Stepping Back - Washington 1

For a while I have used writing as a tool. Although I did not get the idea from Anne Frank, the platitude she justifies the starting of her diary with is similar to what it is that is being attempted with a majority of the writing I undertake: 'Paper is more patient than man.' Behind the phrase is a concern I also deeply resonate with - that what is called normal is, in fact, mechanical living - an unconsidered existence in reaction rather than of action. The movement of writing, here, is a technique of self - a way to address felt needs and felt problems. Writing, in this way, is meant to narrow down what conflicts are in play, how it is the case that there is conflict, and how one is to proceed.

Normative life is disorder, it is fragmented, broken up, filled with silent and not so silent dis-ease. Techniques of self are ways of clarification. They are slaps in the face: they bring up the dis-ease within and invite a narrowing down of experience - a tasting of the raw/red hot hurt. But at the crucial point of the raw feeling, at the moment of reactivity, there is a suggestion to use the reactive energy in an alternative way. The suggestion may be at self-examination (what is uncomfortable? why? what is taking place?); the suggestion may be to observe and get in the shoes of, embody the other (to turn the outside into oneself, to examine the trajectories present in the other, to see you the way the other sees you, to be the other).

Whatever the technique that is in play there is a conversion of energy, a manipulation of mechanical reactivity, of momentum and raw feeling. What transpires is a stepping-back. In every technique of self there is a stepping-back so as to observe 'self' as a process. Only when there is a stepping back from the trajectory/momentum, when there is a starting over, a beginner awareness, is there understanding of what it is that is occurring in consciousness: filtering.


Reading: To Have or to Be? - Erich Fromm; On Heidegger - Patricia Altenbernd Johnson.