Writing 'Writing the Bright Moment'

& Part 1 of 'Dark Matter' excerpt

Hello again, friends and new friends. I’m taking a turn away from our smallholding project (to say it is at the moment ‘full-on’ would be a gross understatement) to remind myself that I am also a writer. Many of you who follow me here have participated in my courses, and some of you have copies of the book I’m drawing on today. If you’re not interested in the writing aspects of my Substack, be reassured that normal service will resume soon.

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In the winter of 2004/5 my life changed for six months in ways I couldn’t have imagined. As a poet, I’d just completed two creative projects outdoors with a wonderful group of multimedia artists. One was a Year of the Artist project at Hestercombe Gardens in Somerset, England, funded by Arts Council England. I can’t start to speak of how inspiring it was to be funded for a whole year to explore creative and collaborative edges with the other members, mainly visual and sound artists, of the genius loci group.

Cyanotype by Penny Grist; poem by Roselle

We followed up on that with a shorter residency at the Cotswold Water Park, about which I wrote a little in the above book. Later and ongoingly I have worked collaboratively a lot with one of the visual artists, Michael Fairfax, with carved pieces such as this stool, below, and sound.

Afterwards, back home on the Bere peninsula in West Devon, I was ready for a change of scene and a new challenge.

I applied for a six-month residency as poet at Sherborne Boys’ School in Dorset – and was offered the post, despite the fact that when I met the Head of Department and the Headmaster I was bedraggled, leaves in my hair and mud on the hem of my long skirt, having been accompanied by my two dogs and the English teacher with whom I would mainly work on the crosscountry run circuit immediately before.

I need to say here that I don’t approve of the private school system politically and philosophically – or rather I believe all state schools should be able to offer such high-level teaching. Like every poet, though, I needed the money, and also thought it would be good to confront my prejudices. What I didn’t expect was that it was to be one of the most inspiring experiences of my life, with excellent staff and engaged students.

I was lent a beautiful cottage in a nearby unspoilt little village where in the dark of winter dawns I’d walk the dogs in ancient parkland. My brief at the school was to inject creativity in any and all lessons in whatever form I wanted. And so I did – haiku inserted into the electronic fixtures list for sports and cadets; the Periodic Table as a starting point for creative writing in chemistry; discussions on the speed of light, uncertainty, and dark matter in physics and many other interventions.

At the end of my residency, various poetry year groups came together to write a very long poem, which sixth-form art students screenprinted in short lines and phrases on T-shirts. A group of about 30 boys showcased the poem to the rest of the school by lying on the assembly hall floor in the T-shirts in a nautilus spiral, then went into town and clustered in changing and random trios with their juxtaposed lines and phrases.

My workload was large and days long. But still, I was able in those six months to complete my first poetry collection, Looking for Icarus, and the first draft of Writing the Bright Moment – inspiration & guidance for writers, over 300 pages of essays from my by-then 14 years of creative, reflective and psychospiritual writing courses, often outdoors, and from other invited writers, all intended to fire your imagination, and most of which include a writing prompt. (The beautiful cover was designed by my friend Fred Hageneder and includes a photograph my my daughter Eloïse.) I was fortunate enough as to be awarded an Arts Council England grant for designing and publishing this.

Here’s a sample essay, coming in 3 parts.

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Dark Matter Part 1

‘Seek for the depths of things...’ Rainer Maria Rilke

‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ Jesus Christ

‘...out of blood and love I carved my poems.’ Pablo Neruda

‘Anger and tenderness: my selves.

And now I can believe they breathe in me

as angels, not polarities.’

Adrienne Rich

In the chapter in this book on solitude (‘The Still Small Voices’) I mention how time alone can bring up issues of loneliness and vulnerability. In a time-hungry world, people with a reflective bent who spend their lives surrounded by others often long for solitude. Paradoxically, though, when that time arrives, it can be less the imagined unmitigated bliss than a time of struggle and confusion. It is as likely to bring demons as it is angels; despair as epiphany.

For a writer, this is not all bad news, however.

For writing to have the power and passion to touch people it needs to go down as well as up: into the dark, mysterious and sometimes painful places of our world, the human heart and the body. It is not enough to write about light, and angels, and flowers.

Writing needs to have what the Spanish call duende: a wild force, a passion, a recognition of the inevitable intertwining of the life cycles of pain and loss and death with those of joy and harvest and birth.

Federico García Lorca, whose name is synonymous with the concept of duende, calls duende a power rather than a method, a struggle rather than a thought. It needs, he continues, to rise up through the soles of one’s feet; it is not a matter of ability or aptitude but rather the way one approaches one’s life, an ‘authentic living style… [which is] the spirit of the earth… of blood… culture… creation’. It needs, he says, to come through the body, so although it can be found in all art forms its natural domain is dance, song or spoken poetry. The arrival of duende, according to Lorca, ‘always presupposes a radical transformation on every plane’. Jason Webster defines duende as ‘the intense emotional state – part ecstasy, part desperation – that is the essence of flamenco’. This doesn’t sit as easily with the Anglo-Saxon soul as with the Mediterranean, or Celtic; turbulence, (metaphorical) blood and fire are not easy companions of subtlety and restraint. Duende is dark fire; the dark face of the angel – and is as necessary as night is to day to the soul. Duende is not safe; but then, neither is life, nor art.

There’s the famous saying of Rainer Maria Rilke repudiating analysis: his fear that if he were to get rid of his demons, he might also lose his angels.

This bears examining. We are, in our culture, somewhat terrified by demons; and it’s part of being human that, rather than turning and facing our own dark aspects, we find someone else on whom to project them. When this happens to an individual, fear is often followed by enmity and hatred; when this happens collectively, another culture or society becomes The Enemy, and war breaks out. So it seems important to find new ways of dealing with what we see as the demonic. (It is interesting to note that, in Buddhism, for instance, which in some branches incorporates the demonic in its pantheon, the primary duality is not ‘good’ and ‘evil’, but ‘ignorance’ and ‘wisdom’.)

There is an important connection between demons and angels – I emphasise ‘connection’ rather than ‘opposition’, the more traditional way of portraying this relationship; and, more, there is a link between this relationship and creativity.

We are creatures of light and dark; we are full of angels and we are full of demons. If they – these warring forces within us – are made conscious, we can use the creative tension between the two to fuel our vitality, our lives and our work; and, more, take some steps towards healing our pain; and are therefore less likely to project it on others.

What I am interested in in this chapter is the fact that as writers we already have one of the most potent tools available to humans for processing difficult aspects of human experience; one which can aid the cathartic release of deep feeling, and go some way towards healing any associated anger and grief. Michael Mackmin, in his editorial in Rialto 55, puts it succinctly: ‘Poetry is a formidable tool for dealing with difficult thoughts and feelings, for tempering pain and celebrating the dance of life lived with awareness.’ There is much literature on this subject of the therapeutic benefits of writing, and a great deal of research has gone into the matter.

‘Poets need to live,’ says Ben Okri, ‘where others don’t care to look, and they need to do this because if they don’t they can’t sing to us of all the secret and public domains of our lives.’ (I am using the term ‘poet’ throughout to signify ‘writer’; a poetic consciousness is the key.)

Writing that comes from the intellect alone may communicate to the head, but will probably lack passion, as well as emotional or psychological depth. Of course this kind of writing has its own necessary place – in report or academic writing, for instance, where what is required is marshalling of thought and factual information for clarity of conveyance, passion is likely to be completely irrelevant or inappropriate. But here, we are talking about creativity and imagination.

‘Most of the methods of training the conscious side of the writer – the craftsman and critic in him – are actually hostile to the good of the unconscious, the artist’s side,’ said Dorothea Brande. Stephen Nachmanovitch says something similar: ‘One of the many Catch-22s in the business of creativity is that you can’t express inspiration without skill, but if you are too wrapped up in the professionalism of skill you obviate the surrender to accident that is essential to inspiration.’

It’s my belief that strong writing, like strong living, emerges from the conjunction of conscious and unconscious, as well as from a meeting of light and dark. We need both. When these two processes, or states, are severed from each other trouble starts – in writing and in life. (We’ll look later, briefly, in this book at how our myths and folk tales are pointers to ways of bringing the conscious and unconscious minds together; the subject is so huge as to be beyond the scope of this book, though I do address it in an earlier book, Riding the Dragon – myth & the inner journey) (see also this Substack section.)

In Jungian and archetypal thinking, the unconscious came to be known as ‘the Shadow’ – that part of us which is largely unknown but makes itself felt in dreams, in moods, in extreme feeling states; it is commonly experienced in passions, impulses and instincts. It’s the part of you which, the harder you try to ‘behave’, to be a ‘good person’, will torment you with dreams of wickedness and wild misbehaviour; the part of you, often childish and tricksterish, which will suggest that, rather than stand around making polite conversation, you’d like to make trouble, dance on the tables, take your own – or someone else’s – clothes off, say what you’re really feeling instead of ‘fine, thanks’; the part of you that screeches ‘My God what the hell have you done to your hair? It looks terrible!’ when what you had intended to say was ‘Goodness, you look different with that new haircut!’ 

The Shadow is in part formed from the aspects of ourselves that other people – parents, teachers, our religion, culture or society, or when we’re older our ego/inner critic/conscience, have condemned as ‘bad’: our rage, hurt, selfishness, jealousy, envy, possessiveness, shame, guilt, blame, anguish, our sense of failure, fear (which may be the root of them all), and often our instinctual nature, our childish self and playfulness, our mild wickednesses, our clumsy or forbidden humour, and our sensual and sexual selves too. Then there’s our fear of loneliness, stasis, ‘is this it’-ness; and too the emergence of the demons from our past – losses, ‘mistakes’, paths and decisions we have or haven’t taken.

The ultimate demon, of course, is death: the fact of it.

© Roselle Angwin, 2005/2024

To be continued.

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Thank you for reading this, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’d love it if you commented, shared, and/or subscribed for more like this and more of other aspects, hopefully inspiring, such as how we might live in our times. Meantime, I wish you bright moments.