Writing Nonetheless,
Nonetheless Writing
Rusty Morrison
(one)
There
are the moments when something is amassing, pressing from all sides, holding me
still, and, at the same time, provoking me to act, some impulse that I have not
understood how to enact. What amasses isn’t heat, but is heat’s kin in its
ability to penetrate, to permeate, to make the climate of the interior porous
to what is changing around it. Something has happened, is happening still, that
I am in the midst of and somehow missing, and that I have, myself, become
missing within.
I
may not be its center, and I am de-centered in the experience, in the
not-understanding what it is. The “something” opportunes a knowing that brings
on a stillness in me (“still” as in the sense of not moving on, but also “still” in the sense of realizing I’m still what I was, not able to engage
whatever is amassing). Stillness is only the first order of attention; motion
is needed, be it motion in mind, in hands, in words—it might be any of these or
other to them, but the provocation must be understood soon enough or the
sensation diminishes before I am fully able (willing?) to be conscious of it.
So much in such moments might be lost.
Yet,
it’s that pause, that stillness, which allows for initiation of a speeded-up,
almost involuntary second order of attention—my hand begins writing a note,
phrase, pause of words, in the notebook I carry with me.
Sometimes
that odd scatter of words in my notebook will hold some glimmer of a
clairvoyance in it, which I’ll feel when I open to those words again, later, or
the next morning, and write from them. “Clairvoyance,” from the French clair ‘clear’ + voir ‘to see.’ But I hear “voyage” in “-voyance,” and I hear
“voice” in “voir.” So I offer them, too.
During
my return to that scatter of words, I sometimes feel guilt about the fact that
the entry in my notebook was necessitated by an amassing I’d not been able to
understand, that I’d missed. But if I bring that guilt forward, and face it
cleanly, then it shifts. Such instances are opportunities in which I might begin to navigate a new trajectory
toward a kind of becoming that is more than my current fixity of framing
allows.
This
morning, once I’ve walked back into the house, after dumping the kitchen
garbage, after making too much noise, after taking up too much space in the
outside without sensing first what that predawn dark might hold—I realize I’ve
missed whatever this particular morning’s pre-morning dark was. “No different
than any other morning,” I rationalize. There’s nothing new out there. I get up
at this time nearly every day, and my routine often takes me outside briefly.
But today something in the sound of the front door’s lock locking is
different—an inexplicable difference, which rests uneasily under the generic
sensation-category of loss.
Some
of the orders of attention that I find in the act of writing are close kin to
the order of attention that prompts me to unlock the door and go back to stand
outside—which may result in finding nothing, except to feel what “nothing”
amasses nonetheless.
(two)
I’m
interested in the orders of attention that I don’t necessarily recognize—the
orders of attention that sometimes are slipped between more recognizable orders
of attention, or are preceding them, or are happening concomitantly, as waking
dreams I didn’t quite notice soon enough. I think of these orders as the times
when I am “writing nonetheless.”
I
appreciate that word “nonetheless” as it begins with the null of “none,” (which
can suggest the connotation: “no one”). But the extra “o,” which would create
“no one,” is hidden under the “n” ’s visor—I call it “visor” since it’s not a
large enough overhang to call it an umbrella, it’s not a complete obscuring. Next
comes “the,” or “the less” which suggests that the “less” here is specific
(“this less” is being pointed to; it’s not “any less,” not “a less”). Common
reading of the whole would suggest that “nonetheless” is proposing an
equivalence. In other words: something “is the case nonetheless,” or is the
case regardless. But I can also hear in it a naming of the “none,” as in “let
me introduce you to “none,” from the
family of “theless.” As in: “Here’s
None the Less.” Or “Here’s Atilla the Hun.
I
realize that I’ve digressed in that last paragraph—playfully, absurdly, “none”-sensically…
How
will I know how far to let myself digress when I’m working to open an idea in
my mind, in my writing, in my poem’s line? I suppose that, for me, I need to
keep checking to see if I’m still having a physical experience of something
amassing, some heat—a sensory component. I can admit to myself that in the
above paragraph, as I typed “Atilla,” I felt I’d lost some heat, lost my
sensory component. It was, for me, time to stop. To breathe.
I
often remind myself of what Henri Bergson recounts: it is useful to attend to
the body’s forms of sensate awareness. His example is that we often laugh
before we realize why we are laughing, before we’ve parsed out an intellectual
explanation: the mind comes in afterward to explain our physical response. I
take this to suggest to me that it is useful to feel the laugh, to feel the
sensate awareness—how often do I ignore it? Do I fail to take the time to ask
my intuition to engage with it? How often such opportunities are lost.
For
me, when I’m working in the nonetheless, there’s a sensory component that
rises, that comes on, as involuntarily as a laugh. As I noted when I began this
writing—it might be a kind of pressure, a heat. It might be a feeling in my
throat, or a very subtle shiver that I feel in my chest, or at the back of my
neck. For how long will the sensory remain animate? For how long should I keep
fitting words to something that I can’t understand, that may even seem counter
to what I typically might write, to what I expected? These are questions that
sit outside of the experience, and that overly logical generalizations can’t
necessarily answer. To approach this too logically, with too much explanation,
is to sheath the experience in intellect’s veils. Veils can be lovely, can be
nearly sheer—in that electric-translucent shimmer, which very fine, very thin
fabric yields—can animate further what emanates, can help me to see the shapes,
the contours of a meaning within the veils. It can be a useful thing, to use
language in this way, for a while. But, at some point, what’s there may be
entirely obscured. Then it’s time to track back, or to begin again, after a
pause. Maybe it’s time to step outside, into the late morning. Or, it’s already
late, and I should be leaving for work!
Michel
Serres notes “every form is draped in an infinity of adherences.” To sense and
then to suffuse the sensory with language, and language with the sensory—this
is an act that I might experience as an undraping of a form, even if the form,
by its nature, continues to move within the infinity of its adherences, beyond
the reach of my act of finding, since no poem, or piece of writing, will
conclude its finding out. But, what I take from Serres is more: I must stay
alert in my sensate being, since the act of writing may begin to obscure what I
was seeking, may begin to occlude the act of finding with only more adherences.
Such are the lively paradoxes; such are the risks.
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