Trying to fit my ideas and experiences into language is almost guaranteed to invite profound friction, or at least some itchiness. One of my favorite articulations of this twinning is in Peter Elbow’s Writing With Power:
“To write is to overcome a certain resistance: you are trying to wrestle a steer to the ground, to wrestle a snake into a bottle, to overcome a demon that sits in your head. To succeed in writing or making sense is to overpower that steer, that snake, that demon.
But, if in your struggles to write, you actually break its back, you are in trouble. Yes, now you have power over it, you can say what you need to say, but transforming that resistant force into a limp noodle, somehow you turn your words into limp noodles, too. Somehow the force that is fighting you is also the force that gives life to your words. You must overpower that steer or snake or demon. But not kill it.”
Peter Elbow, Writing With Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 18.
This image has been a balm through the years, as I’ve worn grooves between my eyebrows in front of a screen or over a notebook making messes of words that still don’t quite get at what I mean. There’s that strain of feeling expression almost in reach but slippery and sneaky, biding its time. It really can feel like wrestling, a framework that was more than metaphorical for me through most of my twenties; my obsessive writing habits were paralleled by obsessive training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
In the antiseptic-scented world of martial arts, conflict was greeted as an opportunity for artful strategy, externalized and embodied in a “battle” between two bodies, one that felt either playful and collaborative, or like an actual fight—egos and animosity broiling under the mask of sport. Training BJJ helped me as a writer because it helped me access the former quality: a light touch when faced with brute force. After all, spending a few minutes ground-fighting a heaving, hyper-ventilating man with a hundred pounds of stony muscle on you, a generic vendetta, and only partial control of his limbs would seem to be an apt framework for the kind of friction Elbow describes above. Articulation—or whatever block is standing in its way—can feel that dangerous and unhinged, a force that’s out to get you and which needs to be reigned in.
This is where the metaphor breaks down for me, but also where it comes to life. BJJ is a sport that involves players—discrete bodies that come together to learn and/or act out fantasies of domination. The muddy, messy way those reflexes are mixed up felt honest to me, if not a bit socially taxing. Writing is mixed up and muddy, too, but usually it feels more obvious to me that the force you’re working with isn’t an opponent to defeat, it’s just you. Ultimately this is also true in BJJ, it’s just that the motif of winner/loser—and even of mastery, for that matter—haunts the joint, a specter that distracts from the heart of the matter: your own process.
With that said, it’s easy to overlook the centrality of process in writing, too—which is to say that resistance to the process is felt as an obstacle standing in the way of it, instead of the process itself. But friction is the juicy stuff, and I think that’s Elbow point when he draws up that image of wrestling a resistant force into a bottle without breaking it. The force blocking the story also is the story.
It’s a friendly and encouraging perspective, one that has helped me to keep going when the going gets tough. It’s an invitation to give up on the hope that things will feel easier when the “real work” is happening. The force blocking the story is also us, or at least the parts of ourselves that don’t want it to come out, and this is also an invitation. There is nothing in myself I need to eradicate or set aside before get into things. Everything that seems like a problem with myself and my process isn’t really that at all, it’s just what I get to work with, and that this work isn’t heading to a place absent of trouble/friction/whatever feels so unworkable now. This friendliness goes totally against the grain of my immediate reaction, but I think it is more honest and also more helpful than my ambitious reflex to get on with things—to get this work over with.
In Start Where You Are, which I just read, Pema Chödrön writes, “The things that really drive us nuts have enormous energy in them.” One of the things that drives me nuts, at least in my writing process, is that I overthink things. I don’t just shoot from the hip (another violent but kind of helpful metaphor). I sit down to, for example, write this newsletter, telling myself that this time I’ll just be quick—I’ll just get things down on the page and then move onto the rest of the shit on my to-do list. But here I am again, re-writing sentences and hesitating at the blank space beyond them. I feel like the whole get-that-demon-in-a-bottle motif isn’t as readily at home in this kind of friction—the kind of friction that is holding back. But it’s all the same. There’s enormous energy in what I want to say and also in not saying it, and these are not separate reflexes. It is one conjoined paradox, two sides of the same coin. The same heartbeat.
Part of the puzzle is my own tendencies, like how perfectionism and anxiety exert control over my creative expression. But I also think there’s an element of all of this that has to do with the content of that expression. It’s like everything is right there on the surface, the hidden meaning in plain view. What seems too obvious (or overwhelming) to say is actually what’s wanting to come out, and the anxiety that stands in the way is also what fuels the work and gives it its meaning.
I don’t mean that things always feel this way. Sometimes things really do come out easily, and that doesn’t diminish their power. But I think there’s something to be said for when writing/creating feels itchy, claustrophobic, awkward, and stilted. (For me, that is often.) For one thing, that sense of vulnerability and discomfort is authentic and shared. It’s a trick of our mind to read it as evidence of our separation—further proof that we don’t belong in the world, in the process, or so on. But that vulnerability is the heart of things.
Using our obstacles to wake up to our connections is a big part of what Chödrön discusses in Start Where You Are. When I revisited my annotations from the book for a quotation to wrap things up, I was amused to find a passage that speaks directly to this line of questioning: “Sometimes writing, instead of being a fresh take, is like trying to catch something and nail it down.” So I’m left thinking about the inverse relationship between control (nailing things down) and freshness—which is perhaps the vital force Elbow advises us to let live. The reality of our experiences (and the world we share) can’t be pinned down, though we can give words to at least some of its messy swirl. Trying to say it “perfectly” isn’t only impossible, it also can feel like rehearsing for real life. I have a hunch that participating in the world as it actually is—and working with the authentic, messy fullness of who I really am—might sometimes feel more like a free-fall than squeezing things into a bottle. Writing is one of the places I go to keep stepping off the ledge. The discomfort that comes along with that leap almost always feels like an accident; letting it in is a portal to the participation I was craving all along.
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