I was out for a morning walk this past Saturday. The air was chilly, the lake was moving only slightly with very low swells blown in by light winds from the east, there were twenty or so sails moving across the water, far out and south, and also to the south, a dozen miles away, the Chicago skyline was standing dark and sharp-edged against the pale sky. Clouds were coming in from the west, and as I walked through the lakeside park at Northwestern University in Evanston, I realized I was getting the last of the brilliant but mild sunshine of the day. And I also realized that the tune in my head was from a high-school musical in which I had led a tiny band in a makeshift pit between the front row of seats and the high stage, banging away at a large, old upright piano (tuned for the performances), with only drums, a bass and a tenor sax. The show was Sandy Wilson’s “The Boy Friend,” a 1950s satire of 1920s musical shows–energetic, superficial, and fun to stage. And I asked myself—where in the world did that tune come from, as I am walking briskly along on this crisp, beautiful morning?

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I tried retracing thoughts I had had already on this walk, working backward through the associations. And I saw that they made a kind of sideways sense.

*

I became aware of this possible process when years ago I read Christopher Bollas’s wonderful Cracking Up (1995). A fellow poet, Steve Berg, told me enthusiastically about this book. The subtitle is “The work of unconscious experience.” Bollas, a psychoanalyist who also has a PhD in American literature, and who has written many books, is keen to understand the freedom of the unconscious, and how in our unconscious, whether we are awake or asleep, many trains of thought are continuously being generated, developing, and then breaking apart and disappearing. This particular book has always seemed to me one of the most fruitful I have ever read in thinking about how the process of writing draws willy-nilly (and fortunately) on our unconscious trains of thought, unconscious feelings, unconscious memories of experience.

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I mean the writing of fiction and poetry, drama and even the personal essay, although it is no doubt true that in even the most impersonal writing tasks there are flickers of unconscious choice to use this word and not that, to extend syntax this way and not that. What makes this interesting is the idea of freedom. We all know how deadening it can be when our choices, word by word, are made in a state of linguistic and cultural unfreedom—that is, when routine wording is what we put down, simply because that wording is easily available to us, is familiar to us, and in almost all the other writing we do, whatever it might be, we want readers to come with us without their having to work too hard. (A whole subject awaits us there, but I won’t go into it today.)

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Bollas shows how and why a train of thought can be retraced, when we are lucky, from a thought or a decision which we feel to be unforeseen and spontaneous back through a whole train of ideas and feelings of which we have been only very slightly aware as we were thinking them. A kind of associational “logic” is revealed.

*

So all of a sudden I realize I am humming to myself the song, “Won’t You Charleston With Me?” (When I got back home I looked up that show online to find a list of song titles, and recognized–for I could never have remembered–which title went with the tune I was hearing from memories of forty-five years ago.)  And I began to try to go backward, to try to remember what else I had been thinking of. It went like this:

**

I remembered having been thinking, at an earlier point on the walking trail, of having performed at the piano very happily when I was sixteen, and so enthusiastically, I now remembered also, that my fingers had bled a little from how hard and for how long I had to keep hitting those keys in order to be heard in that auditorium, which was very big.

*

And I thought how I never enjoyed performing again, and I wondered if this was because my experience in competitions and in a concerto performance two years later had been simply awful. But why had I been thinking about that?

*

I then remembered having watched the first twenty minutes of a “Nova” program on Darwin earlier in the week. I couldn’t stay with it—it was a poor production, the acting was strained, the dialogue was hopelessly unconvincing as real talk between people, and… the flashback to Darwin’s romance with his wife, the devout Emma Wedgwood, was set in her family living room, where she was playing Chopin on the piano.   Beautifully, of course, because the playing had been dubbed into the soundtrack by a professional pianist.   And I, in a petty mood, had been annoyed that the young Victorian ladies portrayed in the movies always play the piano perfectly. But why on my walk had I thought of the Darwin movie?

*

And then I recalled the first moments after I got beyond the town street and onto the path leading into the Northwestern University park land, and how I started heading birdsong from a beach-side copse to the right (while on the left is a massive two-level concrete parking lot, but mostly empty on Saturday morning), and I thought about how often I advert, in my own mind although not in conversation, to evolution in general, as one of the great beauties of the universe (at least, when it is not nurturing new strains of virus and bacteria or wiping out “native” flora and fauna, and so on).

*

And why was I thinking about that? I had been completely unaware of these thoughts as a train of thought; I had not, after all, been thinking about what I was thinking—I had simply been thinking it, in the form of an occasional thought that surfaced for an instant and then was gone again while my conscious thinking was pretty much focused on the path, the lake horizon, the skyline downtown, the breeze, the sun, a women’s lacross scrimmage on the lakeside field, and so on.

*

Now I could see the under-sequence of thoughts as a very private version of what I try to do when I am at work on a poem—looking deeper into how the thought/feeling moves…   This is how I teach, sometimes, too– looking for the wobbly spots in a draft, the gaps or seemingly overly emphatic passages that, to me at least, imply that something important in the train of thought/feeling that the poet is trying to shape remains ungrasped, unexpressed, unrealized.  Flagging those moments, I make no attempt to guess what’s under the surface of the draft, since whatever it is that’s missing, if it is missing, only the poet herself/himself could find by using the draft as a trail of clues leading back…

*

Sometimes—the best times—this exercise opens up a space into which a new thought/feeling rises.

*

I don’t think I have any special talent for working back through a train of thought of which I was not aware. I manage to do it sometimes, and at most times not, and on most days I don’t even try.   But the surprising thing that comes to mind—that has already come to mind—fascinates me and seems to me intimately related not only to the ways in which dreams move (which was Freud’s interest) but also to the ways in which a poem gradually finds its shape as a sequence of ideas and feelings. One can’t move one’s whole creative process into the unconscious; one has to make artistic decisions that are more deliberate and more pondered than that; but one can’t escape—and one shouldn’t try to escape it, whether by distracting oneself from it, or by denying its existence—the unconscious dimensions of one’s writing.  One should use them, as I think all successful artists do.

Unconscious Deliberateness (part 1)

When we work as writers in a state of openness of imagination, when we are responsive enough to allow what we see, both outside and within ourselves, to evoke feeling in us, and when we seek to discover within ourselves–beyond anxiety, trauma, enthusiasm, intense feelings of other kinds, and the sheer bafflement of writing, itself–what we had not known we knew or felt, then we are able to use more of the guiding power of our own unconscious to encounter both the world and ourselves.  We are able to discover more than we could using only our conscious minds.  And when we work that way we also are able to create poetry and fiction that is more deliberately woven together, making choices that are more artistically deliberate and meaningful rather than somewhat haphazard or by writers’ rules of thumb.  The pleasures of weaving that we feel when we work are then felt by the good reader.

Anyway, to think that we are working without the active participation of our unconscious is folly–no one is able with only conscious intent to produce great writing.  There is too much to manage, especially in longer works, and every power of intuition is necessary if we are to succeed. Not only that, but the conscious mind is unable to block out unconscious content, so it is going into what we write whether we know it or not.  So the question becomes, How do I use my own individual intuition, my range of responsiveness, my unconscious choices?  And what can I achieve if I try to do this?

Here is one illustration of supreme emotional depth and supreme craft united in a paragraph of prose.  The English title of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu is a Shakespearean phrase, Remembrance of Things Past (from sonnet XXX).  But properly translated into English the title would have been something as straightforward as “in search of lost times.”  Lost times exist only in our psyche, and this recherche, this search, by the way, is also our re-searching as writers–that is, our moving over the field after the harvest, searching once more, this time not for what was already harvested but for what has come back again and for what was left behind.

At the beginning of Proust’s first volume, called in English Swann’s Way, the first episode is a very prolonged account, astonishing in many ways, of an evening in the narrator’s childhood when his habitual emotional need for, his dependance on, a goodnight kiss every night from his young, beautiful mother, was thwarted by the presence of a dinner guest, M. Swann.  Events and characters are described with extraordinary richness of detail and symbol and psychological insight, and the plot advances only very slowly, as the narrator recalls his strategems for getting that kiss, on that evening both remembered and imagined, despite the intrusive presence of the guest, despite his mother’s reluctance to indulge him, and despite his father’s intolerance for the boy’s life of feeling and his neediness.  The parents finally come upstairs–mother first, whom the boy ambushes with his pleas, followed by father, holding a candle.  And the boy bursts into tears.

This is the crucial, initiating moment of the whole three thousand pages of Proust’s multi-volume novel.  Something is established in this experience of thwarted hope and desire, and then in the sudden and unexpected rewarding of this hope and desire, that sets the course of the whole work. Helene Cixous, the French writer and thinker, points out that in this scene the rewarding of desire leads not to triumph but to an unanticipated feeling of loss, because in finally being awarded, by the father, the presence of his mother, the boy gets her only against her will, and thus he defeats the one person whose love he needed to receive without asking for it.  In the reflective passage that follows this scene, this contradiction in feeling is drawn out by the narrator, and Cixous has also drawn our attention to the culminating poetic figure here–the moment in which child, father and mother are configured in a tableau which establishes the tears of the child not only in that moment but for the rest of his life.  Clearly these pages of Proust are richly woven with the most complicated feelings in the characters, at all levels of their psyches.  I want to point to a little technical effect in the same passage.

I translate Proust’s sentences pretty literally, and not very idiomatically in English, for a reason I’ll get to in a moment (and perhaps readers with even a little French, having first scanned this translation, will be able to follow Proust’s original text, which I will put afterwards):

It has been a good many years since all that.  The stairway wall, where I saw the reflection of his candle come rising, does not exist, since long ago.  In me also a good number of things have been destroyed that I believed ought to last forever, and new things are built which gave birth to new pain and joy which I would not have been able to foresee, before, just as much as the old ones became difficult for me to understand.  It has been a good long time also since my father stopped being able to say to mother, “Go along with the little one.”  The possibility of those hours will never be reborn, for me.  But after a while, I begin again to perceive, if I give a good ear to them, the sobs which I had the strength to contain before my father and which did not burst forth except when I found myself alone with mother.  In reality they never did stop; it’s only because life hushes now all around me that I hear them again, like those convent bells that the noises of the town cover so well during the day that one believed them stopped, but which sound out again in the silence of the night.

Il y a bien des années de cela.  La muraille de l’escalier, où je vis monter le reflet de sa bougie n’existe plus depuis longtemps.  En moi aussi bien des choses ont été détruites que je croyais devoir durer toujours et de nouvelles se sont édifiées donnant naissance à des peines et à des joies nouvelles que je n’aurais pu prévoir alors, de même que les anciennes me sont devenues difficiles à comprendre.  Il y a bien longtemps aussi que mon père a cessé de pouvoir dire à maman: «Va avec le petit.»  La possibilité de telles heures ne renaîtra jamais pour moi.  Mais depuis peu de temps, je recommence à très bien percevoir si je prête l’oreille, les sanglots que j’eus la force de contenir devant mon père et qui n’éclatèrent que quand je me retrouvai seul avec maman.  En réalité ils n’ont jamais cessé; et c’est seulement parce que la vie se tait maintenant davantage autour de moi que je les entends de nouveau, comme ces cloches de couvents que couvrent si bien les bruits de la ville pendant le jour qu’on les croirait arrêtées mais qui se remettent à sonner dans le silence du soir.  (Du côté de chez Swann: Combray)

We see the emotional trauma behind this narrative moment.  My sense of this passage is the following: the adult narrator is struck by what he sees within himself, by his in-sight–as he looks within; or is within and looks around him, there.  At this moment of perceiving what he has already described, of extending the consciousness of narration to the consciousness of aftermath, he understands that like the silence of convent (not church!) bells that is only apparent, not real, because they are drowned out by daytime noise, the long-ago sobbing of his childhood, which he had unspoken permission to release only in the presence of his mother, never did stop. but has only been drowned out by the noise of later, adult life, by his own later history both inner and social.  This already mown field, we enter by night.  And by night the movement, the insight, the discoveries, the knowledge, of the unconscious is as vivid as the watchfulness of the conscious mind by day.  By night, literally–in that in dreams and in the transition from sleep to waking and waking to sleep the unconscious speaks most clearly to the conscious mind–and by night, metaphorically, in that, at whatever hour we write, when we draw on the unconscious we make a kind of night of the day.

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The reason for my wanting to provide a more or less word-for-word translation of the French is to create a reiteration in English of the adjective “good,” which is the best I can do, to match the French adverb “bien,” which because of the necessities of English-language syntax I am having to translate colloquially and awkwardly.  I want to do this so that we can perceive in English not only that the narrator’s sobs are like the nighttime ringing of the convent bells (and vice versa),  but also that he himself as writer rings these bells in his sentences by using the word “bien” five times.  In the passages before and after this one, the word appears only once or twice over a few hundred words–that is, at a more expected frequency.  And I would have liked in the last sentence of the translation to have echoed the narrator’s last use of “bien” with the English “good,” although it would have required me to distort the syntax into something like “the convent bells are good-and-covered by the noises of the town.”  But we’ll leave the problems translation as a topic for some other occasion!

My describing an aspect of craft so unmistakable, which yet seems too subtle to have been deliberately calculated, is for the purpose of giving an example of the working of unconscious deliberateness.  I don’t assume that Proust inserted those repetitions of “bien” consciously, but that he did so with unconscious deliberateness.  Proust’s passage exemplifies a synthesizing power which, at least in his case, directs every aspect of craft toward the one goal of the emotional and rhetorical richness of the portrayal of one moment of feeling.

(Someone will object: How do you know Proust didn’t set up that ringing bell of the word “bien” deliberately.  My answer: Yes, it is most certainly deliberate; there is no other way to account for its aptness and meaningfulness–yet conscious deliberateness alone can never create all the effects one finds in such a paragraph, much less in a whole page, a whole chapter, a whole novel.  There is simply too much to do.  One can’t do it with conscious deliberateness any more than a musician can play a difficult work in the key of B while having to consciously remember that the B scale includes D-sharp.  Nor does the musician need to remember that.  That knowledge, along with knowledge of phrasing, dynamics, and so on–and like Proust’s knowledge of syntax, image, and so on–has been absorbed into the highly trained musicianship that is required of a serious musician–like Proust’s highly trained…  what?  We don’t seem to have a word for what, in the writer, corresponds to “musicianship.”)

Since I am not gifted with Proust’s extraordinary powers of concentration and synthesis, then one of my tasks is to discover how as a writer I can at least bring certain aspects of this unconscious deliberateness to consciousness, so that I can discover on the field of my own experience the hints and clues of my unconsciousness feeling.  So I can glean those hints and clues from what my unconscious has left on the pages of my draft, and let them seize my conscious attention.  Just as the mouse, which anyone else might never have even noticed, or if noticing, might never have pondered, becomes for John Clare the object that, once acknowledged, releases his feeling.