Between the Lines
Mirror Neurons, Autism, Soul Connections, & the Art of Language, Part Two
(Original art by Mrs Horsley)
The Listener: Developing a Dialogue with Self
“Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.” —Catherine Drinker Bowen
Writing down an account of my activities or thoughts creates a distance between myself and the raw material of my existence. Potentially, between my everyday, automated “motor” self and my consciousness. Soul.
As in a therapeutic space, I am talking to an impartial, disinterested, but wholly attentive other. The difference is that the “Listener” is myself. This Listener is something we can all develop within ourselves and without it no real communication is possible. Before we can begin to listen to others, we have to learn to listen to ourselves.
And real speech can only come about as a response to listening, whether internally or externally.
The therapeutic space allows me to re-experience my problems from the perspective of an impartial but curious observer who is free from any strong emotional reactions. This presence is the Listener, both interested and disinterested, sympathetic but uninvolved.
When I communicate with myself in this way, via writing, creative expression, deep thought or meditation, I bring forth The Listener. The part of me that’s equivalent to this sympathetic but disinterested therapist. I can then re-conceive the problem from a an “outside” perspective.
The benefits of this are two-fold: not only do I experience my problem in a less stressful light, I also gain access to a part of myself that’s able to rise above any problem, because it is entirely uninvolved in it, while being privy to inside information about me. The Listener is my own inner therapist.
The Listener is the Soul.
Writing a journal, like talking to a therapist, is a way of testing the contents of my mind, both conscious and unconscious. Writing will bring unconscious matter to the surface just as much as therapy, perhaps more so. This allows for a psychological rehearsal space in which I can see exactly what I am capable of and what not—“where I’m at”—before going on stage and performing in front of a live audience (so to speak).
This sort of dialoguing with the self can have an accumulative effect: it creates a recursive feedback loop in which, the more I reveal the contents of my psyche to myself and integrate them, the more I can accept myself as I am, the more I can open up to others, and so on.
Alchemically speaking, I am drawing the lead of the unconcious into the laboratory of my conscious mind, and transmuting it, via awareness, over a long, painful process, into gold. By establishing a different way of relating to myself through on-going dialogues, I am establishing a kind of private social identity which, little by little, I can then take into the world. By strengthening my individual sense of truth, meaning, and value, I am slowly “finding my feet” in reality.
Keeping a journal is analogous to therapy because, in both cases, a ritual space is created within which the normal social rules are suspended. This ritual space—be it the journal, the therapy room, the shaman’s hut or the Manopticon (Sons of Job men’s meeting)—allows “the inexpressible to be expressed.”
Communicating with ourselves in this way develops our ability to communicate with the world. As we bring this new awareness and maturity into our interactions with others, so communicating with the world deepens our relationship to ourselves.
On the individuation journey to self-knowledge, there are inevitably aspects of my consciousness which I am either unable or unwilling to see. Just as there are spirits which the shaman is careful not to invoke, so there are subjects which I choose not to write (or speak) about in my journaling, often because I am not ready to even think about them.
Once I enter into interaction with other people, however, these are likely to be the very things that get stirred up and drawn out, like toxins in a sauna. They are the rough (and blind) spots which sooner or later are going to inconvenience me as I begin to engage with my environment in new ways.
It is this pressure of interacting with other people that brings home the discord in our psyches and allows us to work it out.
The tension provided by “the other” is essential to individuation.
Writing as Telepathy
The following is from Stephen King’s On Writing:
My name is Stephen King. I’m writing the first draft of this part at my desk (the one under the eave) on a snowy morning in December of 1997. There are things on my mind. Some are worries (bad eyes, Christmas shopping not even started, wife under the weather with a virus), some are good things (our younger son made a surprise visit home from college, I got to play Vince Taylor’s “Brand New Cadillac” with The Wallflowers at a concert), but right now all that stuff is up top. I’m in another place, a basement place where there are lots of bright lights and clear images. This is a place I’ve built for myself over the years. It’s a far-seeing place. . . . you are somewhere downstream on the timeline from me . . . but you’re likely in your own far-seeing place, the one where you go to receive telepathic messages. . . . And here we go—actual telepathy in action. You’ll notice I have nothing up my sleeves and that my lips never move. Neither, most likely, do yours. Look—here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot-stub upon which it is contentedly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. Do we see the same thing? We’d have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do. This is what we’re looking at, and we all see it. I didn’t tell you. You didn’t ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room. . . except we are together. We’re close. We’re having a meeting of the minds.
Stephen King makes no mention of mirror neurons or brain states; back in 1997, no one was talking about such things. Yet he’s essentially describing the same phenomenon as happens with the monkey and the peanut (see last week’s installment): transference of thought.
It’s interesting that King takes the time to describe his brain-state (his mood), even though it has no apparent bearing on the scene which he goes on to transmit (the rabbit in the cage), “telepathically,” in order to literally illustrate his point.
The reason it’s interesting is that the science of mirror neurons argues that it is just such “between the lines” information that is transmitted via language—the writer’s mood and circumstances at the time of writing—even when they are in no way inferred by the written or spoken material itself.
The medium is the message.
Yet in a funny way, the message may also be the medium. Because any writer worth his or her salt is going to be in an unusual brain-state when writing, precisely because the act of writing changes our brain-state.
What King is describing is more than simply a shared visualization, because the act of visualizing—which is obviously linked to dreaming—entails entering into a trance state (at least a minor one).
We all know what it’s like to get sucked into a good book. We get lost in the writer’s (and/or the characters’) thoughts and feelings. We become immersed in another world, created by a combination of words on the page and our own capacity to weave a surrogate dream reality inside our skulls (or bodies, to be holistic about it).
When we are carried away by a good book, fiction or non-, we are only secondarily aware of reading words on a page, because our primary awareness goes where the words take us. And where they take us is not only into our own minds, but into the mind of the author. It is a matching of brains-states, a shared trance.
From here, it follows that, the closer the author was to deep dreaming when he or she wrote the words we are transported by, the closer we can approach to a similar state while reading them. This is what distinguishes great writing from hackwork: the degree of immersion it induces in us is determined, at least in part, by the degree of immersion of the writer while writing it.
This is what communicates—“between the lines.”
Reading Rene Girard is a very different experience to reading Elmore Leonard. The book of Genesis requires a different sort of attention to The Shining. Some prose is harder to “get our heads around,” and while this may have to do with obvious factors (such as dense vocabulary, tortured prose, or labyrinthine sentences), it may also be dependent on how foreign or alien the brain state of the author is compared to our own.
People who work hard to match James Joyce’s brain state (I am told) “get” what he is doing and consider him a genius. For the rest of us, he is incomprehensible and overrated. The same is true of our dreams: the ones that more closely match our waking brain state are easier to remember, understand, and describe.
Others are so “out there” that just thinking about them causes a mild form of distress due to the cognitive dissonance. The Surrealists (Andre Breton, et al.) were all about creating cognitive dissonance. Their aim was to try and match dream states through the use of word and image.
If you read the following sentence, allowing that forensic science has a relative ownership of the sort of cheese waffles which your mother baked when you were a child, for the sake of literary analysis you will take the next number 5 bus and wind up looking for all of the missing punctuation marks.
On the other hand, if I say simply that this sort of playful writing has a pleasingly disorientating effect on the mind, you will be relieved to find yourself back on safe ground, and understand that matching the author’s brain-state does not entail coming too seriously unhinged from the avuncular clown brigade that dwells pseudonymously beneath your staircase.
Coherence is something we let go of only with a struggle. The point is, while you are reading this, you are going along with my own thoughts and as long as these seem to follow a linear sort of sequence, common to waking logic, and to keep to ideas that are reasonably familiar to you, you won’t have too hard a time.
The moment salivating leprous homunculi evoke a far-off reverberation of your own fetal spasms while sniffing your mother’s underwear and lugubriously revealing the secrets of your wasted sex life on CNN, you either laugh, feel disgusted and annoyed, or try and figure out where exactly you lost the thread of this argument.
See what I mean?
Denizens of Dreaming
“Learning to think without resorting to images is indispensable to alphabet literacy. ‘Make no images’ is a ban on right-brain pattern recognition. All who obey it will unconsciously begin to turn their backs on the art and imagery of the Great Mother and, re-orientated a full 180 degrees, will instead seek protection and instruction from the written words of an All-Powerful Father.” —Leonard Schlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
Matching the author’s brain-state is something that happens automatically with “easy” prose, but which we become increasingly aware of having to do when the prose is more innovative and challenging, or conversely, when it is sloppier and more clunkily, pretentiously, or self-consciously structured.
Yet, as the Children of Job substack has been addressing since its inception (vis a vis the Bible), the awareness of the reader (you) is the determining factor in how efficiently any given information gets conveyed.
Communication is not what is sent but what is received.
If a tree falls and no one hears it, there’s no sound. A book that’s never read does not exist as a form of literature, only an object on a shelf. And a book that no one understands, no matter how ingeniously written, is a book that has failed in its objective.
Telepathy has not occurred: minds have not met.
Compare this to our dream lives. How much of the material of our dreams ever makes it to our conscious minds? Yet it’s there: book after book, story after story, just waiting to be tapped into and enjoyed, if only we could find our way back there.
In the common view, dreams are a way for our brains to “work off” excess stress and work out unresolved issues. In the jargon of our day, the dream-state is a place where the unconscious “uploads” data—in symbolic language—about the condition of the “network,” our total psyches, for our rational minds to then download.
This can be transpersonal, as well as personal, because the alleged “unconscious,” according to C.G. Jung at least, is collective as well as individual.
While sleeping, we are in a relatively egoless state. Because of this, information that would otherwise be threatening to, and hence repressed by, our waking consciousness can be processed and integrated.
When I say “relatively egoless,” I mean that our everyday concerns no longer hold sway over our choices. Barring specific anxiety dreams, we aren’t worried about the rent or what the neighbors think of us. Instead, we tend to get caught up in symbolic enactments that make little or no sense within the context of our waking lives.
If we think of ego in its pure sense, however—that of an individual perspective with its own focus and drive—it could be argued that, potentially at least, we are more in our ego while dreaming, because when we sleep our ego and id (conscious and unconscious minds) are functioning more as a unit. This is apparent in the example of lucid dreaming, which is a way of taking control of the components of our unconscious, and writing the dream.
Like a scenarist, novelist, or scriptwriter, the lucid dreamer arranges specific elements of the unconscious in a conscious (or semi-conscious) fashion, and discovers (or decides) how best they fit together to create a meaningful narrative.
This is the similarity; the difference, of course, is in the medium employed. When I sit at a desk and write, as now, I am using words to describe internal states and willingly entering into mild trance, in order to midwife that psychic material into the physical form of literature. When I dream, something else happens, and words are only incidental to that mysterious process.
To write, then, is to create an external vehicle for myself as consciousness: a book, a poem, a short story, an essay, all Trojan Horses by which the denizens of my psyche enter the castle of my mind-self, and from there, the minds of others.
This is called self-expression, and it is a process which most writers would say they have control over, if not total control then near enough. (Writers often say that, when working, the story takes over; but never, I assume, to the point they forget to eat and starve to death.)
When we dream, our control is drastically reduced, to the point that most of the time we even forget we are dreaming. The world we create becomes all-embracing. When we dream, we are “projecting” consciousness outside of the mind-self and creating an image, then stepping into that image and interacting with it.
Anyone who has ever fallen asleep and entered into dreaming consciously (during the hypnagogic state) may have observed a critical moment when ordinary thoughts begin to transform into, and appear as, images and sounds.
The act of creation, stripped down to its essence, is an act that (unlike writing) we have only rudimentary control over. Falling asleep can be either blissful or terrifying (or both; the trick is not waking ourselves up by reacting to the images we see); this is because with it comes an experience of being swept away—raptured—by something unimaginably greater than our waking minds.
It is like tapping into a well of psychic energy that, even at the best of moments during the day, is turned off and unavailable to us. Writers—like all artists—attempt to tap into this wellspring consciously, while awake, to direct it into a finished work which they can present to the world as theirs: “the product of their imagination.”
Yet what if the product is incidental to the real mystery, that of the creative process itself?
What are these seemingly bipolar kinds of consciousness called waking and dreaming? Why is it so difficult (and so fascinating) to build—or discover—a working bridge between the two?
(Over the Paywall: 70% all-new content: Original Sin of Projection, PK Dick’s Defintion of “Idiot,” Going Beyond Science: Unmediated Communication of Brains, Bodies, Souls)