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Speaking bodies III. Language and wholeness: the transformative practice of language
Think of instances of speech and writing you can't stand, think about which category it fits into. It can be any aspect of language - the speaker is either harmed or wanting to harm
2. Principles: language practices change the structure of our bodies We speak and write from body structure, by means of body structure. By means of language we structure other people. Listening to or reading language we are entrained by it. By our practices with language we also structure ourselves.
3. Delightful language - Think of instances of speech and writing you find good.
- When the speaker is mutual and high-functioning you instinctively like being them. Good language has the effect of maintaining or improving structural wholeness of self and others. 4. Language and trauma
5. Language and wholeness What does 'wholeness' mean? What difference does it make to bodies to 1) consciously feel what they are feeling, and 2) speak and act truthfully from that integral presence of body? What are the costs to health and beauty and intelligence of dissociating internally and hiding externally? What is the meaning of pleasure, organically? How much of ill-health and ugliness comes from suppression of early love? The question of state is ultimately a question of body structure, on both macro and micro levels, so this topic leads us directly to the one below: The brain and body are a simultaneous structure of great complexity, which summarizes everything we have been and known, and in which everything is fitted into place with exquisite logic. But any act, or language act, must issue from that great complex whole in a limiting temporal sequence. So we gradually and over a lifetime unfold the whole we already are. Its implicate order.
6. Another word for structural wholeness is love
7. 'Transformation' (Discussion specific to TLA)
8. Diagnosis: careful listening and reading
9. Methods:
10. Summing up the relation: what is good language? It makes good people, both in the long term and in the moment. Good structure: good state. Intimacy.
Example of intimacy in language Tell us examples Coleridge's poem to his child, the romantics, the modernists Bibliography for Speaking bodies III
Supplementary notes for Speaking bodies III - reading notes and student correspondence Dawn Prince-Hughes on gorilla speech They didn't look at one another, and they didn't look at me. Instead they looked at everything. They were so subtle and steady that I felt like I was watching people for the first time in my whole life, really watching them, free from acting, free from the oppression that comes with brash and bold sound, the blinding stares and uncomfortable closeness that mark the talk of human people. In contrast, these captive people spoke softly, their bodies poetic, their faces and dance poetic, spinning conversations out of the moisture and perfume, out of the ground and out of the past. They were like me. Dawn Prince-Hughes, Songs of the gorilla nation * Favor's annotation of Adrienne Rich Rich, Adrienne 1974/79 "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying," in On Lies, Secrets and Silence, 185-194 New York: W.W. Norton. I carry this essay wherever I go, in all my interactions and all my challenges. When I make a new friend, one who I think I might be able to trust, I ask them if they know this essay. If not, I worry until I have given them a copy. The truth that Adrienne Rich talks about is a truth that holds us accountable for our own lives and loves. This truth allows us our fears, but demands we acknowledge where the fear takes us in ourselves and in our relationships. She writes of the silences that are born of fear, which are at their clearest, lies, and at their most complex, obstacles to truth telling. This essay, this thinking, is how I learned to tell the truth. It is the most important thing I have ever read. Favor Ellis * Language and silence When we are silent we can feel our bodies and we can feel other people. So it seems that evasion of silence can very often be taken as a sign of evasion of body feeling. * Language as attention rather than presentation What I'm talking about is a difference of state that is apparent in writing as a difference in diction, in tone. Let me say a couple of things I don't mean. I don't mean academic writing as such. In my experience academic writing can be extremely beautiful. (One of the things that makes it so is clarity.) I don't mean critical reflection, self-criticism. Monitoring oneself is intrinsic to good writing; any of the voices do that. (Their rules are different though.) What I do mean is segregated left-hemisphere language language that doesn't much consult emotion, sensation, perception, and therefore comes across as formulaic. The tip-off can be a fancifying of lexicon: choice of more educated-sounding words and phrases. See whether, when you go fancy in that way, you are cutting off in some way. Right-hemisphere language is earlier: plainer, more direct and more genuinely creative. Also slower, often. When language is not segregated/distanced/cut-off it can be thought of as a sort of attentional organ rather than a presenting-organ. * Amanda on pleasure and writing acknowledging, lately that my relationship to processes of discovery is highly sensual/erotic that these records, as fraught with confusion and pain as they may be, are really, at their essence, acts of pleasure.
* Anna's VW quote and trusting the telling A thing about both Virgina Woolf and Coleridge is that as writers they trust themselves unconditionally. They can be freaking about this or that about themselves, but they trust the telling of it always. For instance this: this goes on; several times, with varieties of horror. then, at the crisis, instead of the pain remaining intense, it becomes rather vague. i doze. i wake with a start. the wave again! the irrational pain: the sense of failure; generally some specific incident, as for example my taste in green paint, or buying a new dress, or asking dadie for the week end, tacked on. / at last i say, watching as dispassionately as i can, now take a pull of yourself. no more of this. i reason. i take a census of happy people & unhappy. i brace myself to shove to throw batter down. i begin to march blindly forward. i feel obstacles go down. i say it doesn't matter. nothing matters. i become rigid & straight, & then sleep again, & half wake & feel the wave beginning & watch light over the house whitening & wonder how, this time, breakfast & daylight will overcome it; & then hear L. in the passage & simulate for myself as for him, great cheerfulness; & generally am cheerful by the time breakfast is over. does everyone go through this state? why have i so little control? it is not creditable, nor loveable. it is the cause of much waste & pain in my life.
* Anna on language and love I can see that Virginia Woolf has fallen in love with reality, and with the process of discovering it and expressing it accurately. This is what she is talking about in Room when she says that it is the writer's responsibility to find, live in, and communicate "reality," "now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech - and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly". She has fallen in love with thinking of things in themselves; this love creates a vivid life and a numinous reality. Her spiritual philosophy doesn't eschew this world for a dark silent cave in which to seek transcendence from this world and the body; she is immersed with the joy of walking through the marketplace of ten thousand howling and silent things. * Anna on body state evoked by tone and style Welwood's tone feels quiet, warm, and unusually human and accepting. while reading his words, I become silent, still, grounded, and physically centered in my heart. * With Favor on self-division in language: I resent that's what I'm taking in, and I resent that's what I've put out.
* Reading and writing as addiction I don't read for a few days, and I feel numb and lifeless and so thick in whatever is keeping me stuck, I can't move.
* Anna on writing and thinking As I don't know exactly where to begin, I think I'll start from where I am. I'm working on this flow of packet to packet in my thoughts on the work, on a flow of essays and books what I am learning I can do - to think on the page in writing, and then see if it strikes a true note of resonance. I am learning, I think mainly in these two most recent packets, that I can think on the page, that in writing I also discover things, and that if I allow myself to meander and discover and hold my perceptions of imminent judgement at bay then I can have a lot of fun writing. Did I really say that?!! I did. once I get past my initial strong hedging of beginning, I start discovering and finding new ideas, or finding that the ones that were rattling in my head for two weeks take unexpected turns. It's also a question of input-output; if I take in a lot of reading and information, I need to digest it in the writing, and then more ideas and understanding will develop. * With Anna on writing for whom, and styles of thought Virginia Woolf's diary ... did she have some fictional audience in mind? how to create that resonance more and more for myself, so that when I'm no longer at Goddard, I will know how to write, how to write my truth, how to create my own audience that will evoke my deep truth. Some way to write and develop what Virginia Woolf calls a prose style which is completely expressive of my mind. Anna Hawkins
creating a space so loving for yourself, so open, that you can unfurl yourself to yourself, without self criticism and judgment.
I shall here write the first pages of the greatest book in the world. this is what the book would be that was made entirely solely & with integrity of one's thoughts. VW
* Integrating: The work you are doing is not fretting, it is restructuring. It is essential. It is making the platform from which to give and create correctly. If fear arrives this way at night I would guess it's because there is old fear structure built into your brain and when you are asleep you aren't able to keep it suppressed. You get the dream when the brain is trying to be undivided. The implication would be to find ways to feel the quality of the fear, every shred of it, as consciously as possible, but in safety, while you're awake, so the brain can get the wholeness it's trying for. It's about gradually rebuilding your own structure so that whatever has been segregated can rejoin the conscious self. For this to happen the child-you needs to freak out fully in whatever way it does, so that its nonconscious structures can let go and be integrated. At the same time you need to not exactly identify with the freakout you need to keep a sense that it is the child freaking out. * Visual writing I also wondered whether you might be interested in doing some specifically visual writing. I am thinking that because one of the things I value about journal writing is that it seems to allow a very private, and perhaps even unconscious, visual perception to speak. When I start writing I might recall something, from the day before for instance, and as I'm recalling it in the slow private moment of writing, I seem to see more. So it seems worthwhile to set up a trusted connection between the primary perception hemisphere and the speaking/writing hemisphere by exercising that connection intentionally. You can write visual sketches the way you make pencil sketches, simply by looking at what's in front of you and trying to write it. Just a thought. * Journal writing and tuning I've been writing my journal in pencil for years, because there seems to be a tuning-in process, where I start out writing from a surface/social voice and then by seeing that it isn't right, switch to something realer. There's something also about the feel of pencil. Something else I discovered is that if I am hesitating when I sit down with the journal, I write down what I can hear at that moment. It seems to help the switch into a deeper attention. * Journal writing and defensive thoughts writing can also be very destructive to myself if I'm writing interpretations of my self or others
* Journal writing as wider connection I describe events in my journal because I am in some ways too fast and too preoccupied with concealment and suppression to really see them when they happen I have to experience them again in the slowness and connectedness and privacy of writing to know what that other half in me was noticing and concluding. I sit down and say to myself, now what do I really think about that? Looking at something again helps me know more than I did the first time. Invariably. It feels as if there has been someone silent who was present and observing and feeling at the time, but not exactly conscious. When I write in my journal she is able to say what she knows, which interests me a lot. Write about things you want to understand not about things you already have something to say about. That way the writing becomes a way of tapping your feelers (it's Virginia's image) into the wide air like a moth scouting pheromones. Watch how Virginia does it you can see her throwing out bait and then staying very alert while she watches an image rise like a fish (her image too) to answer it. Make it so writing is a way of having a conversation with the lover who lives invisible as the silent half of your brain. * With Layla on writing as day-processing I started journal [writing] to process my day so that my dreams would be more free for intentional work. When you asked me in your letter if I had the experience of a silent observer who is able to say what she knows when I am [writing in my journal] I was going to answer no, but over the course of the packet cycle I began to see that a little bit. I would just suddenly know things (mostly about myself and how I was feeling) that I hadn't consciously known before I was writing.
* Using journals and notebooks later The other thing I use my journal for is to record insights (mostly just because writing them down helps me internalize them).
* Not everything is text replying to Barbara Mor Consider Text/Context. For circa 45-50,000 years of preliterate homo-sapiens time on earth, our Human Text was the same as our Human Context: the Natural Worldthis contextual world - all there was, 24/7 and your dreams - was read as simultaneous pragmatic and sacred Text. Barbara Mor I have a large quarrel with that manner of speaking, which I know is fashionable. A context is not a text. It is important to keep the difference clear. There are no texts until there is writing. Texts have a derivative mode of being: they rely upon and are wholly dependent upon a real world which is not text. We do not read the world: we respond intelligently within it. Speaking of that response as reading is a category mistake: reading is actually a tiny subcategory of the larger category which is intelligent response. I believe the wish to call the real world a text is profoundly patriarchal in impulse, a desire to negate what precedes and continues to be greater than male defensive mentality. Again, it is a category mistake to conflate knowing with scientific data or 'information': use of scientific data is a tiny subcategory of the knowing built into bodies of all kinds (and not just human). What's Left, literally, is The Sinister: the Body's Left Side (Dark Side of the Mother, the Flesh & the Heart): the nagual. This realm which hyper-rational males, positioned along all points of the ideological spectrum, have Dexterously (righteously) marked off as profane, errant, forbiddenEschewing the Dark Side, the Left has no Vision Females are the Original Left Yes, but this is spoken very dichotomously. Male defense often involves refusal to feel and know the body as such (the whole body and not just the left side) (and since there really is nothing else, this implies that it involves a commitment to fantasy), but women use this defense as well. Everyone does. It is in fact a defense against early love and its vulnerabilities, and anyone's ego consciousness is premised on some form of that defense. When women see it only as a male aberrancy, they are doing what men do projecting. * With Layla on what writing is good for In a way I am not sure what place writing holds in the world, how important it is if we are all living in touch with the Earth. Here I have been thinking: why am I writing? Writing: arrogance and often to flee to the head and out of the body, or out of the head even out of body altogether to some other world free of these problems. I think it is only worth it as a gift. It is only worth it if I write what the Earth herself wants people to hear.
* Slow language: Anna on language and felt sense Rather, the unconscious is a "holistic mode of organizing experience and responding to reality that operates outside the normal span of focal attention" What is unconscious, then, are the holistic ways in which the body-mind organism experiences its interconnectedness with reality, prior to the articulations of conscious thought" Eugene Gendlin, teacher of the psychotherapeutic technique called Focusing, which draws one's attention to a felt sense within their experience. The felt sense is the pre-articulate fabric underneath a person's words and actions To be able to articulate this non-verbal felt sense, our attention needs to "shift to a more diffuse attention that allows a holistic scanning of experiential intricacy"(54). Gendlin found that most forward changes happened when clients were able to tap into and speak from their felt experience of the moment. The felt sense is often diffused and blurry; it is preconscious. The challenge is to stay with the unknown of this felt sense in order to move authentically from it. Welwood describes psychological inquiry as an unfolding process, which may begin with this felt sense. We tend to talk about our felt sense, instead of speaking directly from it. The unfolding happens when we zig-zag back and forth between our pre-articulate felt sense and our speech. Unfolding in therapy has three main stages: widening into the felt sense of a situation, direct inquiry into this sense, and articulation from various angles until its crux is discovered, thereby relieving the stuckness. Max Picard's suggestion that speech is powerful and affective when it originates from the large space beyond words; speech that moves "from silence into the word and then back again into the silence and so on, so that the word always comes from the center of silence...Mere verbal noise, on the other hand, moves uninterruptedly along the horizontal line of the sentence...Words that merely come from other words are hard...and lonely" (93). I started with a diffuse felt sense of what I wanted to say This is me learning that there is, in Welwood's terms, a holistic organizing principle that sees and comprehends a larger field than my conscious awareness. The "x" is our conscious awareness, but we actually have access to the rest of the circle, we just don't know it. Becoming connected to one's felt sense is, I think, a critical component of engaging in education in this unconscious exploratory manner. the felt sense, and unconscious process in general, make it possible for a path to emerge, one step at a time. I think a deeper understanding of this felt sense was something I was craving, and is what is transfixing, surprising, and shocking me as I read fiction this semester.
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