Writing and Healing: Year 2

Writing and Healing and Dancing with Pain

I've discovered a new site that I like.  It's called Dancing with Pain, and it's by Loolwa Khazzoom, a young gifted woman, a writer and a dancer, who is writing about the healing of chronic pain from the vantage point of a person experiencing it and healing from it, day to day.  She writes, among other things, about how dance plays a role in her healing---physically, emotionally and spiritually.

An excellent introduction to her site is this post: Fundamentals of Dancing with Pain.

I liked that post so much that I wrote Loolwa, and she in turn invited me to write a piece about how I use imagery and writing with patients with chronic pain.

And now that piece, Imagery and Writing for Natural Pain Relief, is up at her site.

I reviewed some patient charts to write the piece and I learned 5 things from writing it.

This list could be called 5 things I learned from Pain:

1. Pain needs to be heard.
2. Pain needs a place in which to be soothed.
3. In a healing place, sometimes it’s possible to discover a new medicine for pain.
4. The healing process takes time.
5. Pain appreciates compassion.

Perhaps this list could serve as a springboard to an idea for writing.

What does Pain need?  What does your pain need?  Or the pain of someone whom who you care about?  And how does one go about discovering just what it is that pain needs?

Or what does X (for instance Illness, Fatigue, Grief) need?

And what might these kinds of questions have to do with dancing with pain?

Reading as Medicine

I recently came across this excellent article, The Reading Cure.  Written by Blake Morrison, and published earlier this year in The Guardian, the entire article is available online and well worth a look.  The article features a Get Into Reading Project now thriving in the United Kingdom.  Morrison also offers a wonderful context for the project—rich instances where writers and readers have found words healing. 

Consider these highlights:

If she’s evangelical in the cause. . . [Jane Davis, founder of Get Into Reading] that’s because of the almost religious role which books have played in her own life—notably, Doris Lessing’s novel Shikasta, reading which, as a young woman, pushed her ‘into something like a nervous breakdown.  I felt so disturbed by it that I wrote to Doris, care of her publisher, blaming her and asking for help.  She wrote back telling me to read more and offering money for books if I needed it.  “I am not your teacher but you need to read,” she said.  I was a single mother living on social security but in the end I decided what I needed wasn’t Doris’s money but a public library.  And, for me, the clue of Shikasta—that life is serious and you have to do something with it—was a lifesaver.’

The self can get help from a book, then.  But the best kind of help doesn’t necessarily come by way of self-help books.

The inseparability of reading and writing is something which Proust acknowledges when he defines the book as a ‘sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.’  It’s often said that books ‘take us out of ourselves’, but in reality the best literature is surreptitiously taking us inside ourselves, deeper than we might have expected or chosen to go.

The inseparability of reading and writing-----

A book as an optical instrument-----

These seem like important pieces.

Pressing One’s Ear Against the Hive: An Image for Reading and Healing

I came across a poem: "Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins.  It has me thinking (more) about ways in which reading might be healing.  Reading as a creative process akin to—and inter-related with—writing as a creative process.

I especially like the first eleven lines, which are framed as a teacher’s request:

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

All these images for reading:

Holding a poem (a story?  a page?) up to the light
Seeing outlines? Layers?  Seeing the bones like in an x-ray?

Pressing one’s ear against the hive of it
As if it’s still buzzing with life and activity, even now, long after it’s been written.  The words like tiny winged creatures each playing their role.  Worker bees?  A queen?

Dropping a mouse into the poem   
Hmmmm
What about a fish?  Letting it loose to swim between and among the spaces.
Then bringing the fish back out.  A talking fish?

Reading as walking inside the room of a poem 
Or the rooms?   
Turning on the light?  Opening windows?
Finding something inside the refrigerator?

Reading as (first?) waterskiing across the surface of it
And then what?  Diving down?
Which brings to mind Adrienne Rich’s poem, Diving into the Wreck----
Diving down to explore the wreck,
Diving down to discover treasure

And how might this kind of reading be healing?

Could this kind of reading—creative—imaginative—could it—sometimes—coax our minds into becoming flexible—even nimble—in some of the ways that yoga postures can do this same thing for our bodies?

Reading as a kind of focused—(and sometimes playful)—concentration? 
Reading as a form of meditation?

_____________________________________

The full poem by Billy Collins can be found here.

I Stand Here Ironing: A Short Story by Tillie Olson

[the eighth garden]

This story by Tillie Olson is an achingly beautiful story.  It opens with this line:
“I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.”

In the next paragraph, we learn who the “you” is:

'I wish you could manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter.  I’m sure you can help me understand her.  She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.’

A memo from the school then.  There’s some kind of problem with the narrator’s daughter.  Thus the torment in the first line.  The mother-ache.  And isn’t there in the memo a vague, or maybe not so vague, sense of accusation?  I wish you could manage the time.  And, I’m deeply interested in helping.  The subtext: Are you interested?  Are you interested enough?  Do you care enough to manage the time?

If I were to build that Writing and Healing Center next to the medical park, it would need to have a library of narratives.  And I think this story would be one of those narratives.  It would be there for every parent who has ever received a memo that has left them aching.  For every parent who has ever wanted to respond to such a memo but who’s had trouble finding the right words.

Here is how the narrator responds—the paragraphs immediately following the memo:

‘Who needs help.’ . . .  Even if I came, what good would it do?  You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key?  She has lived for nineteen years.  There is all that life that has happened outside me, beyond me.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?  I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again.  Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.

The story continues.  An account of the girl’s early years.  A baby who “blew shining bubbles of sound.”  And then the interruption of those shining bubbles.  The hard years.  Several hard years.  Much that couldn’t be helped.  Much that is now regretted.

And then, near the end of the story, the eleventh page of twelve pages, the girl herself enters.  Emily.  “Aren’t you ever going to finish that ironing, Mother?”

I love that moment of the girl entering the story.  Her speaking.  For one thing, the girl speaks with just enough attitude that you think—or I think—maybe she's going to be all right.  (It’s the kind of story where I find myself caring about these characters.  I want for the girl to be all right, the girl and the mother.)  The story continues.  The girl heads up the stairs to bed, speaking over her shoulder on her way up.

‘Don’t get me up with the rest in the morning.’  ‘But I thought you were having midterms.’ ‘Oh, those,’ she comes back in, kisses me and says quite lightly, ‘in a couple of years when we’ll all be atom-dead they won’t matter a bit.’

She has said it before.  She believes it.  But because I have been dredging the past, and all that compounds a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me, I cannot endure it tonight. . .  I will never total it all. . .   

This story would be in the library not just for parents but for anyone who has ever felt a sense of regret.  For anyone who has ever, even now and then, felt the past as heavy, as carrying a difficult weight.  For anyone who has ever tried to gather a story together in spite of regret, in spite of a thousand interruptions.

And, who knows, perhaps it could serve as invitation and encouragement to writing one’s own story—writing in spite of interruptions and with the clear knowledge at the beginning that one is unlikely to ever total it all-------One could begin with a line----I stand here----what?

___________________________________________

I Stand Here Ironing can be found in Tillie Olson’s short collection, Tell Me a Riddle.

Exaggerations

[What follow here are some exaggerated statements—an experiment on the way to finding an emerging center of gravity for Year 2 of Writing and Healing]

Authorship—reclaiming authorship—is at the very core of healing.

Writing to heal is a radical experiment.

The world would be a better place if Writing and Healing Centers were as common as hospitals—or medical parks. 

The world would be a better place if Writing and Healing Centers were adjacent to all medical parks.  Maybe a fence between so the Writing and Healing Center could have a nice contained garden.  Blueberry bushes and tall wildflowers growing along the fence.  A fountain.  A bench next to the fountain for watching the water splash.  Koi in the fountain?  Yellow irises at the edge?

The world would be a better place if all medical parks and clinics had two exits.  And before you reached the exits you’d find a kind person at a desk and she’d ask you a single question: Are you satisfied that you and your health care practitioner are doing everything possible to promote your healing?  And she’d be the kind of person who meant for you to give a real answer.  She’d be listening for a true answer.  If your answer was yes, and if you assured her you felt confident about this yes, you’d be directed to the exit that leads out to the parking lot and you could drive away home.  No next step needed.  But say you answered, no, I don’t think so, I feel like I have some questions.  Or say you answered, I have this hunch---I’d like to be doing something more.  Or I’d like to feel clearer about a plan.  Or I feel like there are parts of this issue that haven’t been touched on.  Well, those kinds of answers would win you an invitation to a second exit and that exit would have a path that led over and through a gate in the fence to the Writing and Healing Center. And when you got to the Writing and Healing Center you’d wait in a comfortable waiting room until it was your turn.  And then you’d have an intake with a Writing and Healing specialist.  An intake longer than fifteen minutes.  Say ninety minutes for that first intake.  And you’d be invited, during those ninety minutes, to participate in some combination of writing and conversation.  And the first question would be: What else do you think could be done to promote your healing?  And any answer would be a fine way to begin.  A word.  A hunch.  A list.  A story.  An unfinished conversation.  A haunting dream.  And everything would proceed from that place—that beginning.  Eventually, if you were interested—and motivated—it could all be touched on.  All of the pieces that you feel have been left out.  And you could use writing—and conversation—as a way to navigate and author your own winding and rich path of healing.   

The world would be a better place if the staff at the medical park also had an opportunity for 2 exits.  And perhaps for a staff member there would be 2 questions:  First, do you feel like you and your own health care practitioner are doing everything possible to promote your own healing?  And, second, do you feel like you, as a staff member at the clinic, are able to do everything that you want and need to do to promote healing with the patients who walk through the door?  And a no—or even a hesitation—in response to either question would win an invitation to that second exit—the path through the gate—an opportunity to explore in further detail one’s hopes and dreams for healing, and then to put down, in writing, the kinds of tangible steps that might make these hopes and dreams a concrete reality.

Writing Without Teachers: A Guidebook by Peter Elbow

[the seventh]

I’m revisiting Writing Without Teachers now for a reason.  Looking for a particular term:
CENTER OF GRAVITY

Looking because I feel that’s the question I’m asking now.  What’s my center of gravity?  What are these small pieces I’ve been writing this year adding up to?  What could they be adding up to? 

Because I number these pieces, I know that this week is Week #26.  So, I’m halfway through the year.  Which seems like about the right time to be asking these questions.  Where am I going with this?  Where do I want to be going?

It turns out that finding a center of gravity is the third step in what Elbow describes as a 4-step process of growing writing.  (I’ve listed 3 steps here.  The fourth step is editing.)

1. Start writing and keep writing.   Okay, I’ve been doing that.
2. Chaos and disorientation.     This is why I keep turning back to Peter Elbow as a teacher.  Because he’s not afraid of chaos.  He welcomes it, sees it as a necessary step.  He encourages it.  He links it with richness.  He writes, “You can encourage richness and chaos by encouraging digressions.  We often see digressions as a waste of time and break them off when we catch ourselves starting one.  But do the opposite.  Give it is head.  It may turn out to be an integral part of what you’re trying to write.”
3. Emerging Center of Gravity.

Here’s what Elbow has to say about finding an emerging center of gravity:

The turning point in the whole cycle of growing is the emergence of a focus or theme.  It is also the most mysterious and difficult kind of cognitive event to analyze.  It is the moment when what was chaos is now seen as having a center of gravity.  There is a shape where a moment ago there was none.

Getting order to appear in chaos takes practice.  First you do it badly, gradually you do it better.  If you refrain from doing it badly, you will never learn to do it at all.

What this means in practice is that you must force yourself to keep getting some center of gravity or summing-up to occur.  Let the early ones be terrible.  They will distort your material by exaggerating some aspects and ignoring others.  Fine.  If possible try for contrasting exaggerations.  Exaggerating helps you to think of things you wouldn’t think of if you tried to be judicious.

Hmmm.  Exaggeration as a way to get there.  I think I’ll try it.