Lindsey – Felt Sense Response

[Sondra Perl]

#700

If I am correct, I’ve experienced felt sense most of my life. I think felt sense goes hand-in -hand with introverts. My theory is that as an introvert, you are almost hyperaware of your feelings and the feelings of others, which at times can be a hindrance. Sometimes being too self-aware brings on doubts. Additionally, if you are a struggling with past issues such as trauma, we have a strong sense of felt sense, but we have also grown accustomed to pushing those feelings away for a multitude of reasons.

Felt sense reminds me of the combination of what I refer to as being in the zone and/or listening to your intuition. It also has shades of talking to your muse. I know when I have been in the zone, I tend to forget about time and space. That said, I find this type of awareness ephemeral and elusive. But I have hopes that Sondra’s techniques may change this outcome.

I would think that writing when we do not have felt sense, or at least felt sense in a positive way, makes it difficult to continue the writing process. But as writers, we must trust that the feeling will come back and must plod through in order to get to the positive felt sense.

I could understand how a struggling student could use the guidelines to focus awareness.

When we are taught to write we are drilled with instruction as to the right and wrong ways of writing. We are so connected to form that we do not listen to our intuition.

[Sondra Perl]

#702

Dear Lindsay, in your post you write: “I would think that writing when we do not have felt sense, or at least felt sense in a positive way, makes it difficult to continue the writing process. But as writers, we must trust that the feeling will come back and must plod through in order to get to the positive felt sense.” And I think your point really speaks to a sense of powerlessness we might feel at times as writers. We are powerless over when we will receive the visitation of felt sense–it either comes to us or it doesn’t. While this point might seem disempowering, I think it’s also kind of a relief because it places us in the position of being a conduit for something other then ourselves. We don’t have to invent anything; we don’t have to engage with “right and wrong ways of writing.” Instead we have to simply participate in the act of writing, trusting that our felt sense will lead us. It reminds me so much of the discourse surrounding ideas of faith.

You also highlight the tensions between form and intuition, which I think is so interesting. Intuition is a kind of embodied knowledge, a way of seeing the world that is often trivialized. It isn’t really taken seriously in the same way empiricism is. Personally, I think this has a lot to do with misogyny–intuition has often been aligned with femininity (i.e. a woman’s intuition). In our patriarchal culture, the idea that there is a kind of knowledge/knowing beyond articulation, beyond empiricism is threatening. It often gets demeaned as irrational, emotional, and hysterical. Maybe the practice of engaging with felt sense will help recover this capacity for knowledge and vision. I kind of hope so.

[Marguerite Van_Cook]

#717

“That said, I find this type of awareness ephemeral and elusive. But I have hopes that Sondra’s techniques may change this outcome.”

I’m with Patrick on this one. Absolutely, a patriarchal system that privileges concrete knowledge is particularly challenging for women to overcome.
I’d like to offer two citations, the first from Derrida about translation and another from Helene Cixous who speaks about women’s language:

“Babel”: first a proper name, granted. But when we say “Babel” today,
do we know what we are naming? Do we know whom? Consider the survival
of a text that is a legacy, the narrative or the myth of the tower of Babel:
it does not form just one figure among others. Telling at least of the
inadequation of one tongue to another, of one place in the encyclopedia
to another, of language to itself and to meaning, and so forth, it also tells
of the need for figuration, for myth, for tropes, for twists and turns, for
translation inadequate to supply that which multiplicity denies us. In this
sense, it would be the myth of the origin of myth, the metaphor of metaphor,
the narrative of narrative, the translation of translation. It would
not be the only structure hollowing itself out like that, but it would do so
in its own way (itself almost untranslatable, like a proper name), and its
idiom would have to be saved (PSYCHE, Inventions of the Other, Volume I, 191)

I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must
write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing,
from which they have been driven away as violently as from their
bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal.
Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into
history-by her own movement.
The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny
that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen
them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the
equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation
is imperative (The Laugh of the Medusa, Trans.Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, 875).

Either, or both of these passages could be unpacked in the context of “felt sense” and I think that the comments about post- modern thinking in the essay are the starting point for tremendous investigations. In felt sense, can we— do we— is it possible— to move beyond gender? If we are bringing the unspoken or unspeakable into language that lives within a sensation of “rightness” are we not freed from enlightenment binaries and also postmodern logo-centricities? I’m using the “rightness” within specific range here.

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

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