This is why asymmetry is so powerful, so important. If totally disparate things are collaged together the human brain itself, little by little, is generated anew.
Psychic geography, ethnography and botany, a poetry of stones. These things feel "far" from each other, and there's a sensation of space. [note movement of this sentence and rewording]. There's a "Huh?" and a "How?" -- a space in our consciousness which is the desire to know. The words jump from their context, without transition or link, and energy is released. "An Asymmetry of Writing? What does that mean?"
Asymmetrical systems are a methodology of discovery, a way to uncover what we don't know we don't know. Because they prompt many meanings at different places and times, as we move through our lifetime they will tell us new things.
Creating Absences: Asymmetrical Writing
When a writer is writing, words follow words. The intellect in motion leaves tracings on paper, a form on a page. Thus a textual form is an afterimage in language of the linking of patterns of the mind as it moves.
Think now, if you will, of the story of your life. Imagine writing it out in the sequence of time: first there was this and then there was that. Now imagine, with scissors and Scotch tape, rearranging its sequence. With either "random" arrangement or intuitive intention, you'll be surprised what you find. Phases of your life converse with each other, and relate in new ways. If you seek for asymmetry, for intriguing connections, you may learn who you are.
Now try the same process, but this time with ideas not events. Follow a sequence of thinking, a free association, and then rearrange it. The newly linked pieces will give you new meanings.
By adding insight to impulse, you can create contexts and movement, and thus a wanting to know. Dissimilar objects in contact produce a presence of Absence, the desire in the reader to want "just a little bit more." What kind of absences are most generous, most kind? Which juxtapositions come close enough to suggesting new meaning, but do not force a preordained one? Picture the ikebana with its elements from nature in kinetic relation. Invoke the same sense of placement, and see what you find.
In a quirky little monograph on symbols in Japan entitled Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes says of ikebana:
In a Japanese flower arrangement . . . what is produced is the circulation of air, of which flowers, leaves branches . . . are only the walls, the corridors, the baffles, delicately drawn. . . the Japanese bouquet has a volume . . . you can move your body into the interstice of its branches, into the space of its stature, not in order to read . . . its symbolism, but to follow the trajectory of the hand which has written it: a true writing since it produces a volume and since, forbidding our reading to be the simple decoding of a message (however loftily symbolic) it permits the reading to repeat the course of the writing's labor.
The sequence of sentences as they appear on.jpeg)
the page is the movement of thoughts. But it's more than reflection. Writing is creating, and words next to other words make fresh channels in the brain. Thus writing has power to change who we are. It works on the reader and the writer as well. As Deena Metzger tells us, "To write is, above all, to construct a self... Journal entries and life histories as well as fictions, poems and plays are variations on the most fundamental human desire to know oneself deeply and in relationship to the world."
If writing is discovering the things you don't know, the reshuffling of sequence takes you one step beyond. Because moving the text reorders the mind, revising [note italics] the text revises the self.
When the text leaves its home and moves out in the world, the process continues. The sequence of discourse moves the mind of the reader--it patterns the motion of the brain as it grows.
Here is a passage from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard:
Everywhere darkness and the presence of the unseen appalls. We estimate now that only one atom dances alone in every cubic meter of intergalactic space. I blink and squint. What planet or power yanks Haley's Comet out of orbit? We haven't seen that force yet; it's a question of distance, density and the pallor of reflected light. We rock, cradled in the swaddling band of darkness. Even the simple darkness of night whispers suggestions to the mind. Last summer, in August, I stayed at the creek too late.
The generous piece of writing, the asymmetrical piece of writing, doesn't boss you or pull you; it creates many emptinesses, fills them in partly, inconclusively at times, and creates them again. This offering of emptinesses, this creation of spaces, gives to the world a new way of thinking about who it is. And the gift keeps on changing, through the movement of time and the difference between people. Each mind is topographically its own, with its own currents and eddies. It has its own humors, and its penchant for change.
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Join a special 2.5 hour workshop this week with Andy Couturier: "Asymmetrical Writing: A More Generous Way to Write." More details and RSVP info here.
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