Why I Write and Teach Writing from Cynthia Davidson on Vimeo.

We write to know, develop, and explore the self. Yet so much of what we do is based on writing for an audience outside the self that is kaleidoscopic, shifting in its expectations as we meet it and forge our literacy identities. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of the feminist tour de force about writing in academia, The Pink Guitar, wrote in Rutgers University’sHOWEVER Forum in 2000:

Of course, one is subject to professional pressures. If you jump track, write another way, writing “otherhow,” you have to make sure that all your kinds of writing are excellent, tested out, I mean by an interior standard of solidity. That way if other people hate it, you will know how to measure it for yourself, on your own.

She is talking about value. Without the referent of self and value to the self, writing never develops the depth we may refer to as heart or soul. Writers may write to construct the self and then write to express that construction—both in relation to other selves, in various contexts. There is something happening in that construction that is akin to Socrates’ graven word written on the soul (Plato’s Phaedrus), but it’s different too. Writing to know may be a female form of knowing, after all. The feminine has been classically associated with form and matter, just as the patriarchy has been associated with spirit and consciousness. If one writes to know, it is possible that one writes without planning or purpose (except to find out what one’s plan or purpose is, perhaps). The writing matter emerges before its meaning or purpose becomes clear. It may be “fuzzy,” “formless,” or “non-linear,” even pointless–until a shape begins to emerge. Sometimes those are the writings that stay with one, aren’t they? Carl Jung said,

Consciousness grasps only a fraction of its own nature, because it is the product of a preconscious psychic life which made the development of the conscious possible in the first place.  Consciousness always succumbs to the delusion that it developed out of itself, but scientific knowledge is well aware that all consciousness rests on unconscious premises, in other words, on a sort of “prima materia…” (Jung, 1944 432-433)

So writing to know the self may also be described as an awakening of consciousness that rests in the “prima materia.” The individual’s writing process is his or her own personal transformative journey. The technology of writing is available to anyone who wants to use it–Adrienne Rich’s ladder into the sea of her famous poem, “Diving into the Wreck”:

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

Writing is the technology that leads to self-awareness, as in this poem—or it can simply be “a piece of maritime floss,” a broken TV, a cracked mirror reflecting a wreck that no one wants to see.

 

Works CitedDuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “On experimentation and critical style.” HOWEVER (FORUM) 1:4 (2000). 1 May 2004. Web.

Jung, Carl.  Psychology and Alchemy. The Collected Works of Carl Jung (Book 12).  -0002 edition. Princeton UP:  1980.  Print.

Rich, Adrienne. “Diving into the Wreck.” The Academy of American Poets. Reprinted from Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich. New York: Norton, 1973. 1 May 2004. Web.