From Nothing to Something. Marguerite

[Marguerite Van_Cook]

#704

The idea of “felt sense” intrigued me immediately. As an actor I had worked with a different type of “felt sense,” in that case one that rehearses the sensation of place. The technique requires that one recall the feeling of a specific environment, so that one can carry what the setting “feels” like into the performance. I remember clearly an exercise where I felt and smelled the sensation of a pine forest. I recalled the softness of the pines beneath the feet and the type of clarity that comes from the scent of pine, the light that plays through the prickly, branches and the touch of their oily residue on the finger tips. On stage one does not have time to revisit each of these elements, but one comes to know what the environment “feels” like. One may now speak one’s lines from the sense memory of a pine forest. The process allows the body and all the senses to connect profoundly.
Obviously, this is far from the writing aspect of “felt sense” and yet on reading the text I saw the something of how at the time, my acting experience had gone farther than I had realized to make sure that one’s performance is exactly in tune. On reading the “felt sense” text, I became aware of how the body carries memory and most certainly “knows” things that it does not need to articulate, at least until it is time. However, this knowledge is there for us to use if we choose. In fact, it will demand attention. As an actor it allows us to act authentically in a specific setting. As a writer, I frequently have used that type of sensory memory to literally look around me in my memory and to describe what I see and feel. The step I had not taken, was to understand this is terms of inscribing this sensing of what needed to be said; what was demanding to be articulated when the empty page lay before me.
I have certainly experienced a rushing flow of words and ideas, and lo and behold, the right voice to tell them. I have used music to bring me to a place where my senses would be triggered and where I could tap into myself. It is usually pleasurable and at times emotional. The part of the process that I had failed to identify was the place of difficulty. I had not understood that my body was working through a difficult memory and trying to align my hand and pen with the terrible discomfort I was experiencing…“but notice, even here, we know the words aren’t right. We know this because our bodies tell us so. If we learn how to pause here and wait, to attend to the wordless discomfort, often the right words can and do come…Felt sense, then, is the physical (Perl 65).” At times, writing comes to me easily, at others I stall. Surprisingly, the idea of “felt sense” has been helping me through this stalling.
In the course of this class, I found myself wanting to write about a feeling of absence, of nothingness. This seemed to me to be absurd. It seemed absurd to me to write a narrative in which nothing happens, where there is no significant event to turn the story. Yet I have not been able to get away from an insistent idea that I need to tell the story of a walk in which nothing happens. What I now see is I have been stuck in the middle of the walk, in a vast expanse of nothing and space, with nothing along except my feelings. I see now that my feelings are indeed the narrative. They are what happens. My coming to writing emerges from feelings. My feelings are the ink and my body the pen. I have come to feel that my walk is the inscription of my narrative, which both writes my physical being and my emotional script. My sense of erasure has a physical presence. I realize that this is indeed the story that I need to tell.
For a while, I have hovered around something unformed. If I tried to go to a new idea in the day, at night my mind would return to the place where I had stalled. In this case quite literally a pathway across a common. On this path, I am able to look around and see the field and the details about me, but I cannot find what to say. The walk stops and I cannot move along the path. When I read the lines, “what happens when we reach the edge of our thinking? From where do new thoughts come? How do we go from what we know to what we don’t know? Or from what we don’t know to what we know?” I recognized that I was both in the middle of my walk, but also on the edge of my thinking. What would happen if I left the path?
In real life I had done this, but what would it mean now if I left the path of my own rehearsed narrative? I am particularly excited by Gendlin’s explanation of our erroneous binary thinking:
[An] ancient error was to divide between body and feeling, then again between feeling and thinking. Conceptual forms were held to be the forms of reality, while feeling was merely an emotional reaction from the even lower body. In that way the body ended up at the bottom, as if it were the least human “part” of us, as if it could be safely given over to the mechanists without our thereby losing feeling and thought. It isn’t so (1991, 104).
He is so right about this that I know it completely.
I will be working with this idea as I go forward. I have a tool that has opened a way for me to step out of the purely psychological, or mind centric place of creation and into the dangerous and inviting inscription of a more immediate and authentic experience.
Huge revelation!

• This topic was modified 11 years, 5 months ago by Marguerite Van_Cook.

[Anonymous]

#713

Marguerite,

I find this paragraph of your post to be absolutely beautiful and very similar to my feelings:

In the course of this class, I found myself wanting to write about a feeling of absence, of nothingness. This seemed to me to be absurd. It seemed absurd to me to write a narrative in which nothing happens, where there is no significant event to turn the story. Yet I have not been able to get away from an insistent idea that I need to tell the story of a walk in which nothing happens. What I now see is I have been stuck in the middle of the walk, in a vast expanse of nothing and space, with nothing along except my feelings. I see now that my feelings are indeed the narrative. They are what happens. My coming to writing emerges from feelings. My feelings are the ink and my body the pen. I have come to feel that my walk is the inscription of my narrative, which both writes my physical being and my emotional script. My sense of erasure has a physical presence. I realize that this is indeed the story that I need to tell.

My personal writing often forms from this place of wanting to write of nothingness. I want to put words to the silence, words to the uneventful, and to the motionless. It does sound absurd, but I think it is that ability to get stuck in the middle of that walk is what makes us powerful and vulnerable at the same time. We don’t realize what color our feelings are painting around us until we write from silence–write from that blank canvas which uses our existing thoughts and feelings as colors. Thanks for this thought evoking post!

[Sondra Perl]

#724

Marguerite,

I am intrigued by the fact that you have gone through the process of “felt sense” through acting and have been able to tap into it for your writing through music. I find that all other forms of expression distract me from the blank, and my worst writing usually occurs through the sound of music. I can’t help but think, through my own experience compared to yours, about how personal our bodies makes these experiences of creating—and how those embodied felt sense experiences effect the unique voices we present in our writing. Your response was beautiful and poetic.

Thanks,

Chrislande

[Sondra Perl]

#727

Chrislande, Marguerite, Johanna:

While each of you has a unique experience(s) regarding enabling felt sense, there’s also a pervasive concept that felt sense reveals in all of us; felt sense is intrinsically connected to human nature. That being said, we need to recognize what it is and cultivated it.

Sondra’s techniques propose entrances into the mysterious realm of felt sense. Like the shaman requires medicinal herbs, the religious require prayer; others enlist meditative thought, (Whirling Dervish use whirling) we writers need a similar conduit, be it music, silence or method acting, (emphasizes the practice of connecting to a character by drawing sense memory/ emotional recall). Like the over used/misquoted line from Field of Dreams, (paraphrasing) “if we build it they will come”, if we recognize felt sense, it will allow us to draw on prospects of awareness.

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