Extended Mind in Creative Writing, Dream Techniques and Psychogeography/Psychogeographic Flow

(Or: 'Accessing the elemental power circuit of the universe.')

In his 2015 article, The Art of Drafting & Revision - Extended Mind in Creative Writing, Marcelle Freiman applies cognitive research to a creative writing disciplinary approach to 'make visible' the experience (or the mind) of the writer-at-work 'to examine intersections between the writer, language, and the materiality of the "doing" of writing.' (p. 48). What he aims to do is to find a way of explaining the connection between cognition, language and the manifestation of meaning through the process (or processes) of creative writing. Most importantly, he says that any stage of the creative writing process is the thinking. (p. 64). My recent editing/revising of the novel led me to examine what he has to say in more depth.

These processes, he says, include 'creative writing [that] is drafted, written and re-iteratively revised' resulting in 'creating complex, nuanced textual meaning using the language' generated by more than simply editing. (p. 52). Of the process of drafting/redrafting/revision, Freiman quotes Ellen Spolsky (2002 in Frieman 2015, p. 53) who argues that 'vulnerability is just what allows creative innovation' and that cognitive conflicts, even small ones 'tend to generate creative solutions.' Vulnerability, then, as a 'feeling' affects cognitive processing, which in turn becomes part of human creativity and specifically, the creative writing process. John Fowles alludes to such 'cognitive conflicts' specifically in 'Notes on an Unfinished Novel' (1969 in Bradbury 1977, p. 138). For him, writing the first draft of a creative piece and subsequent revision/editing 'are so different they hardly seem to belong to the same activity...all that matters to begin with is the flow, the story, the narrating.' But 'During the revision period, I try to keep some sort of discipline. I make myself revise whether I feel like it or not; in some ways, the more disinclined and dyspeptic one feels, the better - one is harsher with oneself. All the best cutting is done when one is sick of the writing.' This incorporation of 'feeling' - of psyche - into the creative writing process is expanded upon by Freiman, who says that the creative writer's use of language requires the writer to access 'the vivid inner, shifting and imagining, perhaps film-like or dream-like, perceptions of memory and imagination.' And, again, this is something Fowles examined in his essay, saying that 'At one time, I analysed my dreams in detail: again and again I recalled purely cinematic effects...panning shots, close shots, tracking, jump-cuts and the rest. In short, this mode of imagining is far too deep in me to eradicate - not only in me, in all my generation.' (1969, [1977], p. 145).

Kazuo Ishiguro has also written about the link between the process of writing and dreams, referring to 'dream language'. He says, 'I started to see parallels between memory and dream, the way you manipulate both according to your emotional needs at the time. The language of dreams would also allow me to write a story that people would read as a metaphorical tale as opposed to a comment on particular society.'

Dream Techniques

1. Unwarranted Emotion 2. Unwarranted Relationship 3. Delayed realization (ENTER/EXIT) 4. Odd postures—figurative postures + escaped metaphors 5. Placing 6. Weird Venues 7. Extended, tangential monologues 8. Distorted time frame 9. Unwarranted recognition of place 10. Private enclaves 11. Unwarranted familiarity with situation (or person or place) 12. Characters from foreign contexts 13. Characters continuing under different surfaces 14. Distorted Logistics 15. Transmuting Narrator 16. Partial invisibility (And odd witnessing) 17. Backward projection of Intentions 18. Bleeding with Memory 19. BACKWARD projection of Judgment 20. Restricted Witnessing 21. Tunnel Memory 22. The Dim Torch Narrative Mode 23. Crowds—Unwarranted Uniformity 24. Robert Altman [illegible] 25. (“More than I expected”) Unwarranted Expectation 26. MIXED PERSONALITY

(From https://lithub.com/how-kazuo-ishiguro-used-dream-techniques-to-write-his-most-polarizing-novel/

'How Kazuo Ishiguro used 'Dream Techniques' to Write His Mose Polarising Novel')

This looks like a preliminary list of ideas, but according to Freiman, represents a vital part of the creative process and links to Seamus Heaney's 'harmonious self-reproduction' (1974, p. 159 in Freiman 2015, p. 54). Heaney considered there is an embodiment of self in the writing process which includes facts of socialisation and cultural context. According to Heaney, and relevant here, is his idea that the starting point in the process of creative writing is the gap between the pre-verbal ('the first alertness or come-hither, sensed in a blurred or incomplete way') and the thought, theme or phrase. The 'gap' is a space where language and cognitive articulation aren't yet matched, and for Heaney, the creative process requires the writer to find that match. Importantly, in order to do this, the creative writer must use 'available resources of feeling, language and form to create aesthetically meaningful work.' (p. 54). Andy Clark refers to the 'mangrove effect' (1998 in Freiman 2015, p. 56) in which he likens the idea of the root system of mangroves in developing his theory of extended mind and variants of extended cognition to the way in which, for instance a poem is constructed, suggesting that the properties of the words (their structure and cadence, for example) go some way to determining the thoughts the poem expresses. Drafting/redrafting/editing/revising/rewriting is part of this process and, according to Freiman, 'it resembles the experience, often noted by writers, that they do not know what they think until they see what they write; or that writers write in order to find out what they want to say.' (p. 56). Clark, however, takes this further by expanding the idea of language as a tool of extended cognition to a tool of extended remembering. i.e: 'the extension of writing "outside" the body provides an externalised means of cognitive remembering, with the text and language not simply as memory 'storage', but rather as part of a system of externalised and ongoing cognition throughout the process of writing and revision. This externalisation, however, is experienced as, or feels like, an integration of self doing the writing and creating the text.' (p. 56). I mention this here, because Ishiguro's list represents just that: a start from which the 'roots' of the ideas will grow - formed from memory and dreams. Nick Papadimitriou talks about writing about an 'anamnesis landscape - a land that I knew but forgot that I knew' and he mentions a going on an 'extended soul-journey through the environment. Therefore the writing is a little bit experimental here and there, but there's also very precise observations and analytic pieces of writing as well.' http://www.samburcher.com/articles/notes-on/153-nick-papadimitriou.html Heaney's 'self-reproduction' implies physicality suggesting the capability of the creative writer to imagine (and re-imagine) their work as a 'reproduction of herself as body, with no boundary between the body and the work being produced, a melding of internal and external processes.' (p. 56)

The influence, then, of dreams and of 'environment' specifically (or geography, or place, for instance) operate as a Prakriti layer - a kind of heft of creative force, which links, actually to Csiksentmihayli's idea of Flow and seems to be essentially psychogeographic in its nature. Of course, this leads me to my own revisions/editing/rewriting process, and the importance, somehow, of dreaming within the narrative:

'She’d taken a nap that first afternoon, had fallen asleep on Guy’s bed. It had been a long journey, in every sense, to this place after all, and her migraine was in a different stage, the stage that makes dreaming and migraines seem able to co-exist. She’ll tell how she dreamed vividly about red slatted light from the gap in the curtains, how she imagined it had made patterns on the skin of her arm like little moving maps or live tattoos. She was sure she could hear voices like flushes of sound from downstairs, and imagined, in that curious state of amazement that isn’t quite of this consciousness, that there was already a soft, sliding strata beneath her, making up a new lay of the land. She’ll say she heard or felt the sound of water from nearby, and there was a sense of home to her, but that was different here, and, anyway, in this dream, Guy was beside her, awake, still dressed, and it was as if she’d wished him there.

She’ll say, in this dream, she moved to kiss him, but he seemed to sense it and shifted away.'

Oatley & Djikic (2008, p. 14) refer to the act of writing thoughts and then editing them as something that 'enables a kind of thinking that is not impossible without external memory, but is made easier by storing some thoughts temporarily in the external medium.' (2008, p. 10 in Freiman 2015, p. 60) and this has made me think about how much of my own memory, remembering and knowledge about the Black Country is being accessed, of course, but also how it is being accessed. Take this excerpt that I worked on today, for instance:

'Imagine what it must have been like for him being back here after all that time, into the interzone of the Black Country. Imagine it now. Imagine him feeling as if he’d passed through some kind of portal, back in time, into a different time-system. Imagine the place re-engineering itself into him, of him becoming a kind of interactive thing, not man-made, not nature either, but something yet to be discovered. Imagine him, if you can, the way the place was working on his mind – nothing coherent, nothing easily explainable – and think of the power of it, his allegiance to the place itself, how he would have been thinking that whatever had happened in the past, however the past had treated him, he was aligning himself, twinning himself, with something that was even more forceful, more dynamic, than that past, that treatment. Imagine a slow curve of a line made entirely by walking ahead of him. Imagine him being gradually, no, suddenly, aware of, rather than hearing, specifically, the sensation of water, the grey-green blades of grass, the complexion of nettle leaves, and the meaning of yellow in the fennel flowers, the curiosity of a lump of concrete or cement. Think about how the rhythmic placing of each step might become out of his control, as if he was being drawn into the place, or back into the place, or into something, like he was part of its permanent essential essence. We could guess that he thought of himself as Guy then, Our Guy, and that all sense of time evaporated along with his feelings, so that, together, what he was sensing was bodily, like utter relief, beyond satisfaction, as if he was in the process of finding the answer to a long-lost question he hadn’t even realised he was considering. It’s at times like that when it’s easy to believe that the gaps between feelings and thoughts are actually as important as the thoughts and feelings themselves, that there is no concealing anything, and that having recognised this, life – his life – could be changed for ever. Ask him where he was, or where he walked to precisely, and he can’t tell you, because there were moments of erasure so that he forgot, or didn’t even recognise where he was and what he was doing, yet it all seemed easy, painless and easy, and looking at the landscape, to him, looking at the canal, the factories, it looked like a foreign land, like a myth or a dream, as if he had burrowed into his own unconscious, where there was a clear picture of what and how he needed to be, what he needed to do. But imagine this, imagine seeing this, experiencing it – because you can bet he did – words, he’d say, emerging through the bark of trees and slipping off the leaves there, like blossoms, like memories; words and sentences shimmering on the surface of the canal water, appearing like living creatures, like gifts, through the water starwort. God’s country, he’ll still say, this place here.

Imagine that. Imagine him believing that he had reclaimed this place. Imagine him thinking he could just pick it up and put it down whenever he felt like it.

Keeping in mind that I read the Freiman piece after working on the revision of this excerpt, what strikes me, reading it back, is my 'use' of memory - or rather knowledge - of the Black Country, and the style (perhaps Ishiguro might refer to it as 'bleeding with memory.') When Oatley & Djikic talk about the temporary storing of thoughts in an external medium, what they're referring to is the receipt of of such writing by the reader, and the way in which the writer handles this, or pre-empts it, or enables it. They say that in revising/editing/redrafting, the writer is 'trying to improve the cue structure' in order to create a 'space in between the text and the reader, in which the reader may create her or his own thoughts and emotions and may accomplish a writerly reading' (after Barthes) '...or a literary reading.' (p. 15 in Freiman p. 60) Freiman refers to this in psychogeographic terms, saying that creative writers and readers engage with the imaginary environment (or the environment conveyed by the writer) so that it becomes 'our mind or state of consciousness' (p. 60). Likewise, Kent Chapin Ross (2013, p. 3) says that theory of mind is an important component of literary psychogeography and begins with 'an understanding of fiction as at least partially originating in a spatially located observing consciousness, or array of consciousnesses' and that 'The nexus of consciousness of an individual with their geospatial location, called here the psychogeographical viewpoint, serves as a lightning rod for a number of words used by narrative theorists.'

Clark's suggestion of the 'mangrove effect' - that the writing generates more of itself in what Freiman calls the writer's 'frantic, grabby mind' (p. 64) has been interpreted by writers. For instance, Thomas Keneally (in Woolfe & Grenville 1993, p. 193) says 'I think there are all sorts of options we take which are dictated by the unconscious... They're options we take by the feel of it - we often make wrong instinctual decisions, but they're the only decisions we could possible have made at the time.' And Peter Carey talks about the writing generating 'what has by no means been fully invented before writing' (Freiman 2015, P. 64) - by which I think what he's doing is agreeing with the idea that the writer doesn't know what they think until they've seen it written down. That is to say, the thought becomes external when we draft the creative writing - that, in fact, only then does the writing become a 'cognitive object', and whatever stage that is in the creative writing process doesn't matter, because every stage of creative writing, says Freiman is the thinking.

In my revisiting/revising God's Country I've realised the heavy weight the novel carries, because its inclusion in my thesis is vital in answering the questions I'm asking. I'm struck, as I read it after having left it to one side for a while, how the boundary between me, as the writer, and it, as the writing, blurs - not because of anything I've ever written or read about the Black Country being 'borderless' but in the experience of writing/rewriting it, it's something I'm aware of to an extent. Freiman seems to say that there are some aspects of the creative writing process that writers aren't aware of at the time, but that the film-like, dream-like insights can be a constant element of the extended mind. Reading part of God's Country, the psyche of the place, as being outside of time, perhaps even outside of itself, comes through so far. The sense of being in the place and the movement through the place by the characters (so far) feels ritualistic, and I'm wondering how much of that is a breach of the boundary between my own physical walking in the place, and my description of Guy's walking in the fictional Black Country. I don't know. Nevertheless: psychogeography and psychogeographic flow - is that what I'm talking about here?

For Nick Papadimitriou, there is a time and a place to talk about your writing process http://www.samburcher.com/articles/notes-on/153-nick-papadimitriou.html . For him: 'There's nothing that distracts you more from working than talking about it.' He's right.