Streams (& Oceans)
of Consciousness

92}NAVIGATING STREAM
OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Through free association, our random thoughts churn up symbols.

Many years ago, while living in Connecticut, I spent a few months apart from the woman I was then engaged to, traveling in the Pacific Northwest. The whole time I was out there, two Beatles songs kept going through my head: “Ticket to Ride” and “Yesterday.” When I came back East, I noticed a strange toothbrush in my fiancée’s medicine cabinet. Needless to say, our engagement was off.

Had I played closer attention to those songs served up by my unconscious, I might not have bothered coming home; I might even have seen that the reason I went away in the first place was that I didn’t really want to get married.

In its swirling eddies and sweeping currents, the stream of consciousness carries observations and associations, implications and omens.

But the stream of consciousness is more than a body of water that sweeps us along like little sailboats through our days. The stream defines us; it is who we are. Our minds may seem incoherent, discharging electrical impulses and sparks in wild disarray, and yet the thoughts and feelings generated by those sparks, in all their randomness, merge somehow to produce a coherent “I.”

Our characters, too, make use of stream-of-consciousness thinking, through what’s called “interior monologue.”

The opening chapter of a student’s novel, set during a seaside idyll, makes heavy use of the stream-of-consciousness techniques pioneered by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The former’s Ulysses holds the most famous interior monologue in English, a passage that, capping an unpunctuated sentence of 2,500 words, ends with what Joyce called “Molly Bloom’s acquiescence at the end of all resistance”:

… I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Stream of consciousness attempts to capture characters’ inner thoughts while moving them through time and space (or, in the case of Molly’s soliloquy, as she lolls in bed). The flowing “stream” must in fact be carefully organized and orchestrated, so that what appears to be chaotic on the surface is actually focused and to the point. Precisely because it lacks any obvious form or structure, stream of consciousness demands a high degree of craft and rigor. Think again of Jackson Pollock’s paintings: All those “arbitrary” drips, swirls, blotches, and spatters are very much in the artist’s control.

In another novel we meet a character named Kim. Fresh from a broken, sexually charged affair, she has just learned that a childhood friend has brain cancer, and processes her emotions as she moves through a seascape. The author has turned composer, creating a symphony of words consisting of a few interwoven themes expressed in a handful of movements. These themes might be: the ocean, the wind, Kim’s sadness over her failure to win acceptance to Julliard (she’s a violinist), and the possible loss of her friend.

All these themes might run together while maintaining a quality of randomness, spontaneity, and surprise, forming a free-flowing “stream” of consciousness. As Kim herself reflects (while rehearsing a violin concerto in her head), “Framework: intro, supporting, supporting, supporting, conclusion.”

None of this is or ought to be arbitrary. If successful, the music should build, movement by movement, to a satisfying conclusion or crescendo, with all of the thematic rivers joining before flowing together into the sea. Otherwise the disassociated strains will trickle off to nowhere.

As with any tour-de-force approach, stream of consciousness typically requires much revision and many drafts. And control of punctuation and syntax is crucial.

In my student’s chapter, Kim’s reveries lead her into the ocean itself, where she nearly drowns after breaking through a fittingly symbolic warning signboard (“ACCESS PROHIBITED”). Her stream of consciousness is literally broken by her fall. The subsequent scene of her rescue shifts us out of reverie and into action, implying that the heroine has nearly drowned in her thoughts.

In your own compositions, pick out the themes and see how they inform and underscore and interact with each other like instruments in an orchestra.

93}DRINKING THE OCEAN: WHEN SYMBOL
& SUBSTANCE PART WAYS

There are authors who ignore, or refuse to acknowledge, the less-than-positive implications of their own symbols.

I’m reading a convincing story about a nine-year-old’s infatuation with the sea, a fixation based entirely on postcards and photographs and on what she has imagined or dreamed, since she’s never actually been there. All this is rendered by the author with great heart and skill, with delightful turns of phrase and descriptive passages. Sara is shown stretching her neck in the backseat of the car en route to the seashore, the landscape rolling by with its “mountains filled with shanty houses of exposed brick, and tin roofs built haphazardly up and down the steep hills.” In the same paragraph I read, “She didn’t want any ugliness to come between her and her ocean.” Lovely.

And, though I admire the title, “Drinking the Ocean,” it makes me question certain aspects of the story that seem to me less than fully realized. This is, after all, the story of a young girl’s love affair—not with a man but with an entity, with the ocean. But the implications and hazards of such an infatuation are not sufficiently or satisfactorily explored. Emotionally, physically, or both, something needs to happen in a story. And in this one, essentially, nothing happens. Sara starts out in love with the ocean; then she meets the object of her dreams, which lives wholly up to her fantasies.

Not only is that unsatisfying, it’s unrealistic. Dreams rarely live up to reality. And so there must, I think, be a moment of reckoning in the story, the moment when reality obliterates fantasy, when symbol and substance part ways. The green-blue sea in a dream or in a postcard is not the same sea that we swim in. That beautiful azure color is only a mirage: As soon as we cup the water in our hands the magic color disappears. Maybe Sara swallows water, or is caught in a riptide? Suppose she gets stung by a jellyfish, or steps on a stingray? The unrealized story arc here is:

(a) girl has naive fixation with the sea

(b) girl goes to the sea

(c) girl finds reality has little to do with fantasy

(d) girl is disappointed

(e) girl comes away with a new, realistic, and mature love based on experience rather than fantasy (the water that she brings home in a bottle is salty and bitter, but she loves it in spite of its harsh taste).

The loss of innocence metaphor is inescapable. The bitterness of the sea is the bitterness that must accompany any relinquishing of innocence or ideals.

A story generates its own unity out of the meanings latent in its raw materials. Those latencies must be made slyly overt; that is the writer’s job. Not to inject stories with artificial or forced meaning, but to suss out the meaning(s) already there, so the reader can, with a little effort, appreciate them.

94}THE SUBLIME EXISTS: DON’T FORCE IT

Of symbols, poet John Ciardi has written:

A symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: It sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can say where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water?⁴¹

Should we force symbols, metaphors, myths, or meanings into our stories? No. Never. Should we go looking for them like big game or mushroom hunters? No. Better to let our symbols find us, and welcome them when they do.

36 From Mystery and Manners, Occasional Prose.

37 An interesting aside: Silas Weir Mitchell, the physician on whom Gilman based the character of the husband (and who did, indeed, prescribe to her his “rest cure”) was a pioneer of neurological medicine who, among other things, treated Civil War soldiers suffering from gunshot wounds. Mitchell was also himself a quite successful author of novels and poetry—much better known in their time than Gilman. They were good friends.

38 Did Jean Giono, writing The Man Who Planted Trees, plan the symbolism of those trees—or need to? Our symbols should all grow as naturally from the soil of our stories.

39 Also Blanche’s Chair in the Moon—a title Williams himself called “very bad.”

40 For similar reasons Catch-11 (Oceans 11) was rejected, as was Catch-17 (Stalag 17), until Heller finally hit on the “funny” number 22.

41 From How Does a Poem Mean?