From: Writing Into the Silence

First class, First exercise

A.

Listening exercise. Eyes open. Just listen.

Then follow a single sound as it disappears back into silence.

Again.

Now listen to the sounds within the room.

Now listen to the sounds beyond the room.

As they mingle– near/far, human/animal/machine... sounds of nature, wind... Feel how sounds extend the sensation of space. Not only opening distance, but shape and layers.

Hold it all in your attention on listening.

Can you hear/sense the silence around and behind the sounds? The silence that holds sound, and allows sound to arise and fall away.?

Synesthesia: with your eyes open you may find that motion and sound begin to combine within your imagination. What about other senses? Smell, taste... Can you hold it all in your listening attention, and listen to motion, color, etc?

Where are you? Listening from an inner silence?

B

Go and find a space from which to listen. Take some time just listening, and let listening empty you. Empty yourself into the silence that holds these sounds.

Sounds occur. They arise and fall away--inside the great empty space of silence.

This silence is not the absence of sound. Silence is not inside of anything

A sound is not a thing because it happens and it ends. Perhaps it is an event. The silence does not happen or end.

Listen. These sounds have nothing to do with you, the small you, the you that is planning and thinking, hoping, worrying, remembering.

Try to listen until the sounds are not out there (and not in you either, not now)

Listen as if you are among them. When you are ready, from this attentive silence, write the first image that comes to mind. No matter what comes. And follow it, as if you were listening to your own mind uncurl--wherever it goes. Twenty minutes.

C.

Return. Discuss.

Now, opening what you have written, using white space as a visual cue for "silence"

copy what you wrote, taking up much more space on the paper. Write on every other line. Big margins. One side of page. No punctuation. Separate into phrases– we aren't looking for line breaks here, just smaller units of sense. Don't worry about it too much – there are infinite ways to break it, and each one will yield a different result.

Read this slowly to yourself– with pauses. "Hear" the words against the silence. Read again.

To disclose what is present.

What is this about? Can you surprise yourself with an answer that rises before thinking/spontaneously, even irrationally.

Stay with that. Write a few words about that.

Then: "What about x?"

And" "What about y?"

Ask it questions, good, open neutral questions.

D.

Break.

Return and ask again- what is this about? Receive a very different answer. There are so many ways into a new piece of writing. When we close down too quickly we miss the various directions that open.

E.

Voluntary reading aloud. We listen once, then have it read again, making notes the second time. To say: "what does this seem to be about?"

Different sensibilities. Hearing differently, each of us taking in different aspects.
There is a silence of possibility, an emptiness of potential behind, around, and within everything we create.

To disclose what is present:

Read very slowly, giving time to the spaces.

Repeat lines. Move your lips. Let it become strange, turning over and over. A chant, a magic summons, a grocery list...

Words become clear/ they become nonsense. All of that is present.

Images separate, they meld. They shapeshift. Tone changes. Lift your eyes. Return. Echoes of other voices below and woven through this voice. What is present here? Unfathomable, even this fragment, quickly produced from a prompt exercise, holds more than you can realize (make real.)

Now give up looking for the meaning. Let the crazy richness of it come forward.

Realize how limited, and limiting, your meanings were. Again and still, disclose what is present. The present. It changes when you look at it.

What was present when you wrote this is now scattered and absorbed in this. Something else becomes present. It changes when you read it. What are these images?

So clear, so strange.