Wednesday, 17 February 2016
There is writing which is deliberated on, carefully reshaped to gather up the available ideas and set them forth, half-creating them in the process, and then there is a freer kind of writing which ventures on and on, hurrying to bring out thoughts that have been latent in consciousness, picking through a jumble that has accumulated like waste, and caring little for quality or clarity, since these can be added in a later editing, if needed. Another rarer kind of writing, although it is not actually written, is in those strange poetic creations that are the occasional gift of dreams or dream-like states. These dream words seem elegant and compacted with diverse and illuminated meanings. They seem the artful containers of a plurality of meanings that couldn't otherwise be kept together. In the two modes of conscious composition the subliminal layer of meaning is either superficially known or not known at all, but dream words which have risen up from below, carry the richness of the depths with them by nature. Of course this is often in a form that does not survive the light of day for more than a few seconds. If one retains some memory of having formed these words it is that they were produced in a strange kind of blissful ease, half intentional and half given, free, but in such a different time and space that the usual idea of freedom no longer applies. Conscious intention casts a shadow, it always masks part of what it aims at. If an object is thematised in order to be grasped in its mode of arising, the intention betrays itself by leaning on the object in order to fix it. Even if intention is deliberately relaxed in order to allow the object to float up, the context of the intention goes before and, as it were, sets up the shot. In waking consciousness the object is approached from the top down, from the descriptive and instrumental layers of mind, so that it is placed before being known. The objectivation of dream consciousness is naturally the opposite of this. If the objectivities of the waking world correspond to the thrownness which can be said to characterise one of the essential ways we find ourselves in that world, it may be because of something we have knowingly surrendered in order to gain our citizenship there.
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