The Poet Pencil

Once upon a time
a pencil wanted to write poetry
but it didn't have a point.
One day a boy put it into the sharpener
and instead of a point,
a river appeared.

by Jesus Carlos Soto Morfin
translated by Judith Infante

This is a poem appearing in The Tree is Older Than You Are, a bilingual anthology of poems and stories from Mexico by Naomi Shihab Nye.  Jesus Carlos Soto Morfin is the youngest poet in the anthology.

In reading about Adam and Eve and the story of Creation, I’m reflecting on our own artistic attempts or creations. From Zornberg’s perspective, this is how we are like God. We are creating something new, something that was not there before. This is the thrill of it.  Right now I am reading my favorite online info site Brain Pickings and absorbing its wisdom. One thing that struck me was a quote about writing from Hemmingway:
 
When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. 
 
This is how the Shange poem in my last blog post felt to me.  It "happened" to me. It touched me like cold water or a kiss.
 
Many of us who write have experienced blocks, where “nothing happens”, not to the writer let alone the reader.  I had been feeling this while struggling to complete a play with my collaborator Evie Rappoport. My means of working through blocks is dream work.
 
This is a particular kind of dream work called Embodied Imagination, created and developed by Robert Bosnak, a Jungian psychoanalyst and writer.  This work is done with a dream worker (a trained guide) who helps, to paraphrase Hemmingway, “something happen” to the dreamer.  In a hypnogogic state, she is led to “enter” or embody significant images in her dream.  From this, she develops what is called a composite, meaning the 3 or 4 significant images are practiced throughout the coming weeks.  Creating new patterns and perspectives, this dream work helps me get a project underway or work through times when I feel inert.
 
A few days ago, in the midst of this block, I worked a dream using this method with my colleague, Kevin Connerton.  And presto! The next morning I woke up with ideas for the final act of our play.  I then wrote the final act. This type of dream work shakes up the unconscious in some way that allows new ideas to emerge.  This dream work facilitates creation.

What Do You Believe a Poem Shd Do?

Nztoke Shange b. 1948

quite simply a
poem shd fill you
up with something/
cd make you swoon,
stop in yr tracks,
change yr mind,
or make it up.
a poem shd happen
to you like cold
water or a kiss.

Poetry in Motion
​seen 1/11/16 on the 6 train

​Zornberg, the biblical scholar, points out that as we each leave our own particular Eden and gain consciousness, we gradually become aware of the many inhibitions and pitfalls – traumatic memories, anxieties, disappointments -- that can come between us and our desire.  Life is now improvisational and unpredictable.  We are open to questions.  We can become unstable and at any moment lapse into one of two extremes: babbling (making no sense) or poetry (making inspirational sense). 
 
Before Adam leaves the Garden, God brings animals to him for naming.  Adam uses language that is concrete and specific, the language of pure naming.  However, after Adam eats the apple, his language breaks down. He equivocates. He blames Eve. He confesses yet he rationalizes. These breakdowns and mix-ups lead to the possibility of interpretation, that is, language as having more than one meaning.  Zornberg’s point is Adam learns to use flexibly tensed speech.  This allows meaning to be continuously transformed. (Speech and language in this context includes feeling states and depth of communication.)
 
Just as scholars such as Zornberg interpret many levels of meaning in biblical texts, so we in psychotherapy address the implicit underpinnings of our conversations.  We also want to transform speech so as to see the world in new perspectives.  This is a creative process that allows for free associations and new configurations of ideas. 
 
It is similar to an artist who wants to continuously press forward and not stay with old, comfortable patterns.  Currently, there is a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Frank Stella’s work.  He is seen as a minimalist painter yet he is not. Even in his so-called early minimalist days, there is vast depth to his work.  His oeuvre has progressed astronomically from his early black grid-like works to paintings that are more like sculptures, to full blown, complex sculptures such as his Indian bird series or his huge, silver metallic sculpture, Raft of the Medusa. This portrays the disastrous raft built after the wrecking of a French Royal Navy frigate, the Medusa, a tragedy in 1816 memorialized by the French painter Géricault.
 
Stella is constantly finding new ways to use space, including incorporating state of the art technology, even now as he approaches his 80th birthday.  Regarding the artistic process, Stella sees the importance of boundaries that define but do not limit.  He writes:  “The essence of freedom… is something that is able to overcome its own boundaries. The question is not only to be able to define things, but also have the boundaries felt in the proper way – they are defining but not limiting.”  He could have been writing about psychotherapy.

​Eating the fruit in Eden represents for Zornberg the birth of human consciousness, the creation of a separate mind.  Adam and Eve are no longer as one.  Now each is alone. This new (self) consciousness delays desire. There is now the possibility of memory or disappointment coming between Adam and his beloved.  A state of arousal is now needed to work towards and create intimacy whereas before Adam and Eve had the innocence and unselfconsciousness of two animals copulating.  This new consciousness represents a healthy shifting between separateness and intimacy.
 
However, with the development of separate consciousness, a new problem can occur. While we spoke in the last post about the problem of not leaving Eden, this is the problem of not being able to return to Eden at all –that is, remaining isolated, remaining imprisoned in a separate mind.
 
One way this can happen is that eating the fruit -- ingesting intentionality and agency --can create an ambition that is limitless.  This person is reluctant to return to Eden, either to be intimate or to simply rest his body and mind.  The Sabbath can be viewed this way: a necessary return to a state of bliss to relax from the cares of being separate in the world.  Not to find a metaphorical Sabbath is to create an unhealthy isolation.
 
A parenting style can contribute to this situation – too much overscheduling and too much emphasis on achievement without helping the child articulate his or her genuine interests. This child can become a very driven adult but yet paradoxically not have genuine desire.  This person may “overwork” and “underplay” but with no real sense of satisfaction or achievement.  She or he is moving too fast and forgets what is meaningful.  In therapy, we can the patient slow down and remember.

Reflecting on the story of the Garden of Eden, we are brought into the world of desire and with that, the world of being human.   In her masterful work The Murmuring Deep, Zornberg writes that with desire comes vulnerability, a relinquishing of omnipotence, and the possibility of painful rejection.  This can be so difficult to bear that there are those who are cannot experience desire and, although impoverished, feel safe. 
 
I have worked with patients who cannot desire and therefore cannot act on their own behalf.  A goal of psychotherapy is to help them learn to want and then have the courage to become active to achieve what they want.  This takes identifying the goal and having the will to go for it.  Psychologists call this ability “agency”.  Having agency allows us to find satisfaction both because we have identified what is meaningful and we have pride in achieving it.
 
This includes wrestling with the shame of acknowledging something has power over you, that is, you want it so it drives you.  There is also the potential shame of failure, of not achieving whatever it is you desire.  Being able to tolerate this shame helps us relinquish feelings of grandiosity and develop realistic humility.
 
Interestingly, some parents are very reluctant to have their children develop desire. These parents continue to gratify beyond the time it is appropriate. The child remains in the same state as Adam before he ate the fruit, an unself-conscious state of simple gratification, a womb-like existence. These children do not learn to tolerate the frustration of wanting, of longing, and then the trial and error period that can precede achieving something meaningful.
 
Children start out in the Garden.  First they are in the womb, where hopefully everything is to their liking, with very little effort required.  Then as young infants, they have their needs met without much fuss.  They take the breast or the bottle and, ideally at least, do not experience much frustration or discomfort. 
 
Then the job of becoming human begins.  The child soon learns he or she has to wait, has to say please and thank you, that is, follow some basic rules.  By the time they reach school age, they are required to learn -- academically, emotionally, socially (not always easy).  When they do the wrong thing, they can become frightened and blame others, just like Adam and Eve tried to shift blame.  Further, to save face, they may not always tell the truth. Their various mistakes help them mature and develop the resilience needed throughout life.
 
Just remember the old Jewish joke: A five year old was sitting at the dinner table and said, “Please pass the bread”.  His astonished mother remarked, “Why, I didn’t know you could talk!”  The five year old retorted, “Up till now, I didn’t have to!”