Notes on THINKING toward NOTES ON TIME, THE OVER-MIND, CLOUDS, SÉANCE, & EXISTING IN THE VIBRATING NOTHING
You want to describe what it feels like to be caught up in a thought, or maybe the initial discombobulation of an idea. A dream?... The period of time between feeling as if you are going to write and writing, the blurry bleary bearing of the weight of the effects of language before language exists. The words for what you want to envision can be slow to arrive, they can be ungraspable, unfathomable, in flight. But you are there, in the world, in the making space. Walking around the block in the making point of view, staring at the sky with the making daze…
The language you require to write, the language that will become inquiry or depiction, charge or mess, can act as if someone calling to you, yelling something important—or, at least, something you want to hear, a clue or a secret—while running away, down the street, into the wind, through a blizzard, you are rushing after them maybe, or leisurely tracing the figure in the distance, or just their gestures, you are calling their name, desperately trying to make them wait, or you are simply there, a shadow, hoping they’ll notice, that they’ll turn back, though so often this figure (this idea or thought, this bit of the start of what might be writing) is too swift, you can’t catch up, you warble goodbye goodbye goodbye! and wave like a child as you turn away, toward life, which is related to but not the same thing as thinking.
You return to work. You feed yourself or someone else. There’s the internet. You pick up the phone. You remember the sensations of the chasing with true regard. Like love, a lover, a beloved, a rush, you tell someone. Or perhaps you tell no one at all. It’s a little embarrassing. What you have desired, what was once in your mind’s sight, at the brink of your awareness, is gone…
Renee Gladman: “I was poised to write. I was poised to open and write or to open and let writing happen. Since it had yet to be determined what writing actually was, how it formed, and where it went once it was made, you didn’t know what you had to do in order to write. You seemed to want to make a map of that blank slate; you seemed to want to make a mark; you seemed to want to pull a mark out of the blankness. The page opened. It was clean but it crackled like something was living there.”
Dara Wier: “we are provided continuously / with contradictions, multi-dimensional contradictions / whose vanishing points never vanish, whose vanishing points surround us / / and it so happens that it is in these chasms, these ruptures, these rips in some of our most ordinarily accepted veils we are finally in the position to feel something extraordinary / / it is in that space in which contradiction and multi-dimensional paradox can be apprehended / / we are most vulnerable, we are more receptive, or receptors are more sensitive, we are more available / / to shocks of feeling our being is inside all else.”
You want to describe the feeling one is in, the space one passes through, for some a mere instant, they are standing in the shower, matching socks, or outside among the rusting leaves and know it—a bolt!—running to a pen as the world falls out, or for you, what has often been a period of many months, lucky weeks, mystifying years of carrying a hint, a vision, a premonition, an inkling or a shimmer in your chest, the trajectory of which is gradually preparing to… what? Arise?
Would you say you are inside or outside? Small or far away? On the moon? In the zone? On fire? Would you say you are under a spell? Possessed? Treading water? On the wire?
Barbara Guest: “There is an invisible architecture often supporting / the surface of the poem, interrupting the progress of the poem…. An invisible architecture upholds the poem while allowing a moment of / relaxation for the unconscious.… An architecture in the period before the poem finds an exact form and vocabulary—, / / before the visible appearance of the poem on the page and the invisible approach to its composition.”
You wouldn’t call this writer’s block, or being stuck. It isn’t writing but an awareness of writing. It’s the something part of nothing. You are headed toward it. There is an idea just over the horizon. You know where to find it. You might even acknowledge the content (“I am writing an essay on thinking,” “I am writing a poem about grief and knees”) and scratch a heap of haphazard notes toward the question at hand, the burgeoning notion—tossing scraps into the cauldron, wrists drifting above the keyboard—but find that it is, for now, formless, soundless, without syntax, or maybe you are simply incapable of sitting with it, listening, opening to séance. The writing is—“in other words”—there, in the room, a vibrant absence. Something does not have to happen for nothing to stun. Describe the nothing. How it moves you. What it says.
Should we refer to this position as a between state, a before state, or an under state? A purgatory or lobby? An elevator or drowning? Is there a surface or shroud? What is the pulpy middle called? A cloud?
(I am light-headed, nauseous. I am inordinately calm.)
H.D.: “When a creative scientist, artist, or philosopher has been for some hours or days intent on his work, his mind often takes on an almost physical character. That is, his mind becomes his real body. His over-mind becomes his brain…. If I could visualize or describe that over-mind in my own case, I should say this: it seems to me that a cap is over my head… a cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body, contained in a definite space. It is like a closed sea-plant, jelly-fish or anemone. Into that over-mind, thoughts pass and are visible like fish swimming under clear water.”
Signs you are becoming a cloud:
1) Staring for long periods of time at nothing. Sitting patiently, blankly, in a zoned-out trance state.
2) Difficulty listening to others. A separation, a dense (liquidy?) interiority. Less capacity for attending to the world’s surfaces. Levitation and distance.
3) Everything—objects, text, talk, landscapes, song—relates to your thinking. Ideas are ubiquitous. A receptiveness to connection. A bird’s-eye perspective.
4) Longing to amass or define form. An awareness of shifting structures and pattern, of various possible trajectories, shape-lust.
5) An inaudible hum, a heavy lightness, a restlessness in the limbs, a desire to float.
You want to describe the space of this generative haze so that you can feel less bewildered when you’re there, less anxious or impatient for the next step, less eager for proof (having written), less of a rush into and out of thought. You want to stay in the bright gray-green energy that transforms itself to winter storm, or dissipates, that can purple or pass, leaving feathers of soft fog in the distance, minor trace. You have known those who inhabit a thought’s action naturally, or through practice, shifting swiftly from the outside (life, the present, today) to the inside (these mushy cosmos). They move back and forth, they leap in. Others go slowly, enduring the freeze until eventually immersed. Some spend a life in anticipation of the apparition, some wake in the midst of—some can’t remember ever having held a pen. The pages just… appeared for them. A ghost wrote it. Cool.
Gertrude Stein: “Now the few who make writing as it is made and it is to be remarked that the most decided of them are those that are prepared by preparing, are prepared just as the world around them is prepared and is preparing to do it in this way and so if you do not mind I will again tell you how it happens. Naturally one does not know how it happened until it is well over beginning happening.”
(I take my headphones off… A person speaks… It ends in question… I see their face but can’t respond… My thoughts kept speaking loudly…)
At other times you have described the feeling, this thinking-or-being-toward-writing-place, this waiting and vibrating, as trance, hypnotism, or divination. You have imagined the artist as a medium between surface and the indiscernible. As someone who must rid their thinking to listen (challenging). Someone who must accept the limits of a vision, join the language that’s available. Attention gets in the way. Thought begins, then obscures. It is desired but wily. The waiting space changes when consideration fades, when the fading’s vapor tips to the hand and ear. You, as you think of yourself, are no longer there. The detail of you may be, frankly, immaterial.
Cecilia Vicuña: “Awareness is the only creative force that creates itself as it looks at itself. A state of mind is transient and eternal at the same time.”
Lynda Barry: “By image I don’t mean a visual representation, I mean something that is more like a ghost than a picture; something which feels somehow alive, has no fixed meaning and is contained and transported by something that is not alive—a book, a song, a painting—anything we call an ‘art form.’”
A cloud’s materials: light, water, air, time, dirt, poison, wind.
A ghost’s materials: history, death, mystery, desire, soul, house, wind, revenge.
The question could be how to sustain the writing in your mind. How to be always occupied. Not to write it. To keep it private. Is it concentration, or connection; a tender ache? What does it matter to be always considering. To be so regularly adrift, adrift, unmoored, aloft…
You want to describe what it’s like to feel possessed by something without knowing what it is, and without working it out. Without anything to show for when it’s passed by. It’s the presence of condensation, or the consequence of materials on your consciousness. It’s the period in which you exist as the being you are when you’re reading—no one, all states, unstable, open—such that what you call writing is one potential result of, but not necessarily, the practice… You want to admit this time (not remember it) as your life. How to respond when asked where you’ve been?
Sources & recommendations:
1. Renee Gladman’s “I Began the Day,” from Calamities (Wave Books, 2016).
2. Dara Wier’s “Inside Undivided” series (Flying Object, 2010-2015), quote from #1.
3. Barbara Guest’s “Invisible Architecture,” from Forces of Imagination (Kelsey Street Press, 2003).
4. H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision (City Lights, 1982).
5. Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation,” (Hogarth Press, 1926).
6. Cecilia Vicuña’s “Language is Migrant” (documenta 14, 2017).
7. Lynda Barry’s Syllabus (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014).
Caryl Pagel is the author of an essay collection, Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (FC2), and two books of poetry: Twice Told (University of Akron Press) and Experiments I Should Like Tried at My Own Death (Factory Hollow Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in Conduit, The Iowa Review, New American Writing, The Paris Review, and The Rupture. Caryl is a co-founder and publisher at Rescue Press and a poetry editor at jubilat. She teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program.