The Range of Experience, or: Tunnelling
Or, A Dream State. There could be a lot of different titles for this post.
From the painter Audrey Flack,
“When you are working, you are alone with yourself. You get in touch with your own destiny. Like entering a dream state, the tendency is to disbelieve that that state has validity. But that is the true reality.”
How to get work done in these times? It might not be possible, but also, it might be. It’s stressful, I think, to consider this time “an opportunity.” I find it easier to think about making art now in the same way I always think about it. I ask myself, what can I make with the tools I have currently available to me? What form can my thoughts best inhabit? What is calling to me? What subject calls for me to work on, but also, what do I myself feel like reading or looking at? Can I also work on something adjacent to that? What vessel is available?
Sometimes, in so-called regular times, when my writing stalls, I pick up the camera. Or I draw. I write in my diary. Or I do some research on a subject that just calls to me, even if it has nothing at all to do with my work. Or it seems not to. (Case in point, me listening rather obsessively to Springsteen for a year and a half and counting…haha).
Maybe you don’t have the attention span to read a whole book. Just pick books up and read lines you like. I’ve always been an underliner, and a dog-ear-er, and so this helps me when I pluck a favourite book off the shelf and search for a line I half-remember.
Some books will open up to a page, and even sometimes the one I’m hoping for, because it’s been visited so many times. The words I’m needing lately are by Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse.
“For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of — to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.”
She goes on,
“When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.”
I guess it’s not a big surprise to me that Virginia Woolf is what I need right now.
“This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability.”
I often calm myself by reminding myself of that wedge-shaped core of darkness, which is myself, my most true self. I draw myself down, I shrink, I sink, I go deep, I go within.
And what is interesting is that it truly is limitless in there, it really is free, it is a stabilizing force. And it’s worth cultivating. Now, always.
There is a technique Woolf refers to in her diaries, the she employs in her writing. It’s Monday, October 15th, 1923. “It took me a year’s groping to discover what I call my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it.”
In another place she says,
“I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment.”
Would it be possible to just start tunnelling, in whatever work you’re doing? Just start working at some small bit of earth, carve out a small space, excavate that, and keep digging.
What I’m trying to do is to just get very quiet inside. I’m trying to get back in touch with my destiny, that wedge-shaped core of darkness.
I hesitate to say that perhaps this will be going on for a while. We are going to experience things we’ve never experienced. It’s going to be difficult. I’m all for being cheerful and optimistic, but also real. And so we’re going to need to develop and expand on those resources that will help get us through. Art can help. Making things can help. Being clear headed can help. Beauty can help. Helping others can help. Cultivating an inner quiet, that wedge-shaped core, can also help. Stay in touch, and take good care of yourselves, dear readers.
