Words of the week

psychosis: / sʌɪˈkəʊsɪs /

(noun) 1. A major psychiatric disorder in which thoughts and emotions are so deeply impaired there is a loss of contact with external reality; 2. a clinically abnormal state of mind, characterised by distorted perceptions of reality, such as delusions, hallucinations, incoherence, or catatonia; 3. a severe form of mental affliction or disease, such a schizophrenia or mania. (adjective: psychotic)

psychoanalysis:  / ˌsʌɪkəʊəˈnalɪsɪs /

(noun)  1. A system of theories concerning the relation of conscious and unconscious psychological processes, based on theories originally developed by Sigmund Freud; 2. a method of treating mental and emotional disorders by analysing subjective material presented by the patient, in order to bring unconscious mental processes into conscious awareness. (adjective: psychoanalytical)

psyche:  /ˈsʌɪki /

(noun)  1. The human mind, as the centre of thought, behaviour and beliefs;  2.  the totality of the mind and its processes, both conscious and unconscious;  3.  the forces within a person that influence their behaviour and thoughts, and shape their personality.

Psyche:  /ˈsʌɪki /

(noun, proper)  1. myth The Greek goddess of the soul, who was the mortal lover and later, purified by her misfortune and rewarded for her passionate commitment, became the immortal wife of Eros, god of love; 2. allegory the personification of the human soul, or life force, as female, in relationship with Eros, the personification of love and desire as male.

[mid 17C, via Latin, from Greek: ψυχή (psūkhē) 'breath, soul, mind']

Writing the monster

There was a demon-baby in my dream the other night. 

Unspeakable

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words. 

~ Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life 

Key words

After filling myself with that unique blend of inspiration and wonder that comes from attending a fabulous writers’ group, I had a tiny, effortless moment of insight. 

I was thinking about writing.  About my own writing, and what exactly I aspire to.  I imagined for a moment that someone else was describing my writing, and the words that I would like to hear them using to describe the essential qualities common across my body of work. 

As soon as I’d framed the question, the answers came – each one arising with clarity and colour in my mind: 

Strange
Beautiful 
Truth

Strange – because strangeness stretches us, grows us and gives us new understanding.   In essence, strangeness is at the very heart of originality. It’s the new, slightly askew view, the novel approach, the uniqueness of a thing. 

Beautiful – I aspire for my work to be lyrical, to capture the fragile moments of ordinary and awful beauty that wash over us and around us, often unnoticed.   

Truth – I aspire for my work to contain at least a fragment of truth – the truth of our shared humanity.  While truth is a many-splendoured thing, and its name has been put to the service of terrible crimes, there is another type of truth:  the unadorned place of connection, the sacred space from which the power of sharing our stories arises.   We do something profound when we acknowledge the reality of another person’s lived journey.  We can do this when we gift our readers with a piece of ourselves, so that they can enjoy the jolt of recognition in an otherwise imagined/imaginal/fictional reality.    

That’s a big ask, right? 

Yes, and no.  I’m going to write what I’m going to write.  It will be what it is.  Along the path to publication the writing will be held up to objective standards, those elements of the craft that are determined by either consensus or debate to be what is required for “good” writing, for publication, or even for commercial success.  None of that, however, creates any personal impetus or satisfaction:  that, my friends, must come from within.  

Once you have overcome the peculiar notion that even a single person on the planet might want to read what you have written, everything else about the quest for recognition and readership becomes even more absurd.  No two people will ever share the same opinion of your work, because each reader brings a part of themselves to the story that they are reading.  Essentially, you are pitching your work to an endlessly shifting finish line.  

So what, then, can a writer aspire to?  Fortune?  Not often.  Fame?  Not likely.  Popularity? Oddly mediated, and even more fickle than ever in the age of the one minute meme. 

The only thing left to aim for is to write something good.  And the only definition of “good” that will be even remotely useful to the writer is the one they have crafted for themselves. 

Strange beautiful truth, it is, then. 

Eating sleep, and burping

Further to The Sleep Eaters, in which four "increasingly disturbed" creatives have volunteered to be locked up. surveilled, and deprived of sleep, the "protocol" is now live. 

The subjects have been inside the controlled environment for 4 days now, and it's starting to get interesting. It's quite obvious at this point that they have lost all sense of what time or day it is, and the effects of the accumulating sleep debt are becoming more apparent. The project blog makes fascinating reading. The Subjects will be appearing during Adelaide Writers' Week which is sure to be entertaining.

Having my own very special relationship with sleep deprivation, I'm following along with great interest. I'm waiting to see if any of the subjects reach that point where dreams become untethered from their moorings, and start seeping into waking consciousness. It opens a very different kind of space in your creative process. Only last week, one of my dreams grew primitive legs and wriggled its way into my waking consciousness, where it has burrowed and started to metamorphose into a brilliantly detailed and intriguing story world.  

Faulty?



English Electric Refrigerator Ad, 1950
by alsis35 @ flickr

So, the repairman is here, repairing our brand new fridge.  Why should a ten-day old fridge need repairing?  That’s the question I’ve asked, futilely, a number of times over the last 24 hours.  They should be replacing this “brand new” fridge, and not repairing it.  But the timing and a tide of unbending service staff are against me.



So, what do I do when the stress of an unsolvable problem hangs heavy upon me?  I open my pink laptop and I write. It’s an instant panacea for my woes.  Like a drug, I can feel the calm seeping again into my veins as I type.  The stress clutching at the back of my skull begins to unfurl and starts to slink away. 

Does this mean I’m just a tiny bit unhinged?  Or faulty, like the fridge? 



Quite possibly.  I’m open to that.  I’m also open to the power of having a tool as richly and instantly rewarding as an open laptop as my stillpoint.  There are worse ways to bear up - or buckle - under pressure. 

But I do well to remind myself that a row or three of words is a curiously fragile path to tread on the way to wellbeing.  

Rebel

It was writer’s group day (my favourite day in the month) and one of our ex-teacher members was running a short grammar workshop for the group.  In particular she was extolling the difference between BECAUSE and AS when used as conjunctions.  She claimed that the use of AS when there was causality between the two clauses was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I wanted to jump up and run to the Style Guide to check, as I wasn’t convinced that I’d just been taught an inviolable tenet of modern English grammar.  (See what I just did?)  Sadly, I don’t have my own copy of the Style Guide.  (I’m holding off on the purchase because I hear another edition is due out soon).  So the exactitude of the claim remains unproven.  And the lesson was not well spent on me.  

It did however fire up my inner rebel.  This is the part of me that eats cold pizza for breakfast and drives against the direction arrows in shopping centre car parks, because I can.  The part of me that talks back at the telly like it’s listening, and wears granny undies as a political statement that only I know about.  It’s the slice of me that lives on the wild side, but on the inside.  It’s the glimpse of me that that surprises or even shocks the other members of the group nearly every time I read something I’ve written.  It’s the part of me that is certain it has a story to tell that the world hasn’t heard yet.

I consider this fragment of rebellion to be a useful corner of my psyche, and something that a writer should fiercely guard and promote within her or himself.  It creates a frame to peer through that shapes the landscapes beyond it, like a frost-crazed window that bends the world’s light into something beautiful.  It gifts a writer their individuality, their tiny sliver of moonlit brilliance.  It’s the difference between serving up a predictable story in cheap glassware, rather than the sleight of hand that delivers something crystalline and unexpected.  It’s the good crazy.  The one you want to drag up into your writer’s garret and tickle mercilessly until it vomits up a piece of the sky.



Crystals and Light -
Cristaux et lumiere by monteregina @ flickr