Ritual, Aesthetics, and Dislocation: Some Tips

A seemingly banal action can put you in a sort of trance state, allowing your unconscious creativity to float to the surface. I copy a favorite poem out by hand. I enter the poem in ways I couldn’t have anticipated, and nuances are revealed to me that were unavailable before, no matter how many times I’ve read the poem. Being in concert with a piece of writing and its author in this way can lead one’s own creative imagination to unlock in ways that were previously unavailable. When I was coming into my own as an aesthetician and an attentive, concentrated writer, I developed many aesthetic and creative rituals that served to prepare me for the experience of writing, prepare me for the Muse, and put me into a world of heightened sensory experience, which for me is an invitation to concentration and creativity. My favorite activity is to go through a letter of my dictionary and make a list of all my favorite beautiful words, for later inspirational reference to use in poems or writing. I also make an obsessive practice of looking words up for their varieties of meaning, which almost always opens up interesting territory for a piece of writing. For awhile, I made a point to brew a specific tea (jasmine, which I call “garden tea”) to smell and drink as I wrote, which always leant a certain aesthetic quality to the writing, then—light, airy, beautiful, ephemeral. I get Bosc pears from the grocery store every week because they’re so lovely to look at, just looking at them makes me want to write, and because the word “bosc” is one of the most beautiful words ever. This doesn’t mean I write anything about bosc pears, per se, but just having one on my desk infuses some quality into the writing, which can happen when the writer is attentive to the workings of the subconscious and the environment’s effects on that. Because I find the word “kale” so beautiful, I started eating kale, first spending long minutes at the grocery store looking at it, terrified, until I finally had the courage to bring it home and eat it. This was necessary for me, because I wanted to be able to use the word if I chose, and use it to its most textured capacities. But this kind of ritual is necessary for me, even if I hadn’t wanted to use the word in a poem—it’s the conscious, conscientious attempt to make myself of the world, to be a participant in natural wonder, to be, in a word, an artist. When I am feeling particularly bereft of aesthetic inspiration, I always turn to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. I believe Stein to be our foremost Western aesthetician, and she always proves inspirational for me. Fanny Howe advocates another style of concentrating, another way to structure the lived life in writing, an aesthetics of bewilderment. This seems particularly useful to those of us who write from the perspective of child narrators, or who want to express in their writing a deep awe, pain, or confusion at the state of the world. She sees bewilderment as a way of entering the work. Bewilderment as a poetics and a politics. She attempts to write characters “who remain as uncertain in the end as they were at the beginning. Bewilderment does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden. Instead, weakness, fluidity, concealment, and solitude assume their place in a kind of dream world, where the sleeping witness finally feels safe enough to lie down in mystery.” Welcome to the term, and to dislocation!