I write with the blood that goes to the ends of my fingers, and it is a very sensuous act.
A. S. Byatt
It’s been a year since I got to contemplate my life from a mossy rock in a Finnish forest. That experience was very healing, as simple and as cliched as you’d expect a sojourn to the woods would be. Predictably, the power of this experience came down to a lack of digital connection and screen time - deprived of a phone or internet connection, being within my body was really the only choice. Not only was I without ‘easy’ connections to the wider world, I also had no real duties or known links to any physical people there - no social demands, no life administration, no work. Just me, myself and my creative practice.
I’ve waxed lyrical before about how this impacted my thinking, but there was a bigger impact beyond how I thought: I felt so much calmer, more plugged in, more bodily. There seemed to be a clarity not just of thinking but of feeling, and of instinct. Was this the real explanation for my surge in creativity?
The role of language and the mind
No longer the prisoner of an unreliable and vexing body destined to perish, the cyberbody promises access to immortality.
From Cybermapping and the Writing of Myth by Paul Jahshan
Maggie Nelson observed in The Art of Cruelty that because of its perceived disembodiment, the internet might be seen as a “gateway to ecstatic, unmediated union” for some, while for others, all this is “utopian nonsense”. As a result, she observes, those in the latter category also often proclaim to be troubled by the alienation they experience online, and therefore “offer up satirical or cynical dystopias in its place”. Anyone who has been on Twitter recently knows what this refers to - the home and heart of a cynical voice. Depending how you view it, the very online world we live in might represent either promise or captivity. Many seem to agree that it is the very disembodiment promised by the online that holds the key either way. For me the question still remains: Why has this disembodied us so much? Especially given how omnipresent the online world is - to the extent that there is no online vs ‘IRL’. As Legacy Russell suggested in the very excellent Glitch Feminism, this dichotomy is antiquated, given how seamlessly our online and offline identities align these days. So why do we still perceive a difference?
It was Emile Benveniste who said that mankind is indistinguishable from language; we create ourselves through our words as soon as we designate ourselves as the “I” in a sentence. When we are the “I” we are given permission to appropriate an entire language for ourselves, at least for a while. Put simply, I need words to start to define myself. We work within the confines of language to do this, to make our concept of ourselves ‘sensible’ within our own minds. This suggests that there is no ‘sense’ possible without shaping one’s own mind around a language that has come to us via a particular tradition. While the landscape of the internet is made up of words, these shift and change continuously. Is this the reason why I have not found the internet to be as helpful to my writing as you’d expect a language-driven environment to be? Because this dichotomy has always struck me as strange. Is it because of its shifting nature, which often works to break and refuse tradition?
It seems logical that it would be difficult to build an identity on shifting language. We are stuck between our need to define ourselves and a language which refuses to be fully definable. There is risk involved in using language as a starting point for this endeavour. The chance of fucking it up is huge. That desire to express ourselves may well come about as a result of this perishable, limiting body we each possess - the desire to go beyond it, so that we can engage with the possibilities of language. As H.G. Wells said, writing itself makes “a continuous historical consciousness possible”. We express ourselves in words to make ourselves bigger than we are - not just to define ourselves, but to belong to something. Wherever words may appear, we have an opportunity to understand them, and by extension, our fellow human. Words can penetrate beyond time and space in a way the body can never do.
Being an artist means going out on a limb in order to express and connect via our medium to engage in this risk for the sake of belonging. This act (desiring connection), stems from an articulation of our identity and wanting to make it sensible to others. There must be that ‘self’ which wants to be expressed. And through the work we do, we discover a self that is both eternally discoverable/discovered and robust enough to be expressed. But as Julia Cameron says:
As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing… Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail.
Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way
We must self-nourish to be able to create. That means we have to pay attention - not just to the world, but also to ourselves. Meanwhile, attention is the battle ground of the internet. Everything is about looking, not seeing. We have to take in a lot of passing text and imagery in order to feel we are ‘engaging’. The concept of ‘engagement’ no longer makes much sense to me. Where is the detail? It’s apt that analytics often count up ‘views’. To ‘view’ something suggests the most minimal unit of looking - just glaze over and let the image pass by and you have ‘viewed’ it. But what have you seen?
This is not ‘attention’ in the way I think someone like Julia Cameron means it. We can’t ‘self-nourish’ from ‘viewing’. We have to pay more detailed attention. The disembodied nature of the internet gives us the chance to ‘move’ freely, and to (at least in theory), pay attention to lots of things and create an identity that does not conform to the body at all. However, the body is a very hard thing to shake loose and we aren’t really designed, it seems, to access detail when we look swiftly at lots of things at once. We also still need a sense of ourselves to start with - and so despite the disembodied environment, I personally feel less like a free agent and more like an untethered ship. The body is limiting, but there is also a clear and boundaried foundation on which to build.
We might argue that the discordant note the modern online world strikes is ‘solved’ by getting back into the body (at least from time to time). But if so, how do we reckon with the body as a limiting force?
The role of the body
From what mysterious place in us does our most inspired work emerge? I believe from some creative intelligence that resides beneath our intellect, a close neighbour to the place where our worst impulses are born.
Melissa Febos in Body Work
What then is the role of the body as a source of information-gathering, about ourselves and our identity in the world? I recall something Arthur C. Danto wrote in What Art Is:
Machines do not have headaches, do not eat, do not have stress, cannot take vacations. To understand these idioms, one has to have a body like the body we all have. One has to be human.
Danto says that although we can play ‘language games’ with machines, without the body we have no real capacity to understand any of these concepts. Our bodies must always be involved in comprehension – regardless of where language is used. Comprehension therefore demands a body. Antonio Damasio’s research famously supports this. Damasio asserted that we always have a somatic impact to our words, particularly evident in the act of remembering. When someone is describing trauma (in The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk) he says:
Mind and body are constantly aroused, as if they are in imminent danger... This in turn can trigger desperate attempts to shut those feelings down by freezing and dissociation.
Just by speaking about traumatic experiences, the body replicates emotional and physical effects. It is not possible to separate the ‘mind event’ of memory from a bodily event. So is there really a division at all, between the words and the body? This suggests that nothing is ever really as ‘disembodied’ as we might think. Julia Cameron seems to think we need to push into this bodily reality further, however, in order to be creatively triggered:
The artist brain cannot be reached - or triggered - effectively by words alone. The artist brain is the sensory brain: sight and sound, smell and taste, touch.
Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way
Some combination of the mind and the body is always at work - the ‘sensory brain’ is Cameron bridging these realms. The body, it seems, can’t be so easily ignored. No matter how much we immerse ourselves in a landscape of words, no matter how much we scroll or dissociate, our body won’t be abandoned so easily. We have to give it its due.
Finally, instinct.
Have we eroded that instinct that comes from within? If we have, it seems to me it is only because we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that our words are somehow separate from our bodies. By extension, our ideas - our creative juice - is also not so easily separated from our bodies. By paying attention to the world, by prioritising detail, and by acknowledging the importance of our somatic response to the input of life, we start to get to know ourselves well enough to cultivate instinct - or a helpful awareness that drives creative responses to the world and enables self-expression. To quote Amina Cain’s very beautiful A Horse at Night:
Am I 'pure' when I write, am I real, am I my true nature? It's one of the times when I am not alienated from myself; maybe that's why I like writing so much. If you are not alienated from yourself, you are more likely to go further into the thing on which you are working.
Deeper. That’s the idea. We want to enable possibilities to open up, chances for our process to mine further, rather than skipping off the surface of an idea at the first sign of trouble. That instinct, to bury in where there is rich territory to mine, seems to me to come from this attention. In deciding to prioritise the body, we might well start to access more and more of this bodily reality. To be less divided from the self. Not all of the time, of course. There has to be a balance - because a body can limit as much as it can free, to return me to my opening point. But all in all, there is a simplicity in deciding what to prioritise. As Goldberg says:
Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don’t think too much.
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
Could it be that simple? Asking people not to ‘think too much’ is one of those annoyingly simple aphorisms that I almost hate on first reading. Perhaps, more to the point, the most important part of this sentence comes earlier: listen well and deeply. To the world, yes, but also to yourself. What is your body saying?
I’m sure I will have more thoughts on this before long, but I’d love to know what you think.
Until next time,
Be well.
CCx