Swimming in the Subliminal Soup

I've read that when you have a successfully creative day, you should stop and take note of the circumstances that allowed it, so that you can try to recreate them in the future. So, here it goes.

This morning I woke up at 3:50 am with thoughts of a solution for a poem that had been going wrong for me. I've woken up with fully formed solutions in my head before (see this post and this one) thus I am a big believer in using the liminal space between waking and sleep for creativity (see here, and here), but this time I woke up without the answer but with the conviction that I could solve the answer, if I thought about it hard right then and there. And so I drifted in and out of sleep.musing and making illogical connections that the sleep state is so good for, and the answer did come. Then came answers to another poem that had been stalled, and then some new ideas for two new poems, and then some more revision ideas.

So you can imagine that I'm interested in recreating this kind of amazing flow that I encountered between sleep and wakefulness for about an hour and a half this morning. How did this extremely productive time come to be?

First, I went to bed after reading poetry (Charles Wright, in case you are interested) and I fell asleep thinking about a poem that was stuck. These pre-sleep inputs gave my unconscious mind the suggestion to work on the creative problem I was having.

Second, this week I have been trying to go to bed 30 minutes earlier than usual to combat the exhaustion I've been feeling of late. I think that getting more rest over several days made it possible for me to be able to stay in the liminal space this morning rather than falling back to a deep sleep (or even a fitful unsatisfying sleep). I think if I had been as tired as I usually am, I would not have had access to the liminal space and to my subconscious work on the problem.

Third, this week I received some feedback from a poet whose work I admire, some very specific feeback, and it gave me a starting point for thinking about a trend in what goes wrong with my work. Having access to his observations pointed my thinking in a way that was more fruitful than my own floundering around usually is.

All this came together this morning in a perfect storm of creativity in my mind. Here's hoping I can instigate another frenzied storm in the near future.

On A Metaphoric Bender

Aimee Bender on the Skylight Books podcast this week discussed exactly what I needed to hear.

First she read a story from her new collection The Color Master, and if you have time you really should listen to it.

But then she started answering questions and fielded one that led into a rumination of the use of metaphors (beginning at about 29:50 to the end). She said that a metaphor shouldn't have a one-to-one correspondence with the thing it is standing in for, or with the magical element. It needs to be more intuitive (from the unconscious, from a feeling of being drawn to use the items in the metaphor) to be infused with an emotional life. "The magic is a kind of access point into the emotional life of the story," she said.

Quoting Donald Barthelme, she said, "Art should both invite and repel interpretation." A one-to-one correspondence between symbol and meaning defies this mystery. Kills the mystery even. Bemder said where you are drawn to the meaning but don't completely understand the meaning, the emotion will be in there, as infused by the symbols you have been drawn to.

Later she said that once you (the writer) begin to see the symbol as a symbol, there are a few ways to fix this. One is to throw a random element in "to get the brain off its analytical mode."  She doesn't believe that anything is chosen at random, but rather that everything is selected from the buried unconscious, and that "to kind of know what you are doing and kind of don't know what you are doing is a very productive space to be in."

Another fix she cites is one used by George Saunders and Haruki Murakami, one in which "as soon as you smell the meaning, you put it in the story." That is, you acknowledge to the reader that x is a symbol for y, yes, they saw it and you saw it too, and now the reader is ungrounded because they no longer know what will happen next, because you have to do something different next, having just acknowledged the symbol. "The story refreshes itself," she explains. The story is free to become bigger than that one symbol.

She says it better than I did, and with examples. Plus she's charming. So go and listen for yourself.