Writing as Listening

Not thinking about what you're going to write next.

When I'm having a good conversation, I never quite run out of things to say.

When I’m having a bad conversation, I say cliches to fill the silence – little packets of handy filler to keep the flood of reality away. I’m not listening.

Why do I do that? There's so much to see when looking into the face of another human being that, if you were to see all of it, you would have a seizure. Certainly, I should have something original to say about it.

I see the flash of a person out of the corner of my eye – it’s a woman in her 30s with a dog. She’s driving a Subaru. She votes blue, I instantly gather. She does yoga. She probably—oh, wait, that's just the reflection of a tree in the window. There is no woman. What did I see? How did I create this character out of thin air? We’re doing this all the time, with people real and imagined.

We don’t see the world, we see our memories. Our minds are always collapsing the raw data of sensory information into understandable little packets that match our expectations. 

At the same time, something beckons us to break out of our memory-jail. The deep spirit yearns to escape the repeating pattern of expecting something, and therefore seeing that thing, and therefore evoking the same reactions from people. Archetypes of our own unconscious project themselves onto others, cast in our own little predictable shadow play. Predictable and boring.

At this moment, I’m having trouble breaking out of my memory jail and thinking something new. Writing, like a good conversation, should be listening. But who, exactly am I listening to? The muse?? Well, maybe it’s you. We’re supposed to be in conversation, right? That’s the whole point of not keeping this in my journal, eh?

I’d rather just write something GOOD, but that’s not listening. Writing good is like talking good — it happens if you’re lucky and you don’t try too hard. All I really have is to relay my experience, stick it in a bottle, and throw it to the ocean and hope that 1) you will find it and 2) this will mean something to you, and 3) it won't join the cacophony of dead memories on this platform – ever reminding us of what we already know. Instead, to try things, to fumble and make mistakes and crash and burn. To erase everything we’ve expected, for a moment, and babble like an infant into the void, and allow that babbling to form itself into new shapes we don't yet understand.

Sometimes, I doodle. I'll draw a random shape. I'll draw another one. I'll see what it reminds me of. I'll try to make it look more like that. On I go like that, until the doodle will bloom out to me like a mandala. I'll create something out of nothing through a conversation. This conversation with chaos and attempted order and then chaos again and attempted order, and then finally, I'll have a doodle that I could have never thought of. 

I guess that’s what this whole “writing online” thing is supposed to be like. I haven’t really figured that out yet. So, I’ll give it a go. If you wanna say something, go ahead. I’m listening (and responding).