erst Erlösung!

(Also sprach Zarathustra, Von Friedrich Nietzsche)

 

Gathering by writing creates unity from the pain and chaos. Zarathustra claimed this as his rescue, his deliverance. Let that power into your words today writer. Turn every fact of the past into the acquiescence of your command. Be brave. Make it so.

 

“I walk among people as among the fragments of the future: the future into which I glance.

And it is with all my poetry and aspiration that I write into unity, as I gather the fragments and the riddles, and the terrible accidents.

And how can I endure being human, if each person were not also a poet and a riddle-reader and the Redeemer of accidents!

To redeem the past and to change everything from ‘It was’ into an ‘I wanted it so!’—that alone means redemption to me!

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from Friedrich Nietzsche)

Speechless yearning in Lucretius

For the wounded normally fall in the direction of their wound: the blood spurts out towards the source of the blow; and the enemy who delivered it, if he is fighting at close quarters, is bespattered by the crimson stream. So, when a man is pierced by the shafts of Venus, whether they are launched by a lad with womanish limbs or a woman radiating love from her whole body, he strives towards the source of the wound… His speechless yearning is a presentiment of bliss.

Sensation and Sex

To cast a phenomenon as ineffable is effortless but is that you, writer, hiding from your hard work of bringing to words? Do you lay deceit upon your less than best so that you may settle? What labours allow you to articulate the speechless of being?

Asking after the oblique mystique

“To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work. Likewise for the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly…”

This is Barthes’ observation in The Pleasure of the Text.

Why would it be the case, writer, that our best ideas come indirectly? What power lay hidden beneath our floorboards, in the back of the cupboard, waiting for us to grope and grasp at another object altogether so that we may say with surprise, ‘Look what I found’?

 

End of the World

For Volume IV of his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire wrote an entry for ‘End of the World’.

The greater part of the Greek philosophers held the universe to be eternal both with respect to commencement and duration. But as to this petty portion of the world or universe, this globe of stone and earth and water, of minerals and vapors, which we inhabit, it was somewhat difficult to form an opinion; it was, however, deemed very destructible. It was even said that it had been destroyed more than once, and would be destroyed again.

Let this set you free, writer. The end of the world will come again, and then again. Let it come. Hasten it with your words if you dare.

Has this ever happened to anyone you know?

Following his early career success, a fictional revolutionary poet in Nabokov’s short story A Forgotten Poet, grasps for straws in the pond of ineptitude in his follow-up collection.

“… he had got hold of some German philosopher or other, and several of these poems are distressing because of the grotesque attempt at combining an authentic lyrical spasm with a metaphysical explanation of the universe…”

Do you, or someone you know, suffer from lyrical spasm? Are you tempted to dot your poems with the names of philosophers or literary theorists? It’s not too late to stop. Help is at hand. Just say no.

 

Παραθαρσύνω: embolden and encourage

Writers need tactics. Tactics is the only known surviving work of philosopher Asclepiodiotus (c. 1 BCE – unknown). The text focuses on the titles and formation needed in the phalanx, including the use of chariots and elephants. Chapter V details the character and appropriate size of arms including the use of bronze shields and spears of varying lengths.

“And the Macedonians, men say, with this line of spears do not merely terrify the enemy by their appearance, but also embolden every file-leader, protected as he is by the strength of five…”

καὶ Μακεδόνες μὲν οὕτω τῷ στοίχῳ, φασί, τῶν δοράτων οὐ μόνον τῇ ὄψει τοὺς πολεμίους ἐκπλήττουσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ τῶν λοχαγῶν ἕκαστον παραθαρσύνουσι πέντε δυνάμεσι πεφρουρημένον

The things you fear in your writing, the things you are afraid to write are also the things that give you courage. Your greatest enemy, writer, may be you. Embolden yourself.

 

Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing

An idea from the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s book The Anthologist (2009):

Isn’t crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don’t weep? When you read a great line in a poem, what’s the first thing you do? You can’t help it. Crying is a good thing. And rhyming and weeping—there are obvious linkages between the two. When you listen to a child cry, he cries meter. When you’re an adult, you don’t sob quite that way. But when you are little kid, you go, “Ih-hih-hih-hih, ih-hih-hih-hih.” You actually cry in a duple meter.

Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. We’ve got to face that, and if that’s true, do we want to give drugs so that people won’t weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die.

Tell me you sob. Tell me our poetry lives.

What have you read, writer, that made you weep?

 

Preachings from six elderly doctoresses

Have you ever been betrayed by your words? In the comedic ‘war between the sexes’ text, Gospels of the Distaff (Les Evangiles des Quenouilles c.1475), a sewing circle of women, led by six elderly doctresses, decide to gather and share their collective feminist knowledge in the form of a book. Their knowledge is both profound and trivial.

On Garters in the Street

Nowe ye for as true as the gospell that yf the hose of a woman or of a mayden unbyndeth in the strete & that she lese it, it is sygne & fayleth neuer that her husbande or her loue gothe elles where.

(from Watson’s 1510 translation)

As none of the spinners and needleworkers can write, they ask a humble cleric to transcribe their teachings. He wields a pen, they wield the distaff. He transcribes their words not in the frame of an intimate knowledge but unfortunately, for himself and the women, ironically, as an immense joke.

You, writer, are in possession of both your knowledge and the means to write it. What are you waiting for?

Thorough rebuke, all you proud poets

Are you writing what needs to be written? It takes guts, and balls, to do so.

Take, for example, Gwerful Mechain (1460–1502); a medieval Welsh poet who wrote Poem to the Vagina as a correction to the canon of poems about women, and women’s bodies, that neglect the quim.

 

Cywydd y Cedor (Extract from Poem to the Vagina)

You are a body of boundless strength,
a faultless court of fat’s plumage.
I declare, the quim is fair,
circle of broad-edged lips,
it is a valley longer than a spoon or a hand,
a ditch to hold a penis two hands long;
cunt there by the swelling arse,
song’s table with its double in red.
And the bright saints, men of the church,
when they get the chance, perfect gift,
don’t fail, highest blessing,
by Beuno, to give it a good feel.
For this reason, thorough rebuke,
all you proud poets,
let songs to the quim circulate
without fail to gain reward.

What does your world say you must not write? What are you denied to write?

Write it.

If experience ruptures your philosophy of life let writing be your constant

The grace of writing is an allowance for change.

You, writer, are not stuck.

You are not trapped.

Take, for example, Dionysius the Deserter, sometimes also called Dionysius the Renegade (330-250BCE). He was a Stoic philosopher, poet and author of multiple books on apathy, training exercises (askesis), pleasure (hedone), freedom from the passions (apatheia), how to live, prosperity, kings, praise and barbaric culture.

Confronted with the pain of severe eye inflammation, Dionysius renounced stoicism. According to the biographical entry in Diogenes’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Dionysius “suffered so severely, he could not pronounce pain a thing indifferent.”

Instead, Dionysius concluded that pleasure is the chief good of life. He indulged his remaining years, as a Cyrenaic, in all manner of bodily luxuries and sensual pleasures.

And he wrote.

I am a thorn: beneath the nail

Disband the canon. Appraise the things you were told have significance. Read for yourself.

Poetry does not begin with the Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis. It begins, says Robert Graves in The White Goddess, with the Song of Amergin, an ancient Celtic calendar-alphabet.

I am the womb: of every holt,

I am the blaze: on every hill,

I am the queen: of every hive,

I am the shield: for every head,

I am the tomb: of every hope.

(Stanza III)

What are you, writer?

 

How can hair come from what is not hair, or flesh from what is not flesh?

In Book II of Lives of Eminent Philosophers Diogenes recounts a story about Anaxagoras (500 – 428BCE), a Pre-Socratic philosopher who adopted Athens as his home in his twenties.

“When someone inquired of Anaxagoras, “Have you no concern in your native land?”

Gently, he replied, “I am greatly concerned with my fatherland,” and pointed to the sky.

Anaxagoras was tried for impiety and Medism in 450BCE.  The accusations were based on his claims that the sun was a red, hot stone and that the moon was made of earth. Following the trial, ostracised from Athens, he returned to Iona and settled at Lampsakos where the anniversary of his death was marked as a holiday from school for all children of the region.

What claims do you own in your writing?

What statements do you utter that could befall trouble?

What lands do you call father?

What do you stand for, with your words, so that a public holiday may be named in your honour?

One must hate literature in order to be a philosopher

To the Philosopher

I have brought out two books this year. One of them as I was moved thereto by God Himself, the other because of the slander of men.

Some of those who wear the white or dark mantle [Pagans and Christians] have maintained that I am faithless to philosophy, apparently because I profess grace and harmony of style, and because I venture to say something concerning Homer and concerning the figures of the rhetoricians. In the eyes of such persons one must hate literature in order to be a philosopher, and must occupy himself with divine matters only. No doubt these men alone have become spectators of the knowable. …

A letter from student to teacher; Synesius of Cyrene (370-413) to neoplatonist Hypatia of Alexandria (355-415)

Through these years of the Christians’ brutal attempts to dismantle philosophy, and the violent abuse and murder of philosophers such as Hypatia, Synesius wrote.

He wrote homilies. He wrote letters. He wrote speeches. He wrote essays.

There is no excuse not to write, and every reason to do so.

It’s not you, it’s them

It’s not you, it’s them; words. Have you ever noticed how words will not stay in place? Will not stay where you set them? Will not grind as you command?

You are not alone.

 

…Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still…

(T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’ 152-156)

 

The energy of dislike

As a writer it is your privilege to privately write whatsoever you wish about whomsoever you choose. You can write bad things happening to bad people. And in doing so, know you are in fine company.

Lucian of Samosata wrote satire, his work often targeting public figures. In the quote below, taken from The Passing of Peregrinus, Lucian recounts his version of the life and death of the cynic Peregrinus Proteus (100-165CE). Lucian witnessed the suicide of Peregrinus when he set fire to himself at the 165CE Olympics.

Thereafter he went away a third time, to Egypt, to visit Agathobulus, where he took that wonderful course of training in asceticism, shaving one half of his head, daubing his face with mud, and demonstrating what they call ‘indifference’ by erecting his yard amid a thronging mob of bystanders, besides giving and, taking blows on the back-sides with a stalk of fennel, and playing the mountebank even more audaciously in many other ways.

If you feel blocked in your writing take these words as permission to privately write all the things you think you ought not.

Write your foe into the town-square with a shaved head and dirty face. Write them ‘erecting their yard’ in public. Write them taking blows from vegetables. Expose them as the fraud you know them to be.

Rebel. Be bold. Write what hurts so that you may write free.

 

What we think becoming, others call unseemly

Again, have you never perceived the neck of the dove changing colour so as to assume a countless variety of hues in the rays of the sun? Is it not by turns red, and purple and fiery coloured, and cinereous, and again pale, and ruddy, and every other variety of colour, the very names of which it is not easy to enumerate?

Philo of Alexandria, On Drunkenness 173

What can we be sure of?

What can we be sure of about our writing and about ourselves as writers?

Is our writing good? How do we know?

Are we brave writers? Do we write hard and clear?

Aenesidemus (founder of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, 1CE) was a member of Plato’s Academy led by Philo. Frustrated by dogmatism in the Academy he developed a foundation for the idea that the judgements and knowledge we claim about things is dependent on a series of contingent and changing conditions. For example, people perceive the world differently to other animals, people perceive the world differently to each other, our own bodily senses offers us differing perceptions of the same thing and so forth.

For Aenesidemus, this flux means we cannot unconditionally confirm most of the claims we make about the world, ourselves and others. We can say some things that may be true in particular circumstances, but nothing holds true outside the conditions, or modes, he describes.

What happens if we see our writing as the neck of a dove? Letting it change in the light; seeing with all our senses, not restricting ourselves to the narrow mutterings of our internal one-eyed critic.

Can we now sit and write?

The gift has already been given

It took three hefty gods to chain and rivet the Titan Prometheus to Mt Caucasus. In Aeschylus’ play, Prometheus Bound (430BC), the gods of strength (Kratos), violence (Bia) and black-smithing (Hephaestus) fix Prometheus to the rock.

Kratos says to Hephaestus, “Now drive the adamantine wedge’s stubborn edge straight through his chest with your full force.”

“Alas, Prometheus,” says Hephaestus shortly before exiting the scene, “I groan for your sufferings.”

Defying Zeus, Prometheus gave us fire. Yet, in a speech delivered to the choir of visiting ocean spirits, chained painfully to the rock, Prometheus declares that he also gave us writing. He gifted us the stringing up of letters with which to hold all things in memory.

From Prometheus, we are able to write things down so we will not forget them. Over space and time the things we have written persist.

Do not struggle with your writing. Do not feel it has left you. In a brave and selfless act writing was given to you by a noble hero. It is yours for the taking.

ευχαριστώ Προμηθέως

Consult the oracle

There is a curious story about Zeno of Citium (333-261BC, founder of the school of Stoicism) told in a collection of philosopher’s lives by biographer Diogenes Laërtius (Lives of Eminent Philosophers).

Zeno “…consulted the oracle to know what he should do to attain the best life, and that the god’s response was that he should take on the colour (complexion) of the dead. Whereupon, perceiving what this meant, he studied ancient authors.” (7.2)

What does it mean to take on the colour of the dead? And how could this lead to reading the Classics?

One interpretation, in the context of ancient Greece, is that it meant to retire indoors and conduct intellectual pursuits thereby avoiding the effects sun exposure.  Another interpretation is that of mimicking the dead. To ‘take on the colour of the dead’ is to be like the dead (Socrates being the obvious model here).

Oracles are not straightforward speakers yet Zeno knew what do to with the advice he’d been granted. Perhaps he was going to read the Classics all along and saw confirmation in the oracle’s words?

Could we, then, be our own oracle? Can we predict our future path by doing exactly what we already know we want to do? Can we bring about our possible written works as though the oracle had uttered our course of life?

Ἑκάτων δέ φησι καὶ Ἀπολλώνιος ὁ Τύριος ἐν πρώτῳ Περὶ Ζήνωνος, χρηστηριασαμένου αὐτοῦ τί ράττων ἄριστα βιώσεται, ἀπο-κρίνασθαι τὸν θέον, εἰ συγχρωτίζοιτο τοῖς νεκροῖς· ὅθεν ξυνέντα τὰ τῶν ἀρχαίων ἀναγινώσκειν. τῷ οὖν Κράτητι παρέβαλε τοῦτον τὸν τρόπον. 7.2

Make words speak louder than actions

There is an appeal against the worth of words, placed in the mouth of Ajax by Antisthenes (c. 445-365 BC, founder of the Cynic school of thought).

In an instructional speech delivered against Odysseus, the mythical character Ajax says,

Do not look at words when judging heroic virtue but, rather, at deeds. For war is decided not by word but by deed: we cannot compete in debate with our enemies, but must either conquer them by fighting or be slaves in silence (53.7)

What, then, can words do? What can we judge from words? When might a word have worth? Are not actions, after all, nothing more than the meaning of a word?

My name, for example, is a word, not a deed. It has worth, to me. My name will tell you things about me and only the one who knows it can call me home on the wild nights.

One of our tasks, as good writers, is to choose words more sturdy than the deed.

Prove Ajax wrong.

Nonumque prematur in annum

Horace advised in, Letters to Piso, that once we have written we let our work rest.  “Put your parchment in the closet and keep it back till the ninth year.”

While these lines (386-390, Art of Poetry) are often interpreted as guidance towards quality, they also highlight the proper length of a thing (with a dash of Horace’s characteristic mockery).

A breath is half a chorus. Twelve hours turns a tide from high to low. A carronade is much shorter than a long gun.

The time it takes to write our work is as long as it takes. Speed is not admirable.

Side-step imposed narratives about writer’s block by casting time as part of the writing. The value of the Sun King’s soup tureen is the price that someone is willing to pay for it. The value is set by the act of payment.

The time it takes to write our work is the time it takes. The time we give is part of the writing, not a measure of the work nor a ruling of ourselves as failing or otherwise.

 

… Siquid tamen olim

scripseris, in Maeci descendat iudicis auris

et patris et nostras, nonumque prematur in annum

membranis intus positis; delere licebit

quod non edideris; nescit uox missa reuerti.

Sharp

Gather from rills that run with honey

Socrates: For the poets tell us, don’t they, that the melodies they bring us are gathered from rills that run with honey, out of glens and gardens of the Muses, and they bring them as the bees do honey, flying like the bees? Ion (534a-b)

Writer’s block is frequently discussed as some perverse coupling of procrastination in bed with perfectionism. And The Writer is the rent-by-the-hour dive in which they rendezvous. Writer’s block is often mis-characterised as a flaw or a deficiency with the writer (not the writing, choice of teapot, etc.).

Writers, again and again, describe the experience of writing as an experience of external inspiration, much like historical descriptions of religious revelation. Is block not with writing, not with the writer, not with the unwritten, but with being numb, dumb, blind, bland and deaf to the glens and gardens?

Phaedrus 245a

Let divine madness take hold.

But they who without the divine madness come to the doors of poetry, confident that they will be a good poet by expert knowledge, meets with no success. And the poetry of the sane person vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired mad-person.

Those of us who write in the grip of divine madness will always outshine the beige university professor.

Thank you Socrates, through Plato.

ὃς δ᾿ ἂν ἄνευ μανίας Μουσῶν ἐπὶ ποιητικὰς θύρας ἀφίκηται, πεισθεὶς ὡς ἄρα ἐκ τέχνης ἱκανὸς ποιητὴς ἐσόμενος, ἀτελὴς αὐτός τε καὶ ἡ ποίησις ὑπὸ τῆς τῶν μαινομένων ἡ τοῦ σωφρονοῦντος ἠφανίσθη.

Writer’s block (ii)

The experience of writer’s block, the experience of being powerless to write, coerces the writer to alter their bonds to the world and her things, including the bond between writer and self. This pursuit can initiate both understanding and frustration. Within each is the power to write.

Before breakthrough there must be blockage.

block

“So the days pass and nothing is done”

Below, a quote from Conrad; three sentences in eight hours, all erased.

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down to eight hours every day—and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. There’s not a single word to send you. Not one! … sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking the baby and alarming my wife. … So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with the horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts.

Conrad, J. 1898. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad

If I were Queen

The subjunctive mood is where we can imagine and articulate possibilities. It is how we can think and express other worlds, other systems, other politics, other structures. It is the part of language devoted to speaking our desires, wishes and dreams as things in themselves.

A language strong in subjunctive mood permits exchanges about experiences such as serendipity, intuition and premonition without slaughtering the experience through explanation and rationalisation. A complex subjunctive mood language creates a world before the corruptions of the -ologies (psychology, sociology and so forth). Yet, while the subjunctive mood is a frequent state in our actual living, it is not well tolerated when we write prose and fiction in English.

This is a problem.

We are living, and we are being, yet we have let our language slip and harden into structures of fact and reason. We have fixed ourselves to what is, not what can be.

On 19 September falls ‘Talk Like a Pirate’ day. Around the world women and men resurrect the world of Treasure Island in their everyday observations and conversations. Perhaps, in years to come, we will celebrate ‘Talk in the Subjunctive Mood’ day.

 

Is writer’s block a social condition?

Writer’s block, the inability to write which is unconnected to a lack of skill or indifference, is often characterised as an internal, individual condition. How then can we make sense of the benefit to writing after a change in our environment?

A change in our setting, atmosphere, tools or routine can often have a positive impact on both the quality and quantity of our writing process. Writing in a different location can mean we write more. Switching to a pencil from a keyboard can mean we write more deeply about our topic. Writing on a train or bus instead of a desk can forge new connections. A change in our environmental conditions can be a writer’s marvel.

This fact suggests writing, as an act of creation, is something other than the expressed ideas of a discrete cognitive process. Could this also be the case for writer’s block? Is there benefit to characterising writer’s block as a social or contextual response? Does such a change in perspective release us, as writers, from the burden of under-performance?

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

Is there reasoning in our idea of writer’s block?

 

  1. The writer has a tendency to write. Tendency is a union of desire (I want to) and capacity (I can).
  2. This tendency is visible in writing-process behaviour. E.g., constructing sentences, shaping notes into logical paragraphs, correcting draft work and so forth.
  3. Writing-process behaviours often, eventually, produce a consequence such as a publishable text, a novel, a poem, a letter, a journal.
  4. Writer’s block is presence of [1] and the absence of [2], [3] and/or [4].

 

If [1] is not present, writer’s block cannot be present.

 

Is there a conflict with the idea of writer’s block and the presence of capacity, the I-can-ness, of writing as an activity? Isn’t writer’s block a lack of capacity; an experience of I-cannot-ness?

Yet, if we remove capacity from [1] does that mean desire unfulfilled completes the picture of writer’s block? Could we say an oak tree has writer’s block if she desires to write but cannot?

Are there grades of capacity? Should we say that the capacity in [1] has been diminished in certain respects? I.e., the writer retains some capacities such as holding a pencil and directing language yet tacit elements of writing as an activity will not open or yield fruit.

Under what circumstances can capacity become and incapacity? Or is it that capacities can become dull?

Writer’s block (i)

Generally, writer’s block is described as the experience of being unable to write, despite the desire to write, wherein no other perceptible incapacities prevent writing. Some people claim writer’s block is a myth; that it is a form of self-delusion. Denial, however, is an unhelpful approach to a person experiencing writer’s block.

Writer’s block is often characterised as a type of suffering. It could, perhaps, be thought of as a type of pain. This view, of writer’s block as a type of pain, may have more efficacy than the usual psychological approach to writer’s block as a stress reaction.

We have a range of effective frameworks for understanding and managing pain. The experience of suffering, in contrast, is often left unattended and demoted as less critical than an experience of pain.

 

Some notes on disgust

Disgust is a fertile state from which we can explore body/knowledge intersections. From Deborah Durham’s 2011 article in Ethos, “…disgust is part of an array of sensations that are seen to be beyond reason and rationality. To ‘feel something in one’s gut’ or ‘know something in one’s gut’ is to know it surely and incontrovertibly: like gut-knowledge, disgust in American is both non-rational, yet also a form of knowledge.”

‘Non-rational knowledge’ seems an overly complicated, and morally-laden, description for an ordinary practice. Is there a way to heal the cleave between ‘feel’ and ‘know’ so that we can discuss a closer-to-whole beast of knowledge? Are there singular words and meanings we can use to replace the go-to divided choices that have become an unproductive formula?

Taking an anthropological turn away from the assumption of the individual sovereign self, can lead us to reach for intersubjective, inclusive paradigms like ‘atmosphere’, ‘quality’, ‘vibration’ and ‘empathy’. Yet these meanings of assembly and inclusive connection have not yet borne the resolution, beyond Cartesianism, that is recognisably possible.

In a phenomenological exploration of pain, Frederik Buytendijk characterises the state of being ‘in’ pain as a severing of the self from the world. Aurel Kolnai, in a phenomenology of disgust, says disgust extends the self into the world. Disgust is a bridge. To experience disgust entails a real or imagined intimacy with the object of disgust.

Kolnai’s use of ‘intimacy’ places us into a more productive register than ‘non-rational knowledge’. Firstly, intimacy itself is a knowledge, an understanding of the strongest kind. And, second, intimacy is an ‘active’ knowledge in contrast to the passivity of non-rational knowledge concepts such as ‘atmosphere’, etc.. Intimacy is a knowledge known in the atmosphere of experience.

Durham asks us to think of disgust as an act of embodied imagination in the company of an intimacy-distancing dynamic (both in and out, both near and far, both push and pull, etc.). Yet, imagination cannot be anything other than embodied. (E.g., what would a dis-embodied imagination entail? Arial maps? House plans? What could an unembodied imagination be? A ghost’s story? A trans-human unseeable vision?)

Imagine eating fresh human faeces. Warm, waxy on your lips. Your teeth slide into the dark, soft cigar. The smell of shit feels like a thick cloud attached to you from within. Are you experiencing ‘non-rational knowledge’? Do you have an array of sensations ‘beyond reason and rationality’?

I didn’t think so.

Doesn’t the power of ‘gut-knowledge’ demand the engagement of an appropriate gut-knowledge language? Would not that simple act alone indicate the deserved respect for the unspoken supremacy of our body, flesh; gut-intimate both delicate and undeniable?

 

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Epistemological concussion and masochism

We, people, observe particular knowledges even when our experiences falsify that knowledge. What we say is different to what we do, and different again, to what we believe.

Interesting writing seeks out our sites of epistemological concussion because, therein, is usually something worth saying in words.

Our epistemological concussion at the sites of pain and pleasure are a distinctly deep knowledge/experience trauma. So much of what we claim to know about pain fails to correlate to our first-person experience. For this reason, sadism and masochism are interesting settings of epistemological concussion worthy of words.

The word, ‘masochism’ has been likened to a wound (see, for example, Eugenie Brinkema drawing from Lacan and Nancy (but regrettably not Derrida)). In this metaphor, the wound of/from masochism is a result of a lack of definition. For masochism (pleasure in pain) to be what it is, pain cannot mean what it means and pleasure cannot mean what it means.

While a literary treatment of masochism is blessedly refreshing compared to the usual psychological and medical stodge, such an approach tends towards a performative narcissism at the expense of the topic at hand. The first responder to any knowing/living epistemological concussion is best chosen from ordinary language. That is what it means to write hard and clear.

Masochism as a wound—a gaping split, a leaking suture, a sore slash, a wet gash, a weeping wound—with these words we begin to find our living pain knowledge.

 

Why did we hurt sadism?

This post condemns emotional, physical, verbal, etc. violence upon non-consenting creatures, things and persons. Transgression without permission is law-breaking criminality and should not be confused with the art of sadism.

Most people, even those who claim to be learned, parrot predictable narratives about the function and meaning of a thing called ‘sadism.’ Sadism lurks in the realm of the sexual, the perverted, the immoral and the violent. Sadism is, a typical parroted narrative claims, a disorder in which sexual gratification is achieved through the infliction of pain.

Most texts on sadism will trudge through the accepted historical emergence from the chronicles of Sade to the delousing of Deleuze. As this has all been done to the point of boredom and it will not be repeated here. The accepted history of sadism is a cliché, i.e. a concept drained of any genuine meaning. Moreover, it is a lazy history. Does anyone truly believe that up until the novel Justine no one explored the dimensions of being alive?

Turning anything into an ‘–ism’ is a way of killing our ability to see the thing itself. Once an ‘-ism’ is consigned to a thing it becomes forced to bear the burden of moral consensus and is, therefore, subject to policing. A person who participates in an ‘-ism’ is usually labelled and ‘-ist’.

Imagine something that is not an ‘-ism’, e.g. a deep love and commitment to dogs. Of all the mammals, four-footed things and living creatures, our Dogist practices Dogism in her choices because it gives her pleasure. (This notion, of desiring a thing because it has a consequence, a result, or an end goal, of personal pleasure, is another unfounded and oft repeated fiction in the realm of sadism.)

She is naturally wired (another parroted narrative) to prefer the experience of dogs. Dogs are part of her cognitive pleasure structure.  She prefers to pat dogs, to walk them, to groom them, to throw a stick and see the dog leap with joy and energy. She once patted a budgie but it did nothing for her.

Some texts speculate that when she was a young girl she had a negative experience that shaped her towards being a dogist. Some significant adult figure was either overbearing or absent, cruel or neglectful, and in those early experiences her dogism seed was planted.

We study her and try to ‘explain’ why she is different. We begin to call her difference a perversion, and she, therefore, a pervert. She has a condition, a disorder.

We need to medicalise her condition. Psychoanalysis, hypnosis, behaviour therapy, cognitive therapy, drug therapy, exorcism, and a transition to synthetic dogs. Dogism, however, presents treatment challenges, because it is often concealed, and is often associated with guilt and shame. (Another cart-before-the-horse parroted narrative; shame is result of dominant cultural values, not individual biological processes.)

The Kennel Club argues that behind closed doors consenting, mature adults should be allowed to keep and care for dogs. We once had a robust licencing system and dog-friendly public spaces but they have fallen away. As the medicalisation of dogism as a disorder grew, we began to forget the art of ourselves as being alive and capable of diverse and beautiful experiences.

We have confused dogism and few of us bother to remember when things were different to today. We have polluted dogism with the crimes of people who are cruel and violent to dogs. Those people are not dogists, that much is obvious. The spaces that accepted dogists have become both shameful in mainstream life and commercialised as a role-driven industry.

Our dogist, our heroine, tries to fight on all these fronts, to remain true to the practice of living as she knows it. She is not a dogist at all; she is a person with a timeless love and infinite care for dogs because they are dogs.

Is the writing the philosophy, or the object of a philosophical process?

Husserl tends to describe the written artefact of phenomenological investigation as “Ausdruck” (expression) and “Deskription Ausdruck” (descriptive expression), “beschreibungen” (descriptions). The written down phenomenological findings are not meant to ‘represent’ the observed phenomenological experience of the past but serve to be a “predictive synthesis”.  (Predictive synthesis of doxa, for example, or predictive synthesis for the future horizon implicit in all perception). We write-out the ‘aspects’ of a phenomenon (experience) as they are, which encompasses their potential.

Writing, then, is for the future, for the possibilities. We write phenomenological descriptions from observation not to capture the ended temporalities, but to open the future to risk, prospect, chance.

Wonderful, yes?

Is philosophy a result or a process? A done thing or a doing?

In philosophy, particular symbolic acts are valued while others are devalued. For example, clarity is valued and vagueness is not. Order is valued, disorder not. Articulate philosophy is safe, while tongue-tied philosophy is a risk. Consistency is esteemed, contradiction admonished.

Yet, to be alive philosophy ought to be an inconsistency; a struggle to understand, a process of gaining clearness, always shouldering haze and obscurity.

Phenomenology, philosophy ‘performed’ as a descriptive process, has the capacity to turn away from analytic forms and turn towards writing. Writing is our entry into the incoherent. Use the checklist below to rate your words as good philosophical process writing. If you can tick three or more descriptors, congratulations. Keep writing.

 

CHECKLIST

My philosophical writing is,

  • Stupid
  • Messy
  • Disjointed
  • Difficult
  • Nonsensical
  • Frustrating
  • Incomplete
  • Confused
  • Struggling
  • Unfinished

What can a phenomenologist see when they look at the world?

Husserl talks about gegebenheit when describing the process of perceiving something in the world. In translation to English we usually use the word ‘givenness’. Givenness illustrates two aspects of the world. It is a quality of that which is given, or perceived, as well as the act of it being giving.

Givenness has a generous, immediate and egalitarian quality. It is a process of offering rather than exchange or ‘having’. The world perceived ‘displays’ and ‘contains’ givenness. It is a condition. It is not ‘displayed’ for us to have, nor are we asked a price for it.

Givenness is a quality of the process of being. The givenness of a tree is not hidden nor delayed from our perception, it is immediately present. The givenness is neither reserved for certain types of creatures or those with endorsed qualifications. It is there for all and every and always.

If you look you will see that the world gives itself to you. You don’t need any documented credentials, or socially endorsed status, or sanctioned knowledge. You don’t have to be a celebrity, or a person with a title, or CEO of McMeaters.

The whole world is given to you; how will you describe what you perceive?

 

Image: Delegation admiring Tom Bass sculpture ‘Ethos’

 

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Is pain a pleasure through ‘some strange alchemy’?

Ever bitten into a tiny raw chilli? Or ordered a twice-hot curry for dinner? What was your experience? And, importantly, how can you bring that experience into the best lights through your personal form of writing?

In A Defence of Masochism, Phillips says ‘…if pain can become pleasure through some strange alchemy, perhaps pleasure itself it not so easily understood” (p35).

Putting the straw-person aside (i.e. who ever said pleasure was easily understood?) there is a glaring deficiency in Phillips’ argument; namely the use of the phrase “through some strange alchemy.” I see this deficiency repeated in many philosophical explorations. Furthermore, rather than pausing to do the hard work to resolve or account for the deficiency, Phillips skips to the next premise, hoping that the wilful act of writing down the words will be sufficient for advancing the argument. But, of course, it is not sufficient.

If you, in your own work, are struggling to express or understand a problem, such as pain, consciousness, symbolism, culture, life, etc., you will reach for grout that permits you to lay the next tile in your thought and development. In Phillips, “through some strange alchemy” is that grout, gap-filler. These pseudo-claims are a useful tool and should be used in early draft work. They keep an argument in motion.

Published texts, however, such as A Defence of Masochism, are devalued as a whole when lazy, magical, hand-wavy putty work is not replaced with a sincere struggle towards candid articulation.

Pain and pleasure are so deeply embedded in our narrative and cultural structures that is it indisputably difficult to experience these phenomena as they appear. The accepted homilies that pass for knowledge, e.g. we are adverse to pain and seek pleasure, dominate pain studies in philosophy. A potentially disruptive text, such as A Defence of Masochism, cannot afford to accept “some strange alchemy” as a satisfactory contribution if it is to challenge orthodoxy with effect.

Pain and pleasure are refreshingly complex experiences. When we describe them as they appear, we may first notice the many discrepancies. Holes appear, for example, between accepted narratives such as pain being painful, pain being undesirable, when contrasted with the experienced pleasure of burning and sweating from a painfully hot meal. The experience of pain and pleasure do not align with our accepted knowledge.

In The Crisis of the European Sciences Husserl said, “I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others…” If we commit and follow through our right to speak out the experience of the world for our own self, in our best lights, we will find the stamina to write past lame “alchemy” claims into productive description. Pain studies, from the clinical to the erotic, are in need of quality first person experiential description.

 

Phillips, A. 1998. A Defence of Masochism. London: Faber and Faber

 

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**Hats off to a treasured reader for the Phillips text.

Opening into the dog; how phenomenology gives us fresh eyes

Phenomenology goes against the tide. It embraces the first-person, or subjective experience, as authorised, logical, valid and legitimate. In phenomenology the first-person point of view is generous, trustworthy and valuable. To understand the strength and uniqueness of the first person requires we release particular stories or myths about the world and how we perceive it.

We are given a script for how the world works yet often, if we stop and look beyond the script, we can see the story fails to fit, to varying degrees. The world itself differs to the story. Our experience of the world exceeds the structures we have constructed. And, if we allow the old story to crumble, we may see the world with fresh eyes, as it is, not as we narrate it.

Many elements of the script, or story, can be safely discharged. Below is my first suggestion.

First, we must reject the idea of perception as a script between two parties; the seer or perceiver and the seen or perceived. The accepted story of perception is that you look at, for example, a dog. You then perform a mysterious, cognitive, internal, private magic called cognition, perception, thinking, representing, etc..

Many textbooks contain a version of a familiar diagram that claims to depict ‘the act of perception’. In this, a drawing of your eyeball may project an arrow onto the form of a dog. From the dog, a second arrow draws out and targets your eyeball. Inside your skull, or above your head in a fluffy cloud, sits a smaller version of the dog. This script has two roles: there is you, looking, and there is the dog, being looked at.

Yet, what of the arrows? Looking is not an act of the eye upon an object. Looking contains not two ‘performances’ in the looker and the looked. To see is a three part event. Seer, seen and seeing itself. The experience of looking seeing, perceiving is not one of cognising then representing to oneself.

If we are standing beside each other, both having an experience that includes looking at a dog and I ask you, “Where is the dog?” you do not point at your head. You point to the dog. When we perceive the dog, we are putting ourselves ‘in’ the dog. We are not creating a small dog within us. We are, instead, reaching out, accepting the givenness, opening into the dog.

Phenomenology is built on the idea that when we experience, we are experiencing something. That is, that consciousness is always a consciousness of something. ‘Of’, which seems a small word here, is actually doing an incredible amount of muscle work. The phenomenological idea of intentionality is often defined as “consciousness of something” yet this ‘definition’ tends to produce fog not clarity. The key is the power of ‘of’.

The experience of perceiving a dog is an experience whereby our consciousness is sited within the dog. Our act of intentionality is to find that consciousness there.

Let me know what you think of this idea.

And look out for the next few posts where we will challenge other aspects of ‘the script’ about perception through the clean-cutting power of phenomenology.

 

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How does phenomenology generate knowledge?

Too often, phenomenology is reduced to a simple schema or steps that must be followed. Let’s take Woodruff-Smith as an example of an over-simplified phenomenology,

“By etymology, phenomenology is the study of phenomena, in the root meaning of appearances; or, better, the ways things appear to us in our experience, the ways we experience things in the world around us. We practice phenomenology (with or without the name) whenever we pause in reflection and ask, “What do I see?,” “How do I feel?,” “What am I thinking?,” “What do I intend to do?,” answering in the first person, specifying the way I experience what I see, feel, think and so on. We produce a phenomenological description of an experience as we declare, attending to our own experience, “I see that fishing boat in the fog,” “I feel angry about what was just said,” “I think that Husserl read Hume,” “I intend to sweep the patio tomorrow” (Woodruff-Smith).

 

So, in Woodruff-Smith’s process we,

  1. Declare our experience,
  2. The declaration describes, and
  3. phenomenology is done.

It is that simple?

No.

  1. I see wind playing in leaves.
  2. Last night’s mackerel makes me weary.
  3. I wonder who you are.

These descriptions follow Woodruff-Smith’s rules but fail as phenomenology.

 

One of the books closest to the heart of phenomenology is Husserl’s Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution (Ideen II). (Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution.)

Ideen II begins with frankness. Husserl observes that nature, as the object of natural science, is not ‘natural’; to perceive nature in this way is itself a constructed perception, an attitude. “Das wird sich verstehen,” says Husserl,“wenn wir die Art der Einstellung des naturwissenschaftlich anschauenden und denkenden Subjekts genauer betrachten wir werden durch ihre phänomenologische Beschreibung erkennen, daß, was es Natur nennt, eben das intentionale Korrelat der in dieser Einstellung vollzogenen Erfahrung ist”.

From within an attitude, the act of looking (noesis) creates a perception of what is seen. Perception is itself an object.

This will be understood,” says Husserl, “if we consider the nature of the setting of scientific intuiting and the thinking subject in more detail, we can recognise through a phenomenological description of it that the object it calls Nature, is precisely the intentional correlate that is accomplished in this setting experience” (emphasis added).

In phenomenology, knowledge is in-from-the writing-reading. Husserl, above, says it is “through” the phenomenological description that we come to understand. He does not say “owing to”, “subsequently from” nor “as a result of”. In passage “through” phenomenological description may we open into knowledge. Knowledge is not a place we arrive at nor a consequence of having consumed. “Through” phenomenological description is the knowledge.

Writing description is not a second turn at living. A statement of experience is not a description. Phenomenology is not a system for producing conclusions. “Through” phenomenological description is the knowledge.

 

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Husserl, E., 1994. Briefwechsel. [Correspondence.]. The Hague: Kluwer Academic.

Woodruff-Smith, D., 2013. Husserl. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

What can you do with a Stupid Detector?

I have an organic machine that gives me quantified readings of the stupidity of things in the world. My machine almost broke beyond repair as I read Christian Tewes ‘The Phenomenology of Habits.’ Below is the last report my machine provided about this article and why it achieved such a high ranking in stupid.

The article claims to be based on “phenomenology in the Husserlian sense.” Instead of doing the hard work of struggling through with Husserl and his words, the article is absent of any of Husserl’s writing. Instead, the article draws from a range of off-topic, online journal articles. Stupid.

This leads to the second stupid. The article has an odd, and rather ‘special’, view as to what “phenomenology in the Husserlian sense” involves. “Phenomenology in the Husserlian sense aims at discovering essential structures of phenomenal experiences. One can differentiate here between the pre-reflexive … everyday experiences and the specification of these experiences from a reflexive stance, the so-called ‘phenomenological reduction’ … . After having suspended the natural attitude toward everyday experiences, the next step in a phenomenological analysis is to find, in a quasi-mathematical spirit, the ideal possibilities or conceptual structures involved in these experiences…”. Stupid.

Let’s recap the generally agreed upon tenets of what can be considered Husserlian phenomenology. It is the study, not the “discovery” of the structures of experience. The study of these structures is partly achieved through writing a particular type of description from the experience, not “about” the experience. This all takes place from the free of charge, egalitarian and non-academic learning centre known as ‘you’; the first-person, the subjective.

This is the salve of phenomenology in our science-greedy, number-crunching, depersonalised era. Phenomenology is a means to rich and meaningful knowledge about ourselves as people. It can help us shape our world to fit us, rather than the reverse which bears out the negative consequences we see around us today. People who feel alienated, ill-suited, failed. Groups of people who experience exclusion or invisibility. The voiceless living—plants, animals, eco-systems—sacrificed for short-thought economies. Phenomenology has the capacity to ‘tell it like it is’ from your experience as binding and authorised.

The word “discovery” makes the structures of experience sound like the dark side of the moon, but they are right there in front of us—we ‘do’ them all the time. We don’t ‘discover’ them, any more than I discover my hand at the end of my arm when I wake up in the morning. And the little word “about” tells us the source of the problem: Tewes thinks of us, in writing, taking up a standpoint outside our experiences; but this is to miss … well, everything—it is to miss phenomenology.

Tewes wants us to know one more piece of stupid; this repeated in various ways throughout the article. “It is important to highlight that the concrete findings of such a procedure are open to falsification.” “The results of such phenomenological-informed neuropsychological research projects would, of course, be open to falsification.”

And this is the heart of stupid. At once using the word ‘phenomenology’ as a handmaiden for a socially destructive agenda while at the very same time not having the courage to trust. Life is open to falsification. Experience is open to falsification. If a loved one tells you about their bad day, do you listen with sympathy knowing that their whole description is, fundamentally, open to falsification?

What is it that makes Tewes so insecure? Why cling to tools that have no place in this domain? Why employ phenomenology with such insincerity? My organic stupid machine cannot answer these questions. I have to figure them out for myself.

Tewes, C. 2018. ‘The Phenomenology of Habits: Integrating First-Person and Neuropsychological Studies of Memory,’ Frontiers in Psychology 9, p1176

How writing rescues us from being dull and blind

Of the experience in writing phenomenology, van Manen says, “it is like falling into a twilight zone, where things are no longer recognizably the same, where words are displaced, where I can lose my orientation, where anything can happen.” A partial loss of self is how van Manen describes his experience of writing. Yet, if we wish to discuss this as one’s relationship to oneself, I think it is not an experience of loss but of suspension and adaptation. We are somewhere other than our Körper place. We are in the space of our Leib self; sensing and animated without the threats of material life and death.

Below is an example from one of Behnke’s phenomenological experiments in perceiving kinaesthetic affectivity. In simple terms, it is an observation made from a practice that creates a space of bodily openness. In this space intersubjective empathetic responses to other bodies can move from being anonymous, or ignored, to being seen and observed. When you read this passage, imagine Behnke gently walking around parts of her urban environment with an awareness of her self as a body and the bodies of nearby ‘anothers’. We enter the description as she is pushing open a door in readiness of walking through the doorway.

“On closer examination, however, one can begin to sense, for instance, how one’s hand is already holding a door open rather than letting it go, in a way whose timing is already coordinated with the movement of others who are about to go through the same door. Or one can feel the pressure of the shopping cart’s handle against one’s hands as one is already checking its motion to make way for another shopper even before consciously ‘‘steering’’ one way or another. (Behnke)

The push of your hand on a shopping trolley, or door-knob, in a named consciousness towards other nearby bodies she calls “interkinaesthetic civility” which “weaves a fabric of reciprocity”. Even without the complicated back-of-house phenomenological theory this description is beautiful and stands with strength on its own. How did Behnke achieve this? How does she write such insightful passages?

In describing a phenomenon we may not know what needs to be chosen and highlighted from the infinitude of experience until the choice is made. Such selections are felt in the process of writing. As we scrawl, one sentence another follows; a sentence is not an idea or meaning but a metaphor (literally a carry-over). As Ingarden insightfully saw, when we describe an aspect of an object we do not describe the object.  “In fact, it is quite the opposite. If the aspects were described, then what is represented in the work would be, not the objectivity that is to appear in them, but the aspects themselves… and the corresponding object would either totally disappear… or would belong to the work only as something that is indirectly represented”. Phenomenology as a practice of writing description is our path around anonymity, dull consensus and predictability to the phenomena as it essentially appears. We can begin to see the truths of the world not through observation but through written description and that is the practice of phenomenology.

 

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Behnke, E. A., 2008. Interkinaesthetic Affectivity: A Phenomenological Approach. Continental Philosophy Review, Volume 41, pp. 143-161.

Ingarden, R., 1973. The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

van Manen, M., 2002. Writing in the Dark: Phenomenological Studies in Interpretive Inquiry. London(Ontario): University of Western Ontario.