Chapter 4

Reconnecting with the felt body for writing and learning

Maria's story

I have chosen Maria's story because it illustrates very well the reconnection with bodily feeling through creative life writing and the reconceptualising of writing and learning as fundamentally embodied processes. As for many Group 2 students, Maria's opening-up involves closer engagement with what she calls her ‘child-self’ and, like Simon, she develops an internal dialogue with her newly-found ‘writer-self’. Maria experiences the opening-up as very challenging, and suffers depression during the early part of the MA. Her story shows how she begins to manage her expanded sense of self in part through developing containing self-images in her creative life writing.

Splitting and its consequences for learning

Maria is in her early 50s when she joins the MA, of French-speaking Belgian origin, and a healthcare worker. She has been attending creative writing courses for 10 years, which has helped her to gain confidence in her writing. Through the MA she hopes to develop greater fluency and structure in her writing and to ‘feel more confident of having a voice’. She feels that understanding her own writing process better will help her personal growth and, for professional purposes, she wants to learn about the therapeutic effects of creative writing.

Maria's main problem is the high level of anxiety she experiences when trying to bring her creative work to completion; indeed it is a troublesome feature of her learning as a whole, sometimes obscuring her capacity to ‘absorb and remember’ and causing blocks. The fear of being judged academically is particularly strong. These problems have their origins, she believes, in her childhood, where her repressive Catholic upbringing led her to repress her spontaneity, and her ‘ambivalent mother’ left her feeling ‘unheld’ (Winnicott, 1960) (see Part III) and deprived of spontaneous love and support. Her creativity and confidence in herself plummeted dramatically during her convent schooling, and not completing her undergraduate degree compounded her sense of academic inadequacy. Leaving her country of origin was necessary, Maria says, for the sake of her mental health, but it has left her with a deep sense of loss and guilt, and the term ‘exile’ occurs frequently. When she writes, she does not always know whether to use French or English, and this makes her feel like ‘a hybrid, living in the borderland’, ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ across the split in her identity that is ‘never going to heal’. Maria's trajectory through the MA, like Simon's, involves becoming more familiar with the different parts of her fragmented personality, bringing them into dialogue with each other, and ultimately finding a way of ‘holding’ them for herself.

Transgressing the familiar boundaries of self-identity

It is the second session of Course 1, focusing on rhyme, rhythm, and sound in poetry, that begins the opening-up process for Maria. She responds playfully to the task of identifying and listening to the sounds of childhood words: ‘I started hearing the sound of words, names of Flemish girls and places. Then memories, images would link with the sound. The more I gave in, lines wrote themselves …a mixture of memories, inventions, metaphors’. The poem that emerges is a mixture of English, Flemish, and French:

The poem indicates that otherness and difference are already uncomfortable features of Maria's childhood, even before the move to another culture that compounds her sense of being ‘other’. In fact, the idea of otherness becomes a central motif for Maria throughout the MA. Later in the above poem it appears as Ostrelande (meaning ‘Land of the Other’), a fictional town invented by a Belgian poet. It is a place where ‘a Flemish Bluebeard, murders young girls’. As the poem is largely from the child's point of view, the emergence of this dark material surprises Maria, but ‘being able to conjure this new aspect of the child helps in making me feel more whole. It gives another perspective to the [aspects] my shy, dreamy, withdrawn, lonely child would have chosen to embrace’. The idea of an Other Land where there can be ‘tension between opposites, light and dark, child and parent, mother and father’ marks Maria's conscious shift away from the good/bad dichotomy of her childhood environment into fairy-tale and surrealism, where the borders between the real and the imagined, the acceptable and the disapproved, can be blurred. It is a means of ‘transgressing’ her usual way of thinking.

A similar transgressive process takes place in the writing of ‘Mother-Food’, inspired by a visit to Brussels. Here again sounds of words evoke rich, sensual memories: ‘Sneaking in[to] the kitchen, gobbling up half-finished packets of waffles, galettes, chocolate pralines … the smell of rabbit marinated in red wine, black pudding…’. She remembers buying a bag of aniseed sweets without permission and her mother punishing her by not allowing her to eat the ‘mouthwatering dessert of raspberries and cream’ with the rest of the family at supper time; instead being ‘sent to the larder, to stare at undesirable groceries: haricots, dried prunes, tins of orange marmalade’. Yet there were also ‘magical days’, helping her mother with the baking:

I can see how the egg yolk mixes with melted butter, brown sugar, then transmutes into a new substance. ‘Make sure you flatten the lumps’, she says. I am left to stir the mixture for a while, as she sprinkles flour into the brown earthenware bowl…After the golden substance is poured into a tray and left to bake in the oven comes the exquisite moment of licking the bowl. After that you felt warm inside, tantalising aromas of cinnamon and gateau lingering on for the rest of the day.

Focusing on these rich sights and tastes and smells from her childhood enables Maria to step out of time, like Proust (see Chapter 8), and bring the past into the present. Whilst these are ambivalent memories, they allow her to evoke her homeland, Le Pays de Cocagne, a ‘land of plenty’, where food ‘holds the promise of jouissance’ – sensuality, bliss – ‘the kind of delicious pleasure bestowed upon us when we give ourselves wholeheartedly to the feast of life’. The writing is itself a feast; it gives her permission to indulge her own sensuality, ‘to reinstate a sense of self made from the experiences of growing up as a girl into a sensuous female body’. This helps to counter the sense of deprivation and repression stemming from her childhood. However, opening up to this repressed material and reflecting on it for the end-of-course paper confronts Maria ‘with many parts of my psyche’ that she finds difficult to manage. The reading groups are not suitable for helping her with this, she says, and she falls into the depression that has long been a feature of her life (see Chapter 12). Yet she does find support from the theory studied in Course 2.

Reconceptualising the self as a process

Julia Kristeva's idea of subjectivity as constantly in process between the Semiotic chora, the bodily-felt, maternal holding environment in which she believes the child is immersed in the early stages of life, and the Symbolic, the realm of language and separation, is a revelation to Maria (Kristeva, 1984). It gives her a new conceptual framework for understanding the splits between her different identities, as her French identity is connected with a sensual, bodily-felt sense of self with which she has lost touch. Kristeva's idea of the chora as a ‘melancholic space’, because of the inevitable loss, in the Symbolic, of the close relation with the mother, also speaks to Maria's experience of depression which she begins to see as a ‘necessary affliction’ involved in opening up to a deeper creativity and psychological change. Connecting with ideas in her native language is hugely beneficial in bridging the ‘big rift’ between her French and English identities; that Kristeva was, like her, an exile, ‘crossing cultures’ between her native Bulgaria and adopted France, also brings a sense of personal and intellectual companionship. Not surprising then that Maria chooses to write about Kristeva's ideas in her critical paper for Course 2.

After reading Kristeva, Maria says: ‘I found myself writing more freely, and I felt I would need to engage in some physical practice, like dance or yoga, in order to continue to free my writing’. What we see happening here is Maria's opening-up to a clearer sense of her own fragmentation and the need for movement and dialogue between the different parts of her personality, but at the same time she is developing a conceptual framework that ‘holds’ these different parts together.

Grounding theory in experience

Course 3 (Writing and Groups) provides Maria with ‘experiential grounding’ for her theoretical explorations of Kristeva's chora. Unlike the previous two courses, this all-female group with its ‘gentleness’ and ‘feminine quality’ feels like the ‘maternal holding environment’ she needs, both mirroring her back to herself in all her different guises and ‘holding’ her (see Part III). This in turn helps her to ‘hold’ herself in the chaotic process of learning. She recalls how alone and unheld she felt when studying for her undergraduate degree, but here ‘the centre does hold after all, I can somehow trust the process’.

With this stronger sense of containment (Bion, 1962) (see Part III), both internally and externally, Maria is able to start writing a piece of creative work ‘from a fragmented sense of self’. Written in response to the first Writing and Groups exercise ‘This is Who I Am’ (see Appendix), it is structured in short, themed paragraphs representing different self-fragments, but the overall effect is of a dream, shifting back and forth between past and present tense, first and third-person narration, fantasy and reality. At the start there is silence and stasis: ‘I lay there for centuries, waiting surrounded by darkness. No words to speak it, forever incubating the unborn’. Then suddenly there is colour and movement. Red predominates: the petals of giant poppies ‘outside my window …, like the wings of the butterfly reflecting light’, ‘crimson … geraniums in terracotta pots’ on a sunburnt Mediterranean hillside. Then there are other bodily sensations: ‘the acrid aroma of the lavandin’, and the loss of felt boundaries in lovemaking.

In the final fragment the narrator is observing a gypsy fortune teller sitting on the steps of her ancient wagon: ‘her earrings dangle creating sparks all around her sunburnt face … she is alert and calm, her feet steady, her jet black hair held by a crimson ribbon undulates around her shoulders … [she] is painting her lips bright red’. This colourful, transgressive woman evokes thoughts of freedom, of the kind of roaming life enjoyed by ‘Mongolian yurt dwellers’. But when the narrator gingerly circles the wagon and is surprised by its owner, she takes fright and runs away, lest this gypsy other, with her disruptive potential, ‘take a piece of my soul’. Yet it is too late: ‘She is already inside of me’.

This striking piece of writing moves back and forth uninhibitedly between the fictive and the real. It continues the work Maria began in Course 1 of opening-up to a more fluid self-experience that involves a deeper sensuality and transgresses her usual conceptual boundaries. The image of Mongolian yurt dwellers is particularly striking, with its connotations of movement across wide open spaces beyond the constraints of settled living, but the fear of the gypsy ‘other’ bears witness to the challenges involved. Maria notes in her journal that writing this piece feels like ‘becoming invaded by something threatening’; yet the fragments are ‘ordered into a cohesive piece’. Potentially disruptive Semiotic material is contained by the structured, Symbolic space of the writing, making it possible to begin to find form for the unspeakable ‘other’ in herself, her lost ‘continental self’. By sharing the piece with the group, she ‘re-enacts [this perilous process of opening up] symbolically’, allowing this challenging ‘other woman’ in herself to be seen and mirrored back to her in the safe-enough space of trusted others: ‘This expands my sense of self and takes me out of the internal space of no-self I experienced in the past through lack of adequate mirrors’. Internalising the group as a positive object in whose presence she can write gives Maria a sense of inner presence that contains the other in herself sufficiently to be able to write when alone. She learns from this that not being able to write was the result of not being able to be alone in the space of writing, not being able to hold her own fragmented inner world, and that this applies to her experience of learning generally.

Fragments of poetic prose as containers for selves and others

Whilst, for some people, the creative writing component of Course 4, Contexts for Practice, is an opportunity for preparing a piece of honed creative writing, Maria uses it for exploring further her personal development. Over the summer vacation she has put into practice her insight that, in order to develop her writing, she needs to engage in some kind of physical activity, as the writing she selects for her portfolio is full of dancing. Dancing reconnects her to the feel of her body, with which she is now, as it were, in dialogue:

I had forgotten what it felt like: the dancing body in motion gently flowing, arms creating curves, hands pushing against soft air, swaying in sync with the branches of the apple tree dancing in the courtyard. How could I ignore your subtle knowledge and love for falls, roles, skips and jumps across the wooden dance floor. Now I feel deep stillness as I lay [sic] with face and belly against the earth.

She has also been using her encounters with the visual and literary arts as a stimulus for free associational writing. A chance meeting with an art student at a gallery leads to her involvement in the creation of a series of photographic self-portraits, for which she must dress up and move her body in front of the camera. At first she finds this inhibiting: ‘the cold eye of the camera’ renders her ‘frozen, exposed, vulnerable, stripped bare’, so that she cannot find an authentic sense of self in this context. Then, almost giving up:

Suddenly she came, first in my mind's eye, then in my body. I moved around, dressed her, gave in to her. There she is visible, taking up space on the gallery wall. I see an ageless woman dressed in black. She is sitting with a very straight back on a wooden chair. She is staring at the sea holding a giant conquer [conch?] shell against her heart.

This is a stark but positive image: the agelessness implies endurance and the upright sitting position evokes inner strength, whilst the shell evokes the sound of the sea with its wide open but risky spaces firmly held. This new image of herself ‘[breaks] through the layers of grief I artfully gathered around my body to protect myself’. After that ‘everything flowed’: desire emerges ‘wearing a see-through black muslin robe’, and then the exotic, sensuous gypsy, inspired now by Frida Kahlo's multi-selved portraits, ‘wearing my deep blue skirt, feather red earrings and an orange shawl’.

Other artistic encounters continue this process of opening-up to a new, more bodily felt self. In another piece Maria finds herself inhabiting surrealistically the aimless, listless heroine of the novel she is reading. She rambles around the seaside town where she has lived for several years, indulging in ‘giant chou buns and coffee éclairs’, taking in for the first time the seedy underworld of this place: ‘the school of drinking at the edge of the pier … pavements covered in seagull shit’, and gathering impressions for writing. She has chance encounters, goes on a ‘date from hell’. It sucks her in, this risky, compelling life lived in a novel: ‘everything connects with everything, everything is happening really fast’.

As Maria writes about this experience, something new begins to happen. Her ‘writer-self’, this sensuous, wayward self who is beginning to have a life of her own, seems to be separate from her narrator-self. Whilst the narrator-self is clearly somewhat wary of this writer-self, ‘her link to the underwater depths’, she knows it is inevitable that ‘soon I will return’ to this risky, chaotic, creative experience. It is becoming a necessary part of the narrator's sense of who she is and in acknowledging it she feels that ‘she has almost found a new equilibrium’. The term equilibrium implies that these two senses of self are not fragments split off from each other, like Maria's English- and French-speaking identities, rather they are complementary parts of the self encountered in the writing process. As we have seen in the example of Simon above, this shift from a sense of fragmentation between different parts of self to a sense of inner dialogue is a foundational moment in the development of a more grounded yet simultaneously more open and flexible stance as a writer, a stance which, in Maria's case, seems to carry over into life more generally.

Narrating the self

Whilst in Course 4 Maria was using her creative writing as a vehicle for personal development, for Independent Study she takes up the challenge of structuring her experience into a completed literary product. Her continuing theoretical explorations are helpful here. To Kristeva's conceptualisation of writing as necessarily involving opening-up to a difficult psychic space is added Hélène Cixous's notion of writing as a metaphorical death: the relinquishing of identity and creating space for the other in oneself. Maria finds support for these ideas in Surrealism, with its emphasis, in the process of artistic creation, on the free associative accessing of words and images as a means of subverting fixed self-structures. These ideas help to frame and contain the new project, ‘Emily's Gift’, as does the device Maria previously discovered of using prose fragments as containers for self and significant others. Her metaphor for the project of ‘weaving a tapestry’ captures effectively the binding together of disparate material within a framed space.

‘Emily's Gift’ draws its stimulus from a series of photographs taken by Maria's artist daughter of a house on the Belgian coast that originally belonged to her maternal grandfather, but was inhabited during her childhood by her aunt. This house, to which Maria returns frequently, has over the years of her ‘exile’ become a ‘shelter for memory’, a symbol of her transient connection with her country of origin. She has agreed to write a text about her relationship with the house to accompany the photos in the book her daughter is preparing, but feels blocked. How she overcomes this writing block is the theme of ‘Emily's Gift’.

The fragments that make up ‘Emily's Gift’ are written in the present tense, using a form of third person narration – limited omniscience, with an element of free indirect style (see Chapter 3) – that allows the fictionalised perspectives of members of the family, or Maria herself in the guise of ‘Emily’, to be embodied and speaking presences in the text, whilst also allowing Maria as framework narrator to structure and contain the whole. The first voice to emerge is Maria's aunt, here called ‘Rose’, a published writer of novels and short stories and a significant person in Maria's early life. Rose has recently died and we encounter her as a ‘spirit bird’ from the afterlife hovering over the Channel between Belgium and England. From here she is looking back at the house by the sea, regretting that she did not have time to write another novel, but also watching her niece, Emily, in her apartment in England ‘waiting for the words carried by the North Sea wind’ to help her write her piece to accompany her daughter's photos.

Several sections further on we switch into Emily's consciousness and learn that, whilst she was estranged from her aunt, she feels they are ‘linked by some invisible thread that binds memories and words into the fabric of lines and stories’. She regrets ‘the resentment she had felt towards her aunt … in her later years’, because of her ‘refusal to engage with Emily's life and struggles’. She also regrets not showing more appreciation of Rose's first novel when she read it as a teenager: ‘She had found the plot old-fashioned and was unable to comprehend why … the heroine chooses to abandon her fiancé in order to devote herself to the contemplative life of the convent’.

On bad days looking at the photos of the house and struggling to write her memories makes Emily depressed. Then waking one morning she feels ‘the unborn text like a garment, a second skin weaving itself around her … [it] had a life of its own, endlessly creating colourful patterns. Before that vision her hands had felt bound’. Having bound hands evokes the unhappy experience at the convent of learning to knit and her mother having to unpick her poor efforts; then how she ‘shrank under layers and layers of [her mother's] knitted socks, gloves, bags, blankets’, a sort of love substitute, and how she tried so hard to be ‘a good girl’ for her mother. Her natural spontaneity and sensuality, she feels, were swamped by experiences like these. And then suddenly she understands the reason why she cannot write: it is because writing evokes an Emily of whom the nuns and her mother would disapprove:

writing made her feel more sexy, gave her an edge, made her eyes sparkle. She could even remember how she had felt when she first learned to read and write. It was in Madame Jeanne's class. She experienced this intense jubilation whilst unravelling the mysterious connections between letters, sounds, words.

To write the text, she decides, she will have to reclaim ‘her place of power in the family tree. She would have to follow her aunt Rose's footsteps by becoming a writer herself’.

Catching sight of her aunt's first novel in one of the photos, Emily ‘feels compelled to read [it] with fresh eyes … to find the secret hidden within the plot’. She senses that there is another Rose ‘artfully hidden behind the veil of a holy woman’ and that finding her is important for her own struggle to write. Immersing herself in the deliciously sensuous language of Rose's novel, Emily is transported back into the sensations of her childhood: ‘coarse sand against bare feet, wet shivering body soaking the summer heat of the sun, … the smell of melting tar on the way back from the beach’. She begins to understand that despite the fact that Rose inhabited the same repressive Catholic environment as herself, ‘Rose somehow managed to save herself with her ability to harness the power of words and create poetry with their sounds’. Underneath ‘Rose's false persona: the helpless, weak, capricious female’ are not only ‘her intelligence and brilliance’, but the sensual woman who, Emily now remembers, filled her room with ‘perfumes and rouge lipsticks … silk flared skirts, mohair jumpers … high-heeled shoes’. Emily realises that:

For all those years [she] had been asking the wrong question: why does [the heroine of the novel] go to the convent? Instead … she needed to ask: whom did the [novel] serve? Her answer: the writing served pleasure. Rose was enjoying herself and wanted to hide this from us … her story was telling readers to love life and celebrate earthly sensations, to love poetry and transient feelings.

Emily now understands that by giving the novel an ending that conformed to the ethos of her Catholic environment her aunt was distracting the casual reader from dwelling on her own sensuality spilling out into the text. Emily is exhilarated by this discovery: it is okay to be a sensual woman and sensuality is in any case essential for writing.

Employing Rose's sensuous approach to writing, Emily finds that: ‘Words flow more easily as if helped by Rose's pen and she can let the house fill her’. Recalling the felt memory of her mother she is able ‘…to taste her, smell her, remember her body so often absent, colour it blue, feed it orange, touch it like silk’. She remembers how the French word for sea, la mer, was always associated with her mother: ‘She would repeat it to herself like a spell: nous irons à la mer, à la mer! It was the most succulent word she knew’. Then similarly sensuous memories of her grandmother emerge, her daughter and her father, the nuns and Uncle Raymond, who confusingly was both her godfather and a priest. Focusing on these felt memories, Emily draws important self-experiences ‘back inside her own flesh’, reclaiming some of the good things she has forgotten. She also finds a method for overcoming her writing block so that she can start writing the text for her daughter's book.

The last fragment concerns Emily's final visit to the house in the company of her daughter and mother for the purposes of the photographic project. The current owner, Rose's son, is selling the house to a distant cousin, so this might literally be their final visit. But Emily and her daughter have ‘captured the soul of the family home’ in the book that will soon be published, so it will never be completely lost. Back home after the trip, Emily dozes and in that half-dreaming state ‘an ageless tall woman dressed in white’ appears, whom Emily recognises as a Mexican storyteller, a curandera: ‘she is sweeping a yard, circling with her whole body, erasing traces … of the dead…Gathering momentum, spinning, the woman in the vision is making space for stories’. Emily feels that she has always known this dancing woman who ‘seems to exist beyond time and space’. In fact she is a part of Emily herself who now realises that ‘she must keep writing stories so the departed may live’. Coming full circle, Emily is taking over Rose's mantle as the family storyteller, and just as the perspective of ‘spirit bird’ Rose at the outset binds together the different locales of Emily's life, so Emily now as storyteller similarly transcends everyday time and space, creating a new, potentially containing perspective for her fragmented life. This contrasts strikingly with Maria's earlier conceptualisation of herself as ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ between her split ‘selves’.

The bodily-felt self as container

Reflecting on the writing of ‘Emily's Gift’, Maria says: ‘The project led me to allow for seemingly disparate, split slices of my life to be brought together into a fictionalised whole held together by my Self’. The capitalising of self here seems significant. It implies a more holistic experience of self, which contains both the writing project and the fragments of her life and identity. She continues: ‘The more I became able to claim authorship on the material, the more I felt an enhanced sense of Self as a writer’. This indicates that this new sense of self is in part a sense of agency arising out of the increased ability to write. Later she says: ‘It is the tension between myself as writer, traveller, exile, and the Self whose roots extend beyond frontiers and time zones that allowed for the creative gesture needed for the making of my text’. Here the holistic sense of self is in productive dialogue with all the different facets of identity.

What becomes clear in Maria's attempts to make sense of her experience is that the more she is able to give coherent shape to her self-on-the-page, the more she feels grounded in a holistic sense of self, and this in turn enhances her ability to write. This virtuous circle of writing and what could be called ‘selfi ng’ brings Maria an increased sense of agency as a learner, so that by the end of the MA she is able to ‘own my intelligence and [have] confidence in my abilities’. Rather than feeling irretrievably split between different selves, with a yawning abyss of ‘no-self’ between, she is more present to herself at her centre, better able to tolerate her anxieties, and consequently more trusting of, and open to, the changes that learning and creativity involve.