Creating a sense of self
We use writing for many things, not just for publication or to communicate with a wider public. Sometimes we write to make a problem clearer in our minds, to work out what we should do. Sometimes we write in order to save ourselves, to shore up some solid written thing in what might seem to be an ocean of chaos.
Anthony Storr in his book Churchill’s Black Dog, which looks at the links between creativity and despair, explores the part writing can play as a means of creating an identity. Storr writes about Keats and Kafka, neither of whom believed they had a solid self to call upon. Keats’s poems celebrate a merging with nature and with beautiful objects, although the poem ‘Lamia’ shows the fearsome side of this lack of fixity; and Kafka’s writing laments the lack of a solid core. His lament amounts to a prophecy of the victimisation and destruction which was to be visited on the Jews soon after Kafka’s death, and a prophecy, too, of the helplessness and fury many of us experience when faced with bureaucracy, or rule by officialdom.
It appears to me, from my reading, teaching and correspondence with other writers, that we can use writing as a way of creating an identity that might not yet exist because of our early experience of being neglected, abandoned or subjected to the whims of adults. Storr uses Charles Rycroft’s definition of identity as ‘the sense of one’s continuous being as an entity distinguishable from all others’, and Jung’s description of personality as
the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual.
There is a question that keeps returning to me in my own writing and in workshops with other writers: can the act of writing play a part in creating an identity for those who, for whatever reason, experience a sense of being incomplete, unrealised, half the person they believe they really are?
The ivory tower
Anthony Storr describes how this sense of being incomplete and isolated can come about:
If guilt is boundless, if nothing the child does is ever right, he cannot develop any confidence in himself as an authentic person with a separate identity … It is not surprising that people whose childhood experience was like that of Kafka tend to withdraw into an ivory tower of isolation where interaction with others cannot threaten them.
Churchill’s Black Dog , p. 65
In writing workshops we can use writing as another place where private thoughts can be set down. We can construct a bridge between our own private place and the place of other writers as we hear one another’s work. Rapunzel lets fall her hair from the ivory tower of isolation and the prince enters the scene. The tower is penetrated by the presence of others who have made a foray from their own towers in order to hear and speak to the person who has just spoken from her own fortress. This is the efficacy of writing, that it is both profoundly inward and pressingly public: the most secreted diary seems to pulsate with a desire to be read, to be known. We speak with Sappho, with Shakespeare, both of whom are present to us despite their bodily disappearance.
Writing allows a retreat into the most private world, then tempts us out to want to speak with others. It allows us to converse with our illustrious ancestors, an activity that in our culture might otherwise be considered insane. Thus, it rescues an important aspect of primitive culture for our own benefit. It reconnects us with other identities, different from our own, who are nevertheless not trying to invade or overwhelm us. We converse with them over time in a way that does not destroy our otium (leisure). We are in our own tower, but looking outwards, rather than down on street level, negotiating (that is, negating our leisure. I owe this insight to Dr Dudley Young’s fine book, Origins of the Sacred). As Anthony Storr writes of Kafka, ‘writing was not only a way of affirming his identity without direct involvement, but also a form of abreaction, of laying ghosts by confronting them and pinning them down in words’ (Churchill’s Black Dog, p. 77).
One of the reasons we may need to write to shore up or build a sense of self is a feeling of impotence, of having no worth in the world or impact upon it. In 1952 the writer Dame Rebecca West made a radio broadcast. She described a visit to her godmother when she and her pretty sister Winifred were by turns ignored and insulted by a woman who was giving her mother an allowance, a woman she visited expecting to enjoy and admire. The broadcast said a great deal about social snobbery and the importance the godmother ascribed to refraining from relations of friendliness with those she believed to be socially inferior. But its chief interest for me lay in Dame Rebecca’s description of what happened when her godmother turned away from her at a railway station. She spoke of the stiff, turned back of the woman who felt no need to say goodbye to someone who was beneath her, of her own tears of grief and rage at being so treated – and then the way her mind ‘slid out to her godmother’ in the cool, interested way a writer’s mind will, in an attempt to understand the complex motivations of a woman who was both concerned for her family’s welfare – she gave them an allowance at some cost to her own comfort – and equally concerned to make Rebecca and her sister feel small. It is this attempt to understand through writing, rather than to confront, challenge, lash out or turn the anger back upon oneself, that I find so fascinating. Rebecca West moves through her own experience of impotence and frustration into an attempt to grasp the whole scene: to comprehend through writing, rather than immediately to act, with the unspoken hope perhaps that this comprehending will enable intelligent action in the future.
There is a point in The Communist Manifesto where Marx makes fun of this endeavour. He says ‘Philosophers have always wanted to understand the world. The point, however, is to change it.’ But we know that we cannot change anything intelligently unless we have begun to understand it. Our own lives form a repeating cycle if we simply react to events without thought. It is my belief that the concentration of thought and energy that writing demands can lead to new modes of understanding, because we have begun to see our world in a new way, without fear. A Zen master, just before he died, instructed his disciples to ‘Look directly. Do not be deceived. What is it?’ When we have begun to look, the veil of illusions, presuppositions and prejudices that surround the object of our looking starts to fall away. We can see more clearly.
John Mortimer spoke of the way writing can convey a particular truth that other modes of discourse cannot because of the web of ritual we are caught up in with other people. He described a judge, dressed in red and carrying a nosegay, and claimed that the ceremony of entering the court in this way has less to do with life as most people understand it than a novel that is written about the legal profession.
In Cassandra’s palace
Cassandra was endowed with the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo, who loved her, but when she refused to love him he changed the gift into a curse. She could still see into the future, but her punishment was that no one would believe her. Her prophecies were to be useless.
Cassandra could see clearly, but her knowledge could have no impact on the world. She is the archetype of knowing impotence, the woman who is shaken, inspired by foreknowledge but denied any power to avert disaster or enable a good outcome. She is isolated, scorned, taken away as a prize of war by Agamemnon, the man without compassion.
The act of writing can transform the impotence, the curse, back into a gift, if we can admit that a part of us is Cassandra, wailing, unheard, ignored, misunderstood; if we can learn to overcome the curse of the envious Apollo and allow our strengths to make sense again.
Apollo is an archetype, a presence in the psyche that we need to understand. Although he is intimately connected with art, poetry and song, he is also a god of order, of social bonds and boundary lines. He is not amused if order is changed or the bounds transgressed. He keeps the sun on its course and he wants things in their proper place, which is where he thinks they should be. When the satyr Marsyas picked up and played the pipe that Athene had made and then tossed aside, Apollo was so overcome with righteous fury that he had Marsyas flayed alive. His skin was torn from his body for making music when he was only a satyr, one of the lower orders, less than human.
I believe there is an Apollo in all of us: a nit-picking, smug, high and mighty part that does not like anything new to happen, wants to keep Marsyas as a beast-creature and Cassandra spouting impotent gibberish that no one wants to hear. We need to make contact with the Cassandra and the Marsyas within if we are to integrate all the notes of our writing voice: the low tones of rage and revolt and the high hysterical shrieking that cries out in the night and is never heard.
But this might feel like a dangerous step to take. Anthony Storr says ‘It is surely the notion of inspiration which has been most closely linked with, and is responsible for, the idea that creative people are unstable.’ To inspire means literally to breathe in. I am saying that if we allow ourselves to breathe in Cassandra and Marsyas, we will rock our own psychic boat, perhaps put ourselves at some risk as the neat god of order is threatened, but the strengths that Apollo has denied will begin to surface and enrich our lives.
We can make this risky transgressional move more effectively if we substitute conspiracy for inspiration. To conspire means to breathe together, and where two or three gather together to draw on the creative forces around an agreed-upon subject, the lines of communication between the ego and the deeper layers of the psyche can be held open: to break the bounds of convention, cliché and common usage and enable something new to be said.
Freud writes about primary and secondary processes in the psyche, and these are connected with the Marsyas/Apollo dichotomy, because the primary processes are concerned with the pleasure principle (crudely: things as we wish them to be) and the secondary processes are concerned with the reality principle (things as they are). But the two processes find a measure of connection in the act of writing. We combine together inspiration and rational thought, and when we conspire with others, reading out our own work and hearing theirs, then our own layers of thought are laid against theirs, providing a further opportunity to keep our inner and outer worlds connected. In one writing group, a writer asked if we could write about ‘What is normal?’ It seemed that Apollo was so strong in him that he found it hard to allow himself to do anything at all, in or out of the writing. He was perplexed about whether singing or talking or laughing to himself were within the spectrum of normal behaviour. Others in the group were able to reassure him, and he came up with a working practice for doing these things: ‘It is normal as long as I can stop myself when I want to.’ With a little help from his friends he had managed to put Apollo in his place, so he could not silence, before they had even begun, those conversations with the self that writers so much need.
Anthony Storr admits that there are risks involved when we begin to make contact with the creative forces inside:
It has been demonstrated that creative people exhibit more neurotic traits than the average person, but are also better equipped to deal with their neurotic problems. It has also been shown that some of the psychological characteristics which are inherited as part of the predisposition to schizophrenia are divergent, loosely associative styles of thinking which, when normal, are ‘creative’, but which, when out of control, are transformed into the ‘thought disorder’ typical of schizophrenia.
Churchills’ Black Dog, p. 264
This is true. If we believe that the metaphors we use are literally true, then we need to consult the doctor. But if we can safely allow ourselves to describe a girlfriend’s ear as ‘a lightbulb … South America’ as one writer did in a recent group, then we are engaging in the risk-taking thought that produces good writing, the kind that pricks the hair on the back of the neck.
But we have to be brave enough to take the risk of seeing a lightbulb or South America in our girlfriend’s ear, to transgress the boundaries of literalness and begin to stretch the meaning of words. We have to be prepared to change the meaning of things. And how do we do this without a solid sense of self?
I think there is a dialectical process at work. We often begin to write out of frustration or despair or a desire for some kind of revenge, and then the healing power of words comes subtly into play. Like Rebecca West, we move from rage and humiliation into a desire to create another world. Like John Mortimer, we respond to a deeply human need to create a world that is more real than the world we live in, with its prohibitions, bans and constrictions. I want to emphasise this element of healing, of drawing contradictory parts of the self together. As Anthony Storr says: ‘The creative act is essentially integrative. Opposites are united; disparate elements are reconciled.’
Through the fear
If the self is divided, craving union with itself through the creative act, so, paradoxically, is the writer’s material, language itself. Because language is divided into subjects and objects, things that do and things that are done to, active and passive, hammer and nail. Jill Purse, in her book The Mystic Spiral, writes: ‘The distance between subject and object is knowledge; hence, in Japanese, the word meaning ‘to understand’ (wakaru) literally means ‘to be divided’.
In terms of our own experience, to be divided against ourselves, to be unintegrated, involves a depletion of the energy in our minds and bodies. As the Bible says, the house divided against itself cannot stand. Yet again the dialectical process, where opposites are conjoined to form a higher synthesis, is at work: because when we explore our understanding, our divisions, through the system of supreme duality known as language, we can begin to remember ourselves as undivided and remember the face we had ‘before the world was made’. For Yeats, who wrote this line, it is the lover who remembers the face of the beloved, and perhaps the necessary activity of the lover – mirroring and reflecting back with love and acceptance the beloved’s face, mind and body – needs to be part of our exploration, our task of healing our own breaks, splinterings and dismemberments. We need to love ourselves without illusions, which is why our understanding is so important, to avoid falling for ourselves in the self-destructive way of Narcissus.
Writing is perhaps the only art that occupies this paradoxical position. Painting, sculpture, music and dance draw on natural materials, touchable things-in-themselves, that appeal directly to our feelings and our sense of beauty. Language, on the other hand, is abstract. It is nothing in itself – a word is here and then gone, it occupies no physical space in the world, and yet a few words can make our day, can change the meaning of the time we are living through.
Our language is made of subjects at work upon objects. It is a system where distinctions and discriminations are made at every point. If we were to try to describe wholeness we would be at some pains, because we would describe it in terms of its parts, its attributes or aspects, which would amount to breaking it down again, attacking it. Words by their very nature would break down wholeness into fragments, into doer and done-to. And yet it is through this system of divisions that we seek to mend the self and make it stronger. If wholeness is signified by silence, by the end of the need for words, then language signifies the search for wholeness. As Estragon says in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: ‘In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.’
We use words all through our lives, but in death we are quiet. We might speculate, then, that language, and writing in particular, because of its supposed permanence, is something we use as a bulwark against our annihilation. In Origins of the Sacred, Dudley Young says: ‘We know little about Minoan culture generally … but it may be … that the Minoans were not very scriptural. (I say this because of all the major cultures they seemed to have feared death the least, and writing is above all an answer to such fear)’ (p. 298). Where does the fear come from?
The analyst Melanie Klein proposed that as newborn infants we all experience the most dramatic fantasies of persecuting or being persecuted by our mother, whether or not these fantasies have any basis in reality. Could it be that writing is especially important when these fantasies have not been held or contained by the mother, when our fear of annihilation remains strong?
I once ran a writing group in which a writer, a journalist, found that a great deal of the writing he had done over the last months had been thrown away by someone. He linked the ‘letting go’ of his writing with the letting go of dying. He said, ‘I kept thinking all is transient but … but …’. He did not finish his sentence and we left it in silence. But I concluded that he had hoped that writing would provide a mainstay against the transience, and that this mainstay had been summarily removed by the person who had trashed it, reduced it to rubbish, rather than allowing it to remain as the transcendent words he had hoped it would be.
Another writer, for whom the persecutory fantasies had been turned in on himself, wrote:
because writing provides an alternative to suicide, it helps me avoid that decisive action and, therefore, leaves open the possibility of recovery. Over a period, writing provides some record of the rhythms of depression (the lapses, recoveries, lapses …) and thus some annotation of recoveries in the past, keeping hope alive. The writing ‘tells a story’. If that story can have a happy ending it may be of some use to other people, and that is a reason for going on … It provides me with something to do (Francis Bacon once said that painting ‘helped to pass the time’) … and as someone who has always found writing a way of clarifying thought and feeling, it may have helped me to some understanding of my condition and thus have made it somewhat less frightening.
There is a lot in this to ponder, but I would like to concentrate on the usefulness of telling a story, and particularly of putting ourselves in the story.
Romancing
The aim of a story is to give pleasure. It may inform and enlighten us also, but we won’t want to read it unless it holds us: pleases, makes us laugh or weep, or hypnotises us with its compelling horror. We have to want to read it, or it isn’t a story, but just marks on a page. A story isn’t a story until it’s been read and taken in.
When we put ourselves in our own story, we go back into our own past, into a time that was painful or joyful, and we make something out of it. The past is therefore not lost or gone, but a living part of the present, something that can contribute to our understanding of the way things are now. I remember two dramatic moments when writers made this generous move. The first was a story about a little girl of about three, left in a rented room by her mother who was out cleaning. The writer gave every detail of the room: the shabby furnishings, the smells, the texture of the air, soiled and unkempt, and most of all an urgent sense of what it is like to be left alone. She gave us her sense of abandonment so that we could look at it and also at our own. And the second was a story about drowning by a woman who had been in a terrible boating accident on the River Thames. She gave us exactly what it feels like to hold your breath for as long as you can and then to give in, knowing you are going to die. She was able to write this back from the grave, as it were, because the top of the boat was then ripped off and she came to the surface.
Both these stories felt like enormous gifts to their listeners. We were this little girl left of necessity by her mother, and we were the young woman losing hold on her life in the Thames. But the writers were also able to make a gift to themselves in writing them. They took something terrible and shaped it into a story that people would want to hear. They brought something back.
But what if what we bring back is too painful for us to write, or for others to hear? There are parts of human experience that make words into beggars, unable to carry the load. What do we do then? We can remember that when we go back into the past we can do with it what we like. This is the freedom of the writer. No one is asking us to write, we do it for ourselves, so when we face impossibly raw parts of our lives we can change them. And changing the past means that we can reinvent the present.
Doris Lessing’s novel The Memoirs of a Survivor has a character who steps through a wall in her flat back into the past. The present is unbearable: London has completely broken down, anyone who can leave has left, the air is so polluted it can hardly be breathed. When she steps back in time, she finds herself in a kind of marketplace where there are pieces of cloth lying about. She comes to know that in order to move forward in the present, to be able to act, she has to do something with these scraps of cloth. She begins to piece them together. The more she joins the cloth, the more free she is to make decisions when she moves back into the present.
I want you now to begin to discover whether this is true for you. We may think that we know our own past, but if we intervene in it and make it other than what it was, then we are taking an important step, we are playing with reality, modifying actual events with the power of our imagination.
Take an event from your own life that you found particularly painful, something that a part of you simply cannot accept. Roll it around in your mind. Muse on it, dream about it. How could it have happened differently? What else could you have said or done? Is there another interpretation of what happened that will make you see it in another way? Now write it, playfully. You can do what you like with it. Afterwards, put it away overnight, then reread it. What effect does your intervention in your own past have on you?
A passage to the unknown
I wonder whether these excursions into and reworkings of our own past can change our perceptions of our present-day lives? With some writers I think they can. For example, one woman, who had lived a large part of her adult life believing that her parents did not love her, tried writing a story in which it was clear that they did. Gradually her vision changed and she came to see that the story was right: they had loved her, but in a way she had not been able to take in. This was a painful as well as a joyful discovery because it meant that she could now begin to live as a human being who knew that she was loved.
But another writer, whose early life had been wholly bleak, both because she was growing up in Nazi Germany and had unbearably cruel parents, found that going back generated a new bout of terrible depression. She said she wished she had kept a diary in the past because it would have been ‘like money in the bank’. I wonder if for this writer the practice of swapping stories would be useful, to help break the hold of her own past. She might ‘give’ another writer some event from her own life and let them do as they wish with it, and they might give her something of theirs. She would then have the freedom of entering someone else’s past rather than her own, and experience the relief of living in another place, with a wholly different set of rules and allowances. Because the prison of our own self can be a terrible place: the hard, narrow bed of our own deprivations, the walls to which we have cried out our fears and longings, walls that did not answer, the lack of a loving presence outside the door. We need a change. If our own past is intransigent in its terrors, if there is nothing in it we can work with, then we can make a virtue out of our lack of identity and allow our writer-self to enter the life of another person, living or dead, and focus on another story, one that may seem far from our own. In the end we will make it our own, we cannot help it, but still it will help us to loose the tyranny of our own past and transform our own relationship to it. In letting go of ourself we can find ourself in a new way.
Moving on
There are times in our lives when everything seems to be moving inside us. The life we are living in the present is not enough, we can feel changes taking place inside our mind and our body. We long to know the future, because it is frightening to feel our known world slipping away, and yet we want it to go, to have done with it. Robert Lowell said that three times in our lives we lose everything and have to start again.
It is during these times of loss, change and development that writing can save our lives. I remember sitting in my kitchen high above London one winter with three friends. We were watching a total eclipse of the moon. As the sky darkened and that dull, bronzy glow surrounded the black circle that had been the moon, I said without thinking: ‘I feel as though I don’t fit in. I can’t relax. There’s nowhere where I can be myself.’ A woman turned to me and said: ‘How can you feel at ease when the whole cosmos is telling you to do something different?’ I laughed – it was a rather dramatic statement – but I knew then that this was the beginning of a change in my life, one I could not stop from happening.
All I could do was to wait patiently. But I couldn’t be patient. I was mad with desire and longing to know ‘the outcome’. And I think I would have lost myself completely if I had not taken the time to write. The poems that came were a diary of the turmoil inside and outside. If I was a ship being wrecked in a storm then the poems were parts of myself that I managed to save. Each time I was thrown in the air or to the ground by the force that was shaking me, I would find myself writing – not to try to understand the experiences or analyse them away – but to keep a record of the changes in the only way I could, through metaphor, the transformative energy in words.
My little ship did go down. I left one country and went to live in another, only to find that I could not settle. I returned with a suitcase, no work and nowhere to live. I had some clothes, and under the clothes, the poems, my only salvage. And as I struggled to build a life, I kept going back to the poems, with their images of animals and angels, the parts of myself I had been forced to learn about, and I knew that, even if they meant nothing to others, they had truly saved my life, because in the poems I had made images of the risks I was taking, and so had honoured my journey and my need to make it in my own way.
Really, changes are happening inside us all the time, not always as destructive as the one I lived through, but sometimes much more so. If we can watch and listen and bear witness to these internal quakes and waves and downfalls, the weather inside us, then we give ourselves the chance to strengthen our identity for the next stage of life, because the writing enables us to know what happened. Telling someone in speech, I found, was no substitute, because they would cast their own light upon it, however carefully they tried to listen. I had to tell my own story, and then read and listen to it myself. To create my identity in my own words.
Which brings us back to the beginning of the chapter, and in a way to the beginning of the book, where we spoke about writing making us more human. And finally, we need to remember that the work is important, for ourselves, but not for ourselves alone:
I thought how the poet is the first explorer beyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge of the human heart; by subtle use of imagery and sound and rhythm, he brings a first order into the wild forest of raw lived experience. To the blind drifted hours in which we simply live without knowing that we live, letting life flow over us in a kind of dream in which fact and illusion are hopelessly mixed, he can give form and name. And by giving this, surely he can give us power to live more effectively, through being aware that we live; and eventually, when the armies of organised knowledge have followed up the pioneer trails of the poets, wisdom can become a public possession; we begin to know something of the facts of our lives and so in part become able to control them instead of floundering helplessly in the dark.
Marion Milner, An Experiment in Leisure, p. 133
That may be a shade hopeful, but we can go for it anyway. What do we have to lose?