A Few Thoughts--

xo

Have you considered cataloguing all of the senses—all bodily sensations—going on at once, in a simple moment of sitting still? (Is this one of those weird things that only I and a few others think about?) In writing, we talk about including the senses…it’s easy to turn to the old standards: sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.

That’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin…basically the primary colors of a sensory or sensual existence, though all of these are going on in the brain, too, of course…activating all kinds of bodily responses.

In revision, in workshop, among our writing crew in Portland, Oregon, we often turn to author Tom Spanbauer’s lexicon, and suggest, “Go to the body.” If drafting comes first from the head, the world of ideas, with a re-write we can move in closer, embody our characters, our narrator, within conjured scenes, in a time, place, situation. But…the body? My god, so much is going on with a human body at any given moment, even under the most benign conditions.

Hunger? How to show it, how to describe it? How does hunger evolve, from the ordinary to the extreme? Cold? My fingers are bitten with cold as I type right now. It’s not life-threatening, only a chilly winter day, an open door, a pale sun through leafless oak trees. Pain? Itchy spots? Stiff muscles, nerves, digestion…and what about the other aspects, the sexy bits, or the gross parts—’cuz human anatomy is complex….—and then the unknowns, the ambiguous, the sympathetic nervous system, hormones, anxiety…what belongs in your writing? What doesn’t? What matters?

Any approximate answer is found in the essential literary math of (author + audience) x time + space/context + desire.

How do we put the complicated layers of physical human experience on the page in a way that conveys a moment of being alive wrapped in the highs and lows along the lines of plot? (I define “plot” generously, because I believe in the smallness of gestures as well as larger twists, turns and leaps…) Some writing profs I’ve worked with along the way refer to what they call “salient” detail—meaning, the most important, relevant, noticeable details…—they’ll say find the salient details, not all the details. It’s good advice. You don’t want to bog the page down.

But which details, of the senses, are most important in the hierarchy of human experience, and even more, in relation to setting the tone of the work you’re creating on the page, defining characters and advancing the narrative propulsion?

The gulf between the delivery of written words and the truth of being alive, in terms of the senses, is vast. Considering the body closely is like watching a night sky until the darkness grows velvety and the stars seem to move, to come in and out of focus, to glow, and you realize how much is actually out there, in clouds, comets, constellations, satellites, planes…With the senses, the body, it’s about looking inward instead of out, at the cosmos of the mind, the constellations of nerves, the architecture of bones and muscles, a beating heart and more. (I’m pretty sure the official phrase for this practice, which I’m advocating, is “tripping out.” I am tripping out about the wealth of bodily reality and the question of how to translate those riches into language…)

We don’t feel the sensations of being alive one at a time, individually. It’s not sight first, then sound…then scent…It’s all happening simultaneously, all the time, complete with thoughts and emotions, the past and the future, laced with hopes, illusions, disenchantments, doubt, certainty, memories…Even an initial effort at meditation reminds us that the act of existing inside the current moment is a skill, a practice. That too seems strange. Why struggle to stay within a moment, the current moment, in which we live? (Now I’m tripping about the human mind, within the human body…)

Should we write our sentences one over the next, until they’re illegible, to show the simultaneity of experience? That’d be one approach!

Here’s the thing: neuroscientists propose that there are more than five senses.

More than five?

Once we allow that the sensory modalities interact, and do so pervasively at multiple levels of sensory processing, with effects at all levels of our psychology (subpersonal, behavioral, and phenomenal), then it becomes difficult to make sense of what, exactly, these individual senses might be. Vision is less a single coherent modality than a complex collection of interacting subsystems. And that collection has features different in kind from those found in the auditory, vestibular, and nociceptive systems (of course, there are many similarities too). Indeed, it can become difficult to maintain the idea that we can have anything like a unified conception of sensory modalities and their interactions.

It’s complicated wiring, or a kind of jumbled color wheel full of blurred lines and combinations, not a set of tidy boxes.

Of course, the mind and body are not two separate things. Psychic pain and physical pain used shared neural pathways in the ongoing human bid at survival.

Scientists have documented what they refer to as the “objective data” of the pain of a social snub, the pain of exclusion, the pain of interpersonal loss. It’s brain activity. Being mistreated hurts in a sustained, physical way. That pain needs to heal just as a broken bone heals. Survival is based on community as well as physical wellbeing. Grief has a weight and ache.

There’s another category of pain studied by neuroscientists that is incredibly compelling: the pain of the loss of meaning.

This is where the Dadaists stepped in, after World War I, back in 1918, in response, to challenge the idea that we could find cohesive meaning in the chaotic narratives of large scale violence. This is approximately, in many ways, where punk rock stepped in, fifty or so years later, tearing down existing expectations and social order.

When faced with a breakdown of meaning, you can freak out, smooth it over, or lean in.

Neuroscientists refer to the “Meaning Maintenance Model,” and consider how the human brain responds to what they call the distress of a loss of meaning.

To study this “distress,” they showed test subjects…the work of the filmmaker David Lynch! Oh, wow.

They turned to art to study the mind. They also use images of modern art, and funky “word pairs”. One example of a word pair, offered in the study’s summary is, “Quickly-blueberry,” which I have to say I actually kind of like. It has no inherent meaning, but those multiple syllabic jumbled consonants and vowels with a shared “y” sound the end of each half of the pair create a lovely echo, a bit of music.

The authors of the study write:

Whether because of nonlinear dream imagery, the unsettling juxtaposition of the beautiful alongside the horrifying, or the surreal disconnect between the events and characters’ reactions, Lynch’s films have the ability to “disturb, offend or mystify”…Insofar as it “hurts” to watch some of Lynch’s films, as it arguably hurts whenever one is assaulted by thoughts and experiences that are at odds with one’s expectations and values, the question arises as to how this uncomfortable feeling is represented in the brain

I like checking out David Lynch’s work, even when I might disagree with things like the gender politics of certain roles, so for one fleeting moment I can imagine that perhaps I am somehow different from the masses! Ha! (I think we all imagine we alone are unique, in our worldview, right?)

It turns out that forms of self-harm, like cutting, also elicit a distress response, and in a complicated way simultaneously soothe the distress response for the perpetrator, so though I’m not a fan or practitioner of self-harm in general, is it possible that some of us watch David Lynch films to engage with a fleeting sense of distress, letting our minds move into another realm and travel back again, cycling through the chemicals of experiencing the unknown?

The best comedy uses a similar path of dodging audience expectations to create a disruption of meaning and land in a new place. When it works, we laugh.

But in big ways, a loss of meaning is a loss of social structure, and a loss of the self. Our lives are dependent on a faith in human connections.

Soldiers, coming back from war, might feel the psychic pain of a “moral injury,” if they believe in a cause—investing their lives in the idea of a just and necessary war, setting off to protect ideas about what a country stands for, how things work—and instead find themselves unfortunately tasked with following, or witnessing, nightmarish, brutal, dehumanizing orders that make no sense. Our brains want to believe in something higher, better, bigger than ourselves.

Deeply religious people, true believers, might feel this pain when they question God’s will, in that Graham Green sort of agonizing way.

Personally, I felt it most over the years I was trapped in divorce court, because I believed in love, the law, common sense and shared humanity the way some might believe in God. I believed in my own good, solid choices and generosity, and expected to be heard in fundamental ways. Anyway! Onward.

The pain of a moral injury is as real as PTSD or any other psychic loss and break.

I rarely bring up those hellish court years, anymore. But watching Trump nominate his list of entitled, accused rapists, racists, misogynists and the rest of it, brings back that bodily sensation of being trapped in a system that runs on hypocrisy, entitlement and inequality. Regardless of your politics, your vote…Patriarchal capitalism is a literal thing; the world is watching men with money shine on the law and rewrite the lives of others, to control and devalue and create an “other”. So many people, of all genders, are reaching for their well-worn copies of The Body Keeps the Score, trying to remember how to let go…

The chemicals of survival, in fight-or-flight mode, fuel the conversations of resistance or moving away. Fight or flight? Thinking that way, stress hormones crank up.

That’s what it means, on a deeper level, to go to the body. It’s not only the scent of coffee on a cold winter day. It’s the sense of living in our human bodies in community and on this planet, complete with the urge to connect, a reach for love, perhaps ideals, maybe a sense of justice and injustice, security and more often insecurity, the awareness of suffering, power trips, ego and higher belief systems, altruism, righteous anger, empathy and desire, to put forward an incomplete list of possibilities in no particular order.

One thing that’s interesting—Tylenol, a pain med seemingly too milquetoast for drama, actually holds power to mitigate both physical and psychological, emotional, pain. How strange is that? Because it works on those neurological systems…and that’s how closely the mind and body are entwined.

But what does this mean, in the writing practice?

When you go to the body, you go to the mind as well. Think beyond the “five senses,” to the muti-verse of emotion along with physical sensations, and a multi-sensory approach to coming to learn who your characters are. Let your language find some freedom.

With all love and appreciation,

M