At least for me, this piece gave a name to something that I have always been aware of, but never really thought of–like it says from the beginning: “…felt sense has always been there, available to you; you just never had a name for it” (1).
I am more aware of feeling the opposite of felt sense, and am actually more uncomfortable with that. When I am not writing, a wave of dissociation exists vividly on my shoulder. My mind is my mind, and my body is a shell.
My mind isn’t one with my body.
And I feel that.
But then, when I sit down to write, I physically get ready.
I crack my fingers, my wrist, my shoulders, my back, and my neck.
My hair goes into a ponytail, because I know I can’t write what I feel if my neck is distracted. My sleeves must be rolled up, because I know I can’t type the proper words if my arms are distracted.
My legs are crossed on the seat, because I know I can’t concentrate if they are touching the ground.
My hands begin typing,but my mind isn’t following.
So I begin pacing, get distracted, and sit down to redo the entire process over. This can sometimes takes hours, no matter whether it’s a longer paper or a blog post.
Eventually, my mind and body find the will to work with each other.
Reading these 3 chapters, I often stopped and thought back of times that I have had writing experiences that Professor Perl is mentioning. The research questions posed by the teachers of writing, made me realize the nature of in-class writing. As an undergraduate, I took an abundance of in-class exams. Never did I feel right about them. I never paused and had a moment of my own innerness. The writing was dreadful, and the feeling was always one of distaste. Now, as I sit and write, I can stop. I can make my body write for me. What reminded me of this was the description of students writing:
“Often I would notice the following phenomenon: Students would pause in their composing, would sit silently for thirty seconds or a minute, and then would have a burst of composing energy that often led to the creation of a new idea. Something was happening in the silence” (7).
Yes. That silence is exactly what it is. That pause is my mind distracting my body, but then that burst of composing energy is my body colliding with my thoughts to form a new, deeper idea. Sometimes the body forces the mind when the mind runs out of things to write about, and when that happens, it’s almost as if a metaphysical battle is taking place in us, and the clash results in something beautiful. Which is why I think I like creative writing better, because it was pushed out of me feeling something, rather than me forcing myself to write actively.
Lazaroff refers to felt sense “as if the kid inside is taunting me through the adult skin” and this kid he speaks of I think lives in all of us (9). The kid that wants to come out and say something without thought but tauntingly won’t do so without us becoming that inner self.
“…the blank is not filled yet. It hangs there–a blank on the page and also this wordless space inside the writer” (51). The “internal click of right-ness” occurs when that space is absorbed the language that our body helps us manifest. The idea that our mental senses can manipulate our body, and thus what comes out physically and mentally, is such a delicate process. The way our body associates with thoughts, is eerie yet very physically satisfying–especially at the end of the composition. I usually always find myself filled with more energy after writing. My mind I can always prepare to write with, but not my body. I always thought that it was up to my mind when I would feel like writing, but it isn’t. This reminds me of a quote from Virginia Woolf,
Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes…
This piece made me truly step back and realize the sensate nature of our physical bodies. “We have been living within and accepting the false separation between body and mind and between thought and feelings” and this is from which I believe my dissociation seeps through. Just like everything else in our existence, we have grown to create a binary in our internalized selves.
The idea of “Carrying Forward” is also very striking to me, and makes me wonder if there are levels of felt sense. We’ve all had those moments in which we experienced felt sense naturally, but then there are those uncomfortable moments that sometimes leave us paralyzed are extraordinarily painful, or jovial. Sometimes, in the writing process, we enter thoughts that begin showing in our bodies. We cry, we shake, we cannot continue. We feel uncomfortable in these thoughts, and not in control of our bodies. The loss of our control makes us even more vulnerable, especially over something that we are. The realization that we just went into such a thought makes us want to escape from it. And often, after that, our writing feels vulnerable. More delicate. Uneditable. Sacred. Raw. [insert other adjectives here].
Lastly, I think felt sense is a very therapeutic way of healing our mind and our body in tandem. We are entrapped in our bodies, but not our knowledge of language. We, supersede our language, and I think the way our body functions in felt sense shows us exactly how.
