Into the Negative

Verge

A Thursday in October. First day of our shoot. It was just getting light when the service picked me up from my house; so that when I got into the van, I stretched out my legs, crossed my arms and slept. Then I opened my eyes and woke up in a forest. Trees soared into the sky, their web-like branches bearing the weight of infinite leaves. Weeds and underbrush covered the ground and where it was bare, there protruded roots and waited mossy rocks. Ravines gaped hungrily to the left and right of the road. Silence hung like mist everywhere. I thought it was a perfect place to dump a corpse; it was so thick no one would know. I checked my iPhone. It was 7 AM, the beginning of what would be a long day, and the signal was going, going, gone.

Negative

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar,” says Percy Bysshe Shelley. His fellow Romantic John Keats encourages writers to carry on despite the “uncertainties, mysteries, [and] doubts.” In the crossroads of these two thoughts stand the writer as a child. A child, as we all know, has no inhibitions and is more than willing to let himself go. He does not know fear and is not held down by uncertainties. He is an artist; his play is all too similar to a writer’s reveries, as Freud points out.

I remember when I first got into writing. I was in high school taking up the not-so-popular Creative Writing elective; I had wanted to be a songwriter. It was the first and (remains to be) one of the most creative points in my life. Our teacher was passionate about literature and it rubbed off indelibly on me. The only rule she gave was “Don’t tell, but show.” There was no pressure then of theory or criticism. There was no pressure of getting it right. We never had to worry about saying the wrong thing and offending the delicate sensibilities of our Catholic school administration. Limitless, I played with the images and the words that flowed out of me like a stream. I knew then what I wanted to do – and that was to write more than just song lyrics. I would write Literature.

It was this starry-eyed child that entered the world of writing. And it is a starry-eyed child that enters the forest, that curious wonderland, of the blank page.

The immaculate page. It is an uncharted continent. There are no signposts and it throbs with a primal energy. A blank page, if you think about it, is not really empty. Rather, it is wild and teeming with potentials and possibilities. It could be a love note, a poem, a grocery list, a confession, or a story. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in one of his letters to the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus: “The beauty of the virgin, of a being, who, as you put it so well, ‘has not yet achieved anything,’ is maternity divining and preparing itself, anxious and full of longing.”

It scares some people, but I find it exciting to travel on such rich terrain. It’s uncertain and it’s scary, yes. But isn’t it also exciting? The virgin page longs to be written on. It’s a land longing to be explored.

A child, without fail, would answer to the calling of his curiosity. To discover what’s hidden in the bushes, to run through the tunnel of trees, to chase after exotic birds, to smell the vibrant nameless flowers, to gaze up at the sky through the tangle of branches and leaves gilded with golden sunshine.

You have never been here before and you enter wide-eyed, with fistfuls of hope and expectation. Here in this forest you find childlike wonder. Here you search for that story or poem.

Death

A few days before the shoot, I had wanted to escape. Somewhere, anywhere. I was tired of the world around me. It had become too familiar and clichéd. I felt stuck. I wanted to get away, to travel, to merely pass by without ever having to stay. I wanted to be free of associations (at least for a while). I wanted novelty, a break from the monotony. I got what I wanted, in a way. In my hand was my signal-less, WIFI-less, useless iPhone. “We’re disconnecting to connect!,” my friend said with ironic amusement. Bored, I walked out of our tent. To the left, trees hunched over a winding dirt path. Above, leaves trembled in the stream of sunbeams. All around was the smell of wet earth and rotting leaves. Fat ants with long, thin legs crawled in and out of the ground. And as I walked, there was the kissing sound of mud and shoes. Here I was, a stranger in a strange place.

Keats describes the poetical character as such: “[I]t is every thing and nothing… it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair; high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated – It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.” It is a chameleon, he says. One with no self, no character, no identity. Another blank slate. Another faceless face in the crowd. A stranger passing through. Anonymous.

The death of the self leaves the writer without an identity. I enter the woods and erase the daughter, the friend, the student, the aspiring-whatever. I am a blank page. I am wild and teeming with possibilities. I could be anything. I could wield the pen as a woman, a thief, a maniac, or a child. Whatever the work needs.

I believe the writer is a mere medium. An aeolian harp. A servant of the poem or story he is writing. There’s a “continual self-sacrifice” (Eliot) for something greater than the writer. The writer loses himself in the process but gains something far grander than his flawed personality.

And when you erase the boundaries and the labels, when you remove the boxes and break down the walls, when you enter the negative and brave the uncertainties, when you figuratively kill the self – wonder is restored.

There’s comfort in such a death. A freedom in anonymity. A sense of liberation in blankness, in being a zero (not a hero). As Sylvia Plath wrote in her poem “Tulips”:

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free –

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you[...]

There’s no pressure to fulfill expectations, or to outdo yourself. There’s not a lot of reason to be scared, because there’s not much to lose when there’s nothing and you’re nobody.

That’s how you leave your name at the door, disconnect and enter the forest where things are new and strange.

Chaos

There are no maps for writing. The landscape (mindscape?) is constantly shifting. I confess I often just feel my way around. I have nothing but my humble skills, my sadness, and the need to make something beautiful. These are what I work with, what I take with me.

It gets trickier the longer you walk and the deeper you go into the wilderness. The rocks are more jagged, the earth is more slippery, the trees are older, the roots are more twisted, the shadows are darker, the weeds are higher, the risks are higher. It gets scary. But if we must keep doing what we love, we carry on despite the settling fear, right?

Entropy is the phenomenon that describes the spiral into chaos. The act of creation has, for me, always involved a descent into a sort of madness and disorder. You step out of yourself and into the negative. You leave logic at the door, embracing the strangeness around you and the questions that bubble in your head. Creativity is a savage forest with many twists and turns.

“Disorder produces creativity,” says a study published by researchers from the University of Minnesota. Their experiment “showed that participants in a disorderly room were more creative than participants in an orderly room” (quoted in Forbes). It’s not surprising. Creativity, after all, is about embracing chaos, about breaking free from the familiar and the certain and the usual. Chaos takes things apart and jumbles them up into new combinations. It’s Genesis over and over and over again.

I like to freewrite. And I imagine the mind as a kind of forest with its tangle of thoughts and questions, its mesh of wishes and memories, its insects of guilt and doubt. With freewriting, I hope to navigate the savage wilderness that is my mind. I’m trying find order while breaking down old orders. I’m trying to ride the wind, I’m trying to be the wind that will shake the leaves of trees until they fall and form new constellations on the ground. I’m trying to find the best order of words, a new order of words.

One

When the walls crumble down, anything becomes possible. Two different ideas could come together and be one new thing. An object can have two meanings. Differences are transcended. Everything unites. Metaphors make sense and come to life.

Writing is a kind of knowing. A way of connecting. The author, light as air without a self, becomes one with the thing he writes. There happens an exchange between him and the subject. They breathe each other, get to know one another. Beauty becomes the author, who then writes the insights he has gained. “Poetry can do no more than affirm the unification of human with nonhuman nature,” says Karl Shapiro.

When I write, I want the words to flow through me. I want to drink in the world and spill it out on paper. I want to take it all in. I take in the forest: the cracks in the soil, the sunlight falling through the trees, the stones and rocks lying on the path, the distant sound of birds, the green scent of nature mingling with the smell of wood and charcoal burning in a pile nearby. I breathe it all in; later, I would write.

I think of writing in terms of space, an actual place. In my head is a forest. There must be a story here or a poem, waiting to be found, dusted, and put in a nice frame (an inch of margin on all sides). I’ve just begun; my shoes are barely covered with dirt. And like a child, I still have much to learn, to see, to trip and stumble over.

It started raining in the afternoon. I stood under the shade, watching raindrops echo on the surface of a pond. Behind me, our six-year-old talent was sailing paper boats in a ribbon of stream. What lands would his fleet discover? He wore a huge smile, from which stars sprung and rose to his eyes. There it was.

Wonder.

References:

Buss, Dale. “Messy-Deskers Unite: New Study Hints That We're More Creative.” Forbes. 19 September 2013. Web. 15 December 2014. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/dalebuss/2013/09/19/messy-deskers-unite-new-study-hints-that-were-more-creative/>.

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2001. 1092-1098. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1989. 436-443. Print.

Keats, John. Letter to his brothers. 21 December 1817.

---. Letter to Richard Woodhouse. 27 October 1818.

Plath, Sylvia. “Tulips.” The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. 160-162. Print.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letter dated 16 July 1903. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. Charlie Louth. New York: Penguin Books, 2013. 23-29. Print.

Shapiro, Karl. “What Is Not Poetry?” The Poet’s Work: 29 Poets on the Origins and Practice of Their Art. Ed. Reginald Gibbons. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979. 92-109. Print.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “From A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2001. 699-717. Print.

Vohs, Kathleen, Joseph Redden, and Ryan Rahinel. “Physical Order Produces Healthy Choices, Generosity, and Conventionality, Whereas Disorder Produces Creativity.” Abstract. Psychological Science. 24.9 (2013): 1860-1867. Web. 15 December 2014. <http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/9/1860>.