My Wild, Secret Discovery

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Writing happens first in the unconscious mind. In From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, Robert Olen Butler says to write first thing, before you encounter language in any of its analytical or “useful” or logical modes. Keep close to the dream state. Now, I never advise you to blindly follow anyone else’s must-dos for writing, since we are all such different creatures. You may, for example, be a night person, whose unconscious is accessed as the day falls away.

But for me, this advice resonated. I already know that I need to keep off the internet and away from email and social media until after I have written. Do I always succeed? No. I know that I have this duality I call “the storyteller” and “the brain,” and that they often wrestle for control of the keyboard or the pen. The early morning, pre linear language, is on the side of the storyteller.

I happen also to be reading a book called The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey that talks about  the way we are split into two selves. He urges us to keep Self 1—that bossy consciousness—from directing and criticizing Self 2—that bodily, creative, active being, the one doing all the ideas that Self 1 lobs at it. But Gallwey points out that Self 2 learns through visualization and embodied action, not through directives and disappointed analysis of the results. That body knowledge matters, is powerful. Trust it.

This connects firmly to Butler’s ideas. Let the unconscious, Self 2, do. Write. Play. Try. If you want to help—oh vigilant Self 1—then visualize the outcome happening. The story emerging onto the page. The tennis ball thwacking over the net. Visualize and then let go. Stop directing.

So a few days ago, I got up even earlier than I do. I already get up at the crack of dawn to meditate for a half hour, and I’ve been doing that for two years—which sounds as absurd and impressive to me as it does to you. Really? I do that? I don’t even have time to put on make up. I do not own a hair dryer. My mother has given me, as a gift, a shopping trip with her, on her, for the last two years of birthdays and I have not had time to schedule it. But somehow, I get up early enough almost every single morning to meditate. And this week, I have been getting up even earlier, so that I can write before I mediate, and still meditate before I make everyone breakfast and make everyone get dressed and put on shoes (currently complete torture for my older seven-year-old) and pack up backpacks and get out the door. I say this because I know that one way or another, your life is ridiculously stuffed with things that have to happen, whether they are the same things as me or not, and I do not want you to think that the important things happen either because there is nothing else going on or because you are one of those magical people who seem to be able to do everything and not break a sweat. Important things get dropped and too much else gets rushed. But.

The mornings are magical for me, vital. The first morning, after I read both these ideas on one day, I woke up and, determined not to read anything that might be considered linear, analytic language, I read poetry. I grabbed a book off the shelf, and it was a book of poetry by W.S. Merwin. (Yes, I read while I brush my teeth and get ready because I have to read more than I am able to read and so I multi-task my reading. Plus I thought that reading poetry would help that unconscious voice well up.)

So I began to read the Merwin, and I thought, he must be a very literal, linear guy. Because the poetry just made crystal clear sense, like reading prose, a story. It just fed into my mind that way, and I thought, I’d better pick another poet. I remembered that Angie had just downloaded a book by Brenda Shaughnessy, the most brilliant, magical, non-linear poet. I zipped to it and read the title poem in Our Andromeda.

And it came at me in the same way.

I just could understand it in a different way than I normally understand poetry. Let’s say that you speak no Italian, but you enjoy listening to it because of the way it rolls around the mouth, because of the song of it. It’s sexy, let’s face it, a sensual pleasure even without sense. Very often that is my relation to poetry. I love to listen to it, but not as a fluent speaker, not for the sense. Well, this poem came to me like my secret Italian lover was suddenly telling me a clear story in a language I could understand.

And then I realized—it was not the poetry that was different, but me. In the witching hour of pre-meditation pre-dawn, I was fluent in poetry! I read that poem and cried. And then I wrote six pages without much stopping. And then I meditated and started breakfast and moved the laundry and life went on. But I’d discovered a secret, and my commitment is to share my secrets with you, even one so miraculous and fragile that I’m nervous to write about it as though it is not a fairy tale but something that really happened on my drawn-on, baby-peed on, torn-up coach one morning in Sebastopol. And the next and the next . . .

Leave a comment! I’d love to know what you discover in the inside out and upside down places where your creativity thrives . . .