What follows is a draft of the Introduction to a book-length
manuscript on mindful writing that I'm working on this summer. The book itself
combines imaginative writing with theories on composition from classical and
contemporary writing / rhetorical theory. Drafts of other chapters/chapter
sections appear on this blog under the "Thus I Have Heard" post
label.
Translator’s Note
“The composition of vast
books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred
pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few
minutes! A better course of procedure it to pretend that these books already
exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary.”
-- Jorge Luis Borges
What is described in these pages is a type of applied mindfulness that has
benefited many people in their endeavors to write. It could benefit many more
writers. Through the ancient dharma of the Middle Path, individuals can find
insight and relief from long-standing worries, pressures, and unease that sometimes
arise around writing activity and can deepen their practice. Although difficult
to precisely date, several distinguished scholars including D.F. Goldberg and
Muri Sami have placed the text sometime between the publication of Peter
Elbow’s Writing Without
Teachers and the rise of
standardized state testing. This work, translated from the imagination into
English for the first time, consists of the earliest known treatise on mindful
writing, “The Extinction of the Suffering of Writing and the Four Noble Truths,”
as well as the classic “Explication of the Eight-Fold Path.” The edition also
offers a selection of interpretations and secondary texts on the subject of
mindful writing. While it is the translator’s duty to avoid undue mingling with
the content of a document, my experience engaging with the dharma has been too
powerful to omit. If the reader permit, by speaking of my own experiences, I
might accurately portray the assistance mindfulness can give to others who
write.
In the late 1990s, I lived as a graduate student in a tenement that was
endlessly peeling on the outside and inside—catalpa trees outside my
second-floor rented room pinged seed pods and dripped sticky oils on cars;
green shingles serving as cheap siding fell out one by one like teeth; pieces
of the slate roof on the adjacent building skied downward to strike porch and
bicycles like urns and gargoyles in an Edwin Gorey cartoon. On a lethargic July
afternoon, I was trying to write to the accompaniment of drills from the neighborhood
auto repair shop. As I turned in my swivel chair away from the desk, a hole the
size of a human head appeared in the wall behind a humble book shelf of plain
boards set atop cinder blocks. It is of no real note though others have
so-noted that this hole was partially blocked by a 1950s paperback edition of
the ecstatic visions of St. Theresa and the unwieldy The Red Book by Jung. The wall surface had
broken to show different eras of wallpaper and tones of paint—some matte or
glossy, others landlord-white or primary—from years and years of students who’d
written theses, dissertations, or manuscripts before me in this same rented
room.
With each passing moment, the treatise leaned farther out of the hole, ready to
plummet onto the electric heating register. In my hands, it was printed on
yellowed papyrus but at the same time the cover managed to suggest a shiny
quality like the most recent rack of bestsellers. The pages were covered in
primitive figures and feathered with Post-Its. It seemed large as a folio and
at the same time pocket-sized and personal. As I turned through the first
pages, I saw that it was composed in a language, although obscure, I had the
fortune (or misfortune) of learning for my doctoral exams. It was unlike the
French or Italian I could have studied: a strange language, not exactly one
ever overheard and not a language a person would likely speak, but instead a
language acquired through years of experiences in writing in difficult
circumstances and for tricky audiences.
As I translated, I noticed a beneficial influence of the document on my own
writing. I had gravitated toward Buddha’s influence instinctively during the
years of my training as a writer. One of the few items I brought in my suitcase
to Iowa City was a how-to book on meditation taken from my parents’ bookshelf
over the TV. My first night alone in the hotel I used techniques in the book.
Later I’d keep a Post-It with “Buddha” or “Present Moment” on the monitor in
the university computer lab, and it helped me continue writing.
I’d often felt I was hostage to a massive problem. In school for creative
writing, I received little guidance on the difficulties of writing. Every now
and then, I’d catch a glimpse of another writer’s process. I’d overhear how a
certain award-winning teacher underwent a dry stretch between books or how a
poet was in the practice of letting his work go fallow for a year after
finishing a manuscript. Subsequently, while giving and receiving feedback with
the expectation of revision was part of the workshop classroom, the first half
of the writing process, invention and all its complexities, was left in the
dark. No one talked about ways to generate and continue writing or how to
manage audience proximity. I hadn’t heard of Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers, or the whole process movement in
writing instruction. No one explained that what might look like a writing block
could actually be a necessary delay or the natural functioning of the
unconscious. Perhaps the burden of their own writing difficulties made it
impalpable for the teachers to take on the worries of their students.
Between 1992 and 1999 and 1999-2005, (MFA years and then years prior to PhD
program), my experience with writing consisted of many dim hours at a
thrift-store desk trying to write, illuminated by break-through times in which
I was able to ramp up my discipline to where a fiercely get-it-right outlook
resulted in new, stronger pieces. At twenty two, I hadn’t been ready for the pressurized
environment of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A writer needs to start at a certain
level to finish their training completely in graduate school; otherwise, the
writer should be prepared for uncertainty, incompletion, trailing off,
lingering questions, dead ends. Later, as I approached my thirties, the need to
find a way to support myself and the desire to find a life partner became
swiftly mounting pressures so that every hour spent at the desk felt
high-stakes, meaning it had better yield results in the face of these other
pressing issues. I didn’t understand that if a person can make contact with her
intrapersonal voice, she is almost always alright as a writer. Much later would
I understand that to be fluent means switching to low-stakes tasks or informal
writing to stay in constant contact with the internal writing voice.
The truth
is that I’d always had discipline when it came to writing, willingly turning
over my hours to the desk. But writing was only productive either through an
impalpable and untenable regiment modeled on the dancer Martha Graham’s work
style or at writing’s whim when new approaches and ideas came as a surprise and
were not something I could control or replicate. By discipline, I mean a severe
strictness, rising at 3:30 or 4 AM to write and restricting my diet which
couldn’t be sustained, and I’d find myself back to seemingly producing nothing,
wishing I could force myself again into the harsh regiment. I didn’t even own a
bed and slept on a flop-out mattress stored in the closet. My practice was
built on a false discipline.
The whole time I was filling pages and pages of writing journals which, because
not intended for an audience, I didn’t consider real writing. My unconscious
would frequently take charge. I’d discover a drawer of fairly decent new poems
at the end of the summer that I honestly couldn’t recall writing. The writing
spirit, whatever made it first seem in earlier life a playful, imaginative, and
necessary act, continued despite my categorizations and plans. It protected my
writing from the damages of my ego. Sometimes
it would take over my conscious self, and I’d write rapidly, feeling inspired.
The stop-gaps I’d installed to prevent my internal voice from actually flowing
would be suddenly overwhelmed to capacity. I remember explaining to a teacher
how I’d felt while writing one break-through poem, and he shrugged and said to
take those rare moments when they are handed to you. Such advice suggests that
type of writing experience (scribbling it down before it’s lost or slips from
mind) is a gift and not the symptom, as I would now call it, that something is
awry with one’s overall way of writing. Since becoming a practitioner of
mindful writing, writing is no longer a strain promising at best diminished returns
for the effort. Writing is a positive and productive experience and is now a
daily need.
The central contention of Thus
I Have Heard is that our
understanding of the time involved in writing skids to a stop startlingly short
of arguably the most fundamental part of the sequence: the present moment. Yet
the present moment is the time and place from which all writing springs, and to
bypass the present is to forfeit the textual richness of the moment and risk
facing obstacles to composing resulting from that omission. A present-focused
thinking brings three powerful benefits to the act of writing. The first
benefit is noticing the vacancy of the moment: the actual privacy a writer has
from any eventual audience because of separation in space and time. The second
benefit includes noticing intrapersonal
rhetoric (self-talk) and the
preconceptions many people lug around about their own writing ability and the
genre or task at hand. The third benefit of mindfulness involves observing that
self-talk in order to find new content. That is, mindfulness shows how a
non-stop river of inner talk passes through each moment: a river rich in
imagery, phrases, and ideas.
In translating the manuscript, I rewrote what I heard, picking a format to
which an emerging academic would be naturally accustomed—a collection of
selected writings or a textbook. Thus behind the fictional nature of this work
are the ideas of thinkers not necessarily associated with story-telling:
Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Peter Elbow, Carl Rogers, Michel de Montaigne, Carl
Jung, Jean Nienkamp, Walter Ong, David Bohm, Mina Shaughnessy, Mike Rose, Keith
Hjortshoj, Robert Boice, William Stafford, Thich Nhat Hanh, Hughes Mearns,
Janet Emig, Thomas Newkirk, Donald Murray, Lisa Ede, Andrea Lunsford, Lloyd
Bitzer, Marcel Bénabou, Brenda Ueland, Shunryu Suzuki, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
Stephen Kerr, Ellen J. Langer, and Richard Shusterman, to name a few. Readers
interested in the theoretical and pedagogical foundation of Thus I Have Heard can turn to the Notes section of
the manuscript where I provide annotations. Otherwise, these underpinnings will
not appear in the body of the book.
After testing the dharma on groups of undergraduate and graduate
students, I began to imagine retorts and responses, alternative ways of
thinking about the topic, and contemporary interpretations of the original
dharma came to mind. In the compilation are also works of poems and fiction
which have been written over the ages in the tradition of mindfulness by
members of the Write Nothing Sect, the practitioners of mindful eating
and description, the ascetics who freewrite twenty hours a day in mountain
caves, and the practitioners of embodied writing for whom writing is entirely a
physical activity.
A few observations about the chapters and selections. “Thus I Have Heard”
appears to have been written sometime between Socrates’ debate with Crito and
the establishment of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1930s. The recovery of
this manuscript has taken many twists and turns. In the late 1960s when the
Writer was visiting the United States per the invitation of the Present Moment
Society , the original manuscript became lost, shortly after the Writer
attended the landmark Dartmouth Conference. A year or so later, the Writer had
moved to New York City and was moonlighting as a secretary in a major
publishing house along with many other women also completing MA and PhD
degrees, usually in the fields of literature. A proof of Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers arrived at the Writer’s cubicle
after it was passed around between secretaries who were all delighted with
Elbow’s concept of freewriting. The Writer joined the secretaries around the
water cooler and in the break room to talk about freewriting and practice it
themselves. The Writer was delighted by the concept of freewriting and audience
proximity and devoted the next quarter century to silent contemplation of its
connections to internal conversation and awareness of the moment. Many readers
before you have noted the heterogeneous nature of the Writer and the
circumstances mentioned in this document. As the notable critic Nina
Sandsworth-Ipswich has said, it is almost a “revolving door of identity, time,
space, gender, hour, a veritable slide show of indeterminacy.” The Writer
is a multi-identity personage who speaks before audiences of writers in a
strange sort of writers’ retreat. The Writer is no single person and at
the same time the combination of all wise writing teachers who have ever been.
Many details in the piece revolve and offer the reader a variety from which to
select in order to speak to more than one subjectivity and from more than a
single time or place.
I bow in gratitude to the dharma for it has let me become who I wanted to be.
Naples, Italy
August 8, 2015
— Alexandria Peary
All week we'd seen actors playing gladiators, men dressed in gauzy red loin cloths and bristly helmets, bare chests exposed (or in the case of one out-of-shape actor, a plastic chest plate to give him 6-pack abs), smoking an e-cigarette, talking on cell phones, leaning shields against small carry-on suitcases the same red as the costume.
