When I’m working on something, the Thing often wakes me up. My bedroom is just a few steps from my desk, and before my eyes open, the Thing nudges me. It’s not so much the manuscript in progress, but more of a malleable entity that not only lives and breathes in my psyche, but also lives and breathes in the world, and seems to secretly interact with whatever I just read/watched/discussed the night before. It’s often bloated with potential, malformed, a kind of growth, like Belial, the siamese twin brother in Frank Henenlotter’s cult horror movie Basket Case (full disclosure—I happen to play a nurse in Basket Case Part 2). This can go on for twenty years. Sometimes I’ve wondered if I might prefer the Thing to remain undone, because once the Thing is excised it can no longer be tweaked, and, truth be told, the Thing is never really how it had imagined itself.
Anyway, these are the Things we are reading and thinking about in Writing Group.
After the Thing wakes me up, and I realize that most of its ideas are gibberish, the Bibliomancy Muse takes my hand and guides my bony fingers to a book that might serve the Writing Group; as it turns out, she keeps insisting we read about consciousness herself:
“Barthes is the latest major participant in the great national literary project, inaugurated by Montaigne: the self as vocation, life as a reading of the self. The enterprise construes the self as the locus of all possibilities, avid, unafraid of contradiction (nothing need be lost, everything may be gained), and the exercise of consciousness as a life’s aim, because only through becoming fully conscious may one be free” (Sontag, On Roland Barthes, xxxiii).
And this about “The resistant medium of language”: “A language is therefore a horizon…” (Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 31).
And Also:
“It is not so much a stock of materials as a horizon, which implies both a boundary and a perspective; in short it is the comforting area of an ordered space” (Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 31).
Perfect for the purposes of our Writing Group, because the next step in our late morning routine is to briefly enter the realm of meditation. Within our mediations, we often broaden our POV by finding an interior horizon line. We toggle from the infinite expression of Self (Sat Chit)— experienced as Awareness (the breath moving through a still body)—to the finite expression of Self.
The infinite expression of Self is condensed in the Sanskrit phrase: Tat Tvam Asi (I am that). This is like: if the blank page was aware of itself.
The birth of desire is the first expression of finite consciousness. The desire to express yourself is like the first stirrings of a fiddlehead fern pushing through black soil. This is the first sentence on the blank page.
(Join us, join us, join us….Writing Group a monthly Zoom Link you can use at your discretion M-F 11am-2pm [EST].) xo