Writing Toward the Unconscious
“The texture of memory and the texture of dreams are curiously similar; an intense combination of a freedom verging on randomness and a specificity that feels oneiric. Most narratives of dreams simply don’t work, on a technical level, while most dreams do narratively “work” as dreams. You don’t have a dream and think, “That was not a dream.” But often when you read about a dream, or see a depiction of one, you feel like you’re reading about or seeing something that isn’t a dream.”
Excerpted from Teju Cole’s Blind Spot.
I read and think and walk until I come across some explosion of feeling that seems worthy of writing down here and sharing with you all. I try to do so monthly, but there’s no forcing it really. I’m trying to force it less. My best work happens when I’m not forcing it.
Recently I returned to Birchbark Books—not Louise Erdrich’s much beloved institution, but a sprawling collection of unheated barns full of used books in the backwoods of upstate New York. Only open on the weekends, it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to get back there; this time I found, among others, an old copy of Borges’s Other Inquisitions (not to be confused with his first essay collection Inquisitions, published when he was 26 in 1925 and which, according to the introduction to my 1952 edition, he eventually thought pedantic and would buy up copies and destroy them—a good argument for not publishing too early). The first essay, “The Wall and The Books,” makes the assertion that the “imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the aesthetic reality.”
It seems like a paradox, that that which is not yet made concrete from the imagined is actually the real. I think about the novel I’m working on currently, which frequently dissolves into a collection of stories, only to gel and reform over and over again, like a shallow pond caught in a freeze-thaw cycle disrupted. But then, I’ve always enjoyed the oscillation, the moving back and forth, sometimes rapidly, between two extremes. If a writer always knew exactly what they were doing, if they lived somewhere other than inside a reality not yet realized, would we have any good books at all? Moreover, would anyone choose to transition? If they could foresee exactly what their future appearance and life would be like? It’s the unknown that pulls us toward creation, of the self and of the novel. I forget this sometimes, in my rush to have it all figured out.
I think Henri Bergson has gotten closest to describing the necessary failure of aesthetics in his Creative Evolution:
“There are things that intelligence alone is able to seek, but which, by itself, it will never find. These things instinct alone could find; but it will never seek them.”
What Bergson means by “instinct” versus intelligence is really what the whole book is devoted to exploring. Bergson was a proponent of the idea that evolution was “felt” in the body, rather than thought, and thus was difficult to rationalize. As a concept, instinct has largely fallen out of favor among biologists and writers today, replaced by the quantitative imperative of genes and creative writing workshops. I’m sure I’m reading Creative Evolution in a manner that would be anathema to Bergson and philosophers of science at the turn of the century, coming at it from an aesthetic vantage point. But then, it was a time when the methods of writing novels and evolutionary theory weren’t quite so siloed as they are today; there’s nothing in Bergson’s book that rejects a more creative reading. It’s a perspective I’ve been experimenting with in my *sigh*ence classes, the notion that creative writing pedagogy has been steeped in hypothesis and peer-review tactics of the scientific method, and providing a path into the unconscious, or at least more self-awareness, should at least yield some interesting results. (The question of how closely aligned craft-focused creative writing pedagogy is with the of “progressive” evolutionary theory is something else I’ve become more convinced of, but a subject for another post.)
I’m not a planner or outliner in my writing, though I still tend to overthink my plots until they’re no longer remotely interesting to myself. I become tangled up in thinking about where things are going, always seeking instead of letting things come to me. I’ve never really tapped into the unconscious that supposedly lies behind every literary decision I’ve made; I’m not much for Jung, the coincidence, the meaning of dreams. But the unconscious does seem to be the one area where I’m not obsessed by a search for meaning. There’s been so much effort to bring the unconscious or subconscious to light in creativity more generally, and literature more specifically, that it’s difficult for me to imagine a version of that which lies under the surface that isn’t already drawing attention to itself in the first place. Still, it feels like a direction I want to be groping toward, if only because everything currently on the surface feels too overt, too overly machined, and I want to be writing along that knife’s edge between being understood on the one side, while gazing into the abyss on the other.
What I’m Reading
I’ve been devouring Balzac’s Lost Illusions, which has been an excellent reminder that every single problem now facing of writers, publishers, and booksellers has remained almost exactly the same for the last 200 years. A few things I love: the pages-long digression on the history of paper and papermakers. Stalking the wooden galleries of Paris where unknown writers try to sell their manuscripts to for a few hundred francs. The sparring of journalists flip-flopping between Royalist and Liberal newspapers, then trashing one another’s books in unsigned reviews just to prop them up in another column and generate sales. And this quote:
“Every writer has a monster inside him, something like a tapeworm, and it devours every feeling the man has just as soon as it blossoms.”
If you’ve been feeling frustrated with the state of publishing, writing, or bookselling, I can’t promise this book will make you feel better, but it will make you laugh, and sometimes that’s better.
Upcoming
I used to end these newsletters with a short list of publishing opportunities, but even those brief lists have become too much for me to keep up with. Besides, I now have enough of my own happenings and classes to share that I’d rather fill this space with that. If that list was why you’re here, then I’m sorry to disappoint. Maybe you’ll find something else here of interest. If not, that’s okay too.
New Classes: Container Work I & II: Spring 2023 Workshop Pods: small class sizes, Zoom-based, focused on self-awareness in your own writing and revision, visits with editors & more
*sigh*ence class // science class, March-April 2023: Zoom-based, this section will slightly different from before, with more emphasis on unpacking scientific assumptions as science fiction writers
Keep your eyes peeled for my first in-person class announcement in Portland in several years, coming soon!
Journal: smoke and mold just published its seventh issue, including this interview with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore which we did ages ago in 2020. Still feels highly relevant though. Check out the whole issue!
We’re also still open for submissions to ACROSS / WITH / THROUGH: Trans Writers in Translation, to be published next year.
Events: I had an absolute blast talking with Lydia Conklin about their story collection Rainbow Rainbow for The Sitka Center for Art & Ecology’s Winter Keynote (recording here). Would love to be doing more of this kind of event—if you have a key, let me note it! Or speak about it!
The Lover: My husband Ruune has a brand new EP out today, The End of Nothing, Part 2! This is a lofi, stripped down folk album, which I’ve been quietly agitating for over the years, and he’s lovingly delivered. I think my favorite song here is “Transfer Station Bay,” a quietly political folk song written while they were a gleaner at the dump watching truckloads of belongings deposited from sweeps of houseless camps. They don’t make them like this anymore.