analogy and metaphor
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Doubting Writing / Writing Doubt

the nonhuman, and what voice means
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Here

 

we


are
…

Lucinda
Strahan

Here we are …

Lucinda Strahan

Hey, um       does anyone? no

So none of it… you know,

I actually think I went a bit too far there
(numbers 16 to 19 maybe not so strong)

I’ve been a writer for a few years now and I thought that I would know this

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to bring one's shame, vulnerabilities and doubts to a critical writing community

simple observation, sensing, noting

to hold oneself available to others

I feel I am too closely hooked to the artworks

knowing from a place of interrelatedness rather than knowing about something that starts with references outside oneself

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objects that have something to say

my own discursive costumes of authority

the language we are accustomed to hearing

humans, artworks, buildings, moments

First workshop, Photograph by Laura De Neefe



13 seats are placed in a circle in the gallery.
Ten workshop participants are seated together with
the program leader, the curator and the editor

Program Leader: Every time I have tried to fix on what I want to say to you here it slips through my fingers. These past few days as I have been moving around, doing laps in the pool for instance, it comes to me clear as a bell. But now it's gone again

—it's something about beginning with my own vulnerability, something about not knowing what is going to happen here, together, over these weeks of doubting writing

—last year, when we first set off on Writing in the Expanded Field, I was so overwhelmed by this not-knowing, I felt like I was holding it together only just. Maybe I was (holding it together) or maybe I wasn't (depends who you ask). I will however, say this

—this loosening and expanding, this vulnerability and doubting, it is not so easy (but it is worth it). So, here we are. And we must start somewhere. We must start where we are.

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a poetics of attentiveness rather than excavation1

Find a spot that you like. If it's not too cold, take off your shoes (no problem if you don’t want to). Sit in any way (on the floor, on a chair) so you feel the floor through the soles of your feet, or your sit bones, or through the palms of your hands.

Take your attention down, to where your feet or your sit bones are contacting the floor. Sense the floor of this building.

Now take your attention down, through this floor. Sense this building on the ground. This is the ground of the Kulin Nation.

What tributaries run underneath this gallery?2

Now bring your attention up, into your legs and through your sitting bones, and keep bringing it through the body. Can you bring your attention out of the top of your head? Can you get a felt sense of the ceiling? (You may not. Don't worry).

Perhaps your felt sense disperses and shoots out sidewards as you bring it up the body?

How far in each direction does your felt sense of this space go? Just sit and attend to this for a few minutes.

Your felt sense may stop at the limits of your physical body. All you may be getting is energetic static. That's interesting, huh?

I can't feel my body.

Again, just sit with this enquiry for a few moments. This softening into felt perception. If you need to stretch your arms or wriggle your legs, or roll your shoulders as you loosen, go ahead. Get up a sit down again if you want. If it's too much, get up and go and get a snack. That's fine. Try again another time.

When you settle again, come back to your felt senses in this space. Has this changed at all? Maybe you sense something new? Sound, temperature, bodily pain or discomfort?

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An artwork, or an exhibition (if it is good!) moves you. It sets off complex physical, sensory, intellectual and emotional reactions that writers usually wrestle into structured prose with an enormous amount of effort.

"art works affect before they inform, perform or communicate"3

What if, as writers we go with these first responses?

things you might notice:

an inner dialogue

a memory triggered

a taste in your mouth

a desire to possess

an urge to write in another language

an image or voice from the imaginary

it might be quickening of the heartbeat as you approach a work

it might be blankness

physical discomfort, awkwardness

sudden exhaustion?

a metaphor that strikes

Let it be raw. Let it be awkward. Forget grace—4

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Thank you so much, all of the readings were so beautiful. It brought to mind a book of George Steiner’s that I read one time called Real Presences5 and in the first chapter he imagines a city where there is no critical writing.

[Laughter]

The only way acceptable response to a work of art is to make another work of art in response. This is the first time that I’ve really experienced that, in a direct sense, and it was incredibly moving for me as a listener and I wondered if there was a shift that any of the writers experienced from a position of critiquing to a position of engagement and creative response?

on the subject of words and singing

AHHHHH Roni is my absolute favourite ❤️❤️❤️

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Can I add, that one of the reasons these curatorial themes have been such a gift, is that the critical writing position—the 'objective' critical writing position is conventionally an invulnerable position (on the page), even though it’s difficult to do, and even though you’re very vulnerable while you’re writing anything. But in working with this show, we have been able to dive into this, to engage the vulnerabilities and doubts that are always there, in any kind of writing attempt.

Image:

First workshop,
Photograph by Laura De Neefe

  1. Sarah Nuttal "Surface, depth and the autobiographical act: Texts and images", Life Writing, Vol 11, No 2, 2014, pp.163

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  2. Ellen van Neervan "Women With Us", Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), 2018, pp.90

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  3. L Grosz quoted in Max Delany, On Vulnerability and Doubt, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), 2019, pp. 8

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  4. Mary Cappello, Awkward: A Detour, Bellevue Literary Press, New York, 2007 pp.16

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  5. "Imagine a republic that bans commentary, ‘a society, a politics of the primary’ peopled with ‘citizens of the immediate’. In this aesthetic utopia, writer and reader share the same ‘philo-logy’ and the interpretative impulse gives rise not to criticism but to ‘an enactment of answerable understanding’. The citizenry dance dances, recite poems by heart, produce paintings to register their experience of paintings and novels to answer novels. Their response is as complete an individual expression as the artwork they respond to; text and counter-text live equally through each other. The parasitism of academic criticism and journalistic reviewing ceases, the unmanageable flood of unreadable dissertations subsides, and the interposition of professional opinion between work and audience is eliminated. The cultural establishment expands to a cultured populace, and consumption gives way to creativity." Wendy Steiner, London Review of Books, Vol. 11, No.11, June 1, 1989, viewed October 4, 2019

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the nonhuman, and what voice means ⤻