intestinal.space

There’s a blank. Then a curve or sharp end comes into view: a word or image that wasn’t there before. Where does it come from? Not fully out of my head (the bobbly part I use to dig myself into holes). Maybe the body? (“Write from yr stomach,” Liam Rector advised again and again.) Or somewhere less tangible and harder to name?

Poet and all-around prolific writer Donald Hall termed this creative spring the vatic voice, a capability he believed everyone had:

“Vatic was the Greek word for the inspired bard, speaking the words of a god. To most people, this voice speaks only in dream, often in unremembered dream. … It is the vatic voice (which is not necessarily able to write good poetry, or even passable grammar) which rushes forth the words of excited recognition, and which supplies what we call inspiration. … I know that as you grow older you can learn better how to listen to this vatic voice. You can learn better not to dismiss it, you can learn not to be frightened of it. You can learn to let it keep talking…” (1)

Hall’s advice for cultivating the vatic voice reminded me of what I was doing at the time in psychoanalysis, treatment I started because words had dried up. No, the world wouldn’t miss my unwritten poems. But clients wouldn’t pay for a blank page, and I would miss a roof over my head. I had things to say, all trapped under some psychical ice.

The vatic voice sounded something like free association, which is not as freewheeling and random as its perception in popular culture. Free association is a skill that takes time to learn through a shared process of speaking, listening, hearing and being heard. Instead of a transactional “fix me” therapeutic exchange, psychoanalysis teases an open-ended and uncertain dance with the as-yet unspeakable. It takes an attentive, curious, and creative analyst to make it possible, let alone make sense of it.

At the time I read Hall’s short and classic essay, I noted the echo to free association and then forgot about it. I was getting my words back. I was meeting client deadlines. I hacked away at poetry and other personal writing, unearthing texts of myself. I was listening better to myself, an ogre catching small birds and trying not to maul them.

*

Love crept in. The classic transference. I became an analytic cliché, but it gave new meaning to a favorite passage from Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text:

“To be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas, how I best invent what is necessary to my work.” (2)

This wasn’t love as subject or object, possessed or possessor. Rather a sort of air that makes a certain relaxed attentiveness possible, an environment necessary for words—on the page (for Barthes) and before the page (for me). Barthes describes the most pleasurable text as one that:

“…manages to make itself heard indirectly: if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else. I am not necessarily captivated by the text of pleasure; it can be an act that is slight, complex, tenuous, almost scatterbrained: a sudden movement of the head like a bird who understands nothing of what we hear, who hears what we do not understand.”

As Barthes reads, Hall writes, and I stumbled through hours with my analyst. Each activity is a transit across a territory (book, page, space between two chairs) that mirrors the transit across an inner territory where we each linger to hear a true word.

*

A few months ago I came across an interview in which Hall explained the origin of his notion of the vatic voice. It was, in some measure, something he learned in psychoanalysis, a process that lasted seven years, up to three times a week:

“Coming into my doctor’s office, I learned how to tap instantly into the on-flowing current inside my head. That essential step took me about a year, but once you learn it you don’t lose it. I learned to listen for the vatic voice, to watch images running over the mindscreen, to give a telegraphic account of what I heard and saw. It was good for me as a creature and good for me as a poet.” (3)

He described the effect on his writing process:

“Today when I begin writing I’m aware: something that I don’t understand drives this engine. Why do I pick this scene or image? Within the action of kicking the leaves something was weighted, freighted, heavy with feeling—and because I kept writing, kept going back to the poem, eventually the under-feeling that unified the detail came forward in the poem. The process is discovering by revision, uncovering by persistence.”

Yes! I was excited and in some way relieved to see that Hall had elegantly translated his psychoanalytic work from the secluded hours of treatment into a concept that any creative could appreciate. It reminds me of what I so easily forget: that speaking and listening to myself is the creative work, whatever the result.

*

Now that my analysis has ended, I’m aware that the territory “between” is now a “between within.” This transition extends the conversation indefinitely, as Hall said:

“Even now I talk with my doctor every day of my life and he explains the sources of feeling—although he’s dead.”

My own psychoanalyst is, I’m grateful to report, very much alive. But there’s an hour on Wednesday that now feels dead. It is the black hole that recurs in my dreams—both the well of a more livable self and the eclipse of loss. The shape of what’s missing and where it might be found.

The open question remains: How well will I be able to stay with my vatic voice? Who is listening? Am I listening? Judith Butler writes,

“The very ‘I’ is called into question by its relation to the one to whom I address myself. This relation to the Other does not precisely ruin my story or reduce me to speechlessness, but it does, invariably, clutter my speech with signs of its undoing. Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.” (4)

So I sit down to write, solitary but not alone, inviting the loose attentiveness that lets something more than mind and even body speak. Something more fragmented, rarely easy, and always incomplete.

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1. Find “The Vatic Voice” in Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected (University of Michigan Press 2004)

2. The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1975)

3. Read the entire interview online: “Donald Hall, The Art of Poetry No. 43,” The Paris Review, Fall 1991, No. 120.

4. Undoing Gender by Judith Butler (Routledge 2004)

A few months ago I got the itch to spin again. Out of nowhere, that memory of fibers twisting up from an undifferentiated mass into the start of something useful. As a teenager, I spun wool from the fleece of my single sheep. The yarn was thick and uneven, the spinning wheel big enough to qualify as furniture.

This time around, after a bit of research, I stumbled across the Indian book charkha (“book”? I’m hooked). It’s meant for spinning thin, light fibers like cotton and silk. When closed, it’s no bigger than a hardback bestseller. In an increasingly complex world, I love its simplicity. With so much of my life relying on digitization and virtuality (evidence this blog), my charkha is pleasantly analog and physical.

GANDHI’S CHARKHA

The book charkha (and larger briefcase-sized version) is more properly known as a Yerwada charkha, a design Mahatma Gandhi and his associates developed and used while imprisoned in the Yerwada jail in the early 1930s. Gandhi was behind the re-engineering of the large household spinning wheel into a portable, affordable tool.

Why did Gandhi care about the charkha? Indian cotton was being exported to Britain and then imported as finished cloth, a relationship that enriched Britain economically and politically, while making India dependent at both ends of the textile value chain. Against this landscape, Gandhi realized that spinning could be a symbolic act of independence.

First he began spinning cotton, making “women’s work” into everyone’s work. Then he began wearing only kadhi, cloth made from homespun cotton. In these simple and perfectly legal gestures, he revealed the politics of cotton and cloth. When he encouraged everyone to spin—men as well as women and in public whenever possible—spinning became an act of political defiance, symbol of national self-sufficiency and also pushed social politics forward. The charkha became a weapon in India’s nonviolent war for independence. All that from a spinning wheel in a box.

SPINNING AND PARAMETRICS

It took me a few tries to feel the rhythm of spinning on the charkha, but soon I was winding thread off the spindle to make room for more. It can be quite meditative, but one day I put my laptop nearby to watch video of the CalArts conference “The Politics of Parametricism”. The fascination running through my fingers was about to get a new dimension.

Parametricism describes design that takes multiple parameters into consideration, a complexity powered by computational algorithms. If you’ve ever wondered how those fluid, organic, futuristic-but-here-now buildings are possible, that’s parametrics. See some masterful examples at Zaha Hadid Architects. Watch this for an introduction.

Parametric design soars and inspires more organically than those higher-than-high, straight-to-the-sky structures. It’s easy to get lost in those curves.

But today, parametric architecture is also status architecture. The CalArts conference exposed the problem: Is parametricism for everyone, or is it computational power for those with power? Can it be used to empower local neighborhoods and small scale economies or must it always inscribe the signature of status and wealth? Is it part and parcel of our current capitalist orientation, or can it be used to transcend that worldview, benefiting a broader base? These are no small questions for architecture and every other industry and discipline being recast through the heady possibilities of Big Data and computational power.

MEANWHILE…

So how fitting that the low-tech charkha and high-tech parametricism come together in Mumbai’s Charkha Monument, an abstract design that “represents the ideology of the spinning wheel and India’s sustainable progress through its visual motion and construction.” It embodies modernism’s signature parallax view, with every vantage point revealing a different sculpture. It references political history while looking forward through the lens of a design “developed using a digital applet, the spiralling gesture of a spinning wheel explored with multiple parameters in play: diameter, density, speed, and geometries.”

I came across the Charkha Monument after watching the CalArts conference. It’s the spring of 2014, some 85 years after Gandhi reminded Indians of the power in their own hands. Meanwhile, American democracy bows to corporate power and care for the commons becomes more rare. It’s the era of experts (as .expert becomes the latest URL extension) that reminds us that some things are better left to the grownups.

As cotton runs through my fingers, I wonder how we will negotiate this “hands off” approach to our own future. Computational power is being embedded across the built landscape and in the devices of everyday life. This will supposedly do more for us, making life easier. But as net neutrality teeters on the brink of extinction, the future is indeed not looking like it will be evenly distributed. Will this Internet of Everything be good for all or only for some? When no one needs to drive a car, how will our inherent longing for control be satisfied? What new fantasies will we agree to in order to keep the machines running?

I draw out more cotton and turn the handle on the charkha, working out unevenness and testing the strand before winding another yard of thread onto the spindle. I don’t quite know myself anymore, this woman asking political questions. I wasn’t raised to be political. Politics was for politicians, but whenever I hear someone say, “I’m not political,” I hear my own fear. “I’m not political” means “I’m not ready to wield my own influence.”

RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW

For those years on a Montana ranch, I felt I had no influence at all. Everything happened somewhere else. But I did learn the tools of self-sufficiency (too well, at times). I did learn to expect answers of myself before seeking answers from others. As I spin, I’m aware of this fundamental orientation. It creates a turning together of the countless small things I’ve learned and experienced over the years. Now they’re overlapping and catching, twisting up into a directional strength. This might be a rope to tie a boat or thread to weave into a material with new properties and possibilities.

The impulse to spin, literally and figuratively, is deep in the bones of culture. It’s how raw material becomes material that matters. Look to the double-helix; spinning is in the very shape of our DNA. Politics—the art and science of power—is also with us everywhere, making the worlds where we live and shaping what we grow, make, buy, and build. More than ever, computational power and algorithmic design are shaping those outcomes. But make no mistake. It begins with our own grasp and what we choose to take in hand.

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MORE:

The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies and the Future(s) of Sociality, CalArts conference at REDCAT, Los Angeles, November 15-16, 2013

LIVE Architecture: Charka Monument, 11-meter tall outdoor Installation in Cross Maidan, Mumbai, India

The Charkha Movement

An introductory video on charka spinning by Ritesh Singh

I bought my charka and cotton fiber from New World Textiles.

Again, at the precipice. Some part of me must love it, considering how much time I spend here. This place of mind and body where time mostly stops and all notions of progress are undone. It’s the place from which I didn’t finish two master’s degrees, the place from which I leave businesses and communities. It’s the place from which I broke my marriage. I clear the area and protect what I can. Disasters loom.

Depression is what I used to call it, a too-simple pseudo-diagnostic that was nevertheless a sort of relief and license for getting nothing measurable done. It is a trough—but also a precipice. Outwardly, I feel low. Inwardly, somewhere near my bones, chaos is erupting. This deadened surface is, in fact, a highly polished containment field. I make no sudden movements. I put away the credit cards and don’t get behind the wheel. Every gesture will be rash. Damage will be done but (with luck) only the kind that can be undone.

When whatever lurks deep flashes too fast to the surface, behavior gets bent. Absent words or images—absent the possibility of an understanding audience—what longs for symbolic expression gets written in the flesh.

Skin is not the only surface we use to inscribe our identities. My persistent fat is a story of the struggle that circulates continuously in my blood and nerves. The mind of my body has its own strategies and sometimes seems to have had enough of me. Then, to satisfy the craving for change, the best tactic seems to be: unloose the body itself. Time to go. Time to move on. An action that is by nature unfathomable, even when the polite suicide leaves an explanation behind.

At this precipice, my self-doubt so far takes hold, even as it unleashes empathy for those who go. Their suffering is by definition beyond bearing. Whatever the inexpressible “it,” it is too much. Too much becomes a hole with its own gravity. It calls. It swallows some of us.

Impossible to know how it works out for those who go. But there is the suffering left behind, the aftermath that is not at all “after” but present, if not accounted for. The legacy to loved ones and acquaintances is the unthinkable possibility, their  minds and bodies now imprinted with the shape of that hole.

At this precipice I’ve learned to wait. It can feel pathological, this attentive inability to move. But it’s a vast improvement over sinking into thick silence or sizzling in the bright lights of compulsive distraction. I sit on this edge in a sort of humming drift, humming and groaning, listening for myself and the escaping word.

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Postscript: A few weeks later, I come across these lines in Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover: “He waited for a clarifying wind. And torpor hardened over everything, like the lava stream. He looked into the hole, and like any hole it said, Jump.”

Not All Who Wander Are Lost. When I was a teenager, that bumpersticker favored by Lord of the Rings fans and New Agers didn’t strike me as profound or funny. Depression-era reality echoed down the generations of my family: Uncertainty is the enemy, and wandering doesn’t pay the rent.

In those years, Thoreau spoke to me, against a poster image of a sailboat at sea leaning into a moody sunset: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”  The problem? Certainty is the enemy of dreams, not to mention imagination.

In my 20s, I grew confidently in the direction of perfectionism and fetishism. I named one of my early businesses No Loose Ends. Life became some version of porn, compelling but completely unsurprising. Novelty but not change. Movement but not growth. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Certainty was my virtue. I was productive, efficient and unequivocal. What can be measured can be managed. Control, we’re told as consumers, is empowerment. Power is a springboard to freedom—the f-word that unlocks the American dream.

Certainty as a habit of mind was my defense, a hand held up to vast possibilities I had no capacity or facility to entertain. The “Exactitude” poster, a French Deco classic from a fateful 1929, hung in my first office. But certainty was a brittle strength. Uncertainty was and is the messy thing that overflows.

Most of what we rely is actually up for grabs (as it actually always has been). Last night’s earthquake, a gentle rock-a-bye as I was falling asleep, was a good reminder.

As it always has been! But electricity, running water, concrete, fully-stocked grocery stores, mobile phones (etc.!) give me the impression that I’ve mastered daily life. Even if it’s impossible to solve the Big Questions, a full belly leaves less room to worry about it. This may be why I’ve always been so obsessed with stories—novels, short stories, films. Narratives can be ways to imagine and rehearse alternative futures and even break open history so it can move in different directions. Stories can get past emotional and psychological defenses that “facts” can’t.

My own ability to imagine “what if” is limited less by knowledge than fear—unconscious fear that doesn’t announce itself but nudges me back into cravings for routine comforts. Endless, unchanging loops of the known. Processes that make other people bobblehead in agreement. Same as it ever was.

Without uncertainty in the frame, my thinking goes awry. Risks seem greater than usual. Creativity shuts down. I tell myself that I’m in control but wonder why my knuckles are turning white? It’s a form of mind-body split. I don’t think I’m alone in it. Companies use this dissonance to sell us more stuff while politicians exploit it to start wars. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s concept of anti-fragility, things that benefit from volatility, is interesting here. Stay tuned for more on that.)

I’m still working at being more resilient. What’s clear is that by defending myself from considering alternative futures—and my agency in them—I also distance myself from what’s bubbling in my own unconscious. Dreams and the future. The two are not unrelated.

In 2006 I took a brief course in scenario planning, basically a business application of storytelling. Even after 2008, it’s a tough fit for businesspeople who are paralyzed by things they can’t measure. When I studied it, scenario planning was the ONLY business planning process that accounted for uncertainty. Astounding when you think about it. With one hand, we wave at the multiverse. With the other, we clutch at counting the stars.

Near the end of the course, I asked Kees van der Heijden, one of scenario planning’s big names, if the practice was as much psychological exercise as business strategy. Were the exercises really tools to help people gain a sense of familiarity with the very FACT of the unknown? He smiled and nodded.

An imagined future becomes a possible future (though not necessarily a likely one). And while more space for what’s possible sounds wonderful in that rational part of the mind, contingency makes us squirm. It threatens the way things are, and if the way things are is good for you, you stand to lose. But, to paraphrase another bumpersticker, shit will happen. And standing too firmly against that inevitability can get very messy indeed.

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Want more?

ScenarioThinking.org – an open community devoted to scenario thinking and planning

Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation by Kees van der Heijden

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of INCERTO (Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and The Bed of Procrustes) an “investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world”