Integral Education: The CIIS Blog

Editorial Revision As An Act Of Exploration

By Randall Babtkis, writer, poet, and professor in the Department of Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry 

Even if some ways of being old are never new, older work has a dynamic value. You might look at your buried poem and ask how, temporarily, it slipped from consciousness – like a pencil tucked inside an architect's ear. After all, if it was an exploration of a previous moment of happiness or fear or pain or wonder, what of the next moment?

A comma might be able to fix it. If you went slightly wrong once, try to establish your new bearings with a pause – like a singer with a cognitive structure to her breath – before saying the next big thing. There is an echo-chamber in all revision and a flow to each declaration. Behave as though you are invited to a wedding – tradition-bound and melancholy – full of that kind of high hope which comes with the happy promise of intercourse. In the poem I am trying to breathe new life into, intercourse is a given.

Try making noises that make unusual, if merely well-grounded, musical sense. You will benefit from self-knowledge, though your audience requires none of the true facts. You might as well be Shakespeare for the thimbleful we need to know of your life. You may sing yourself, as Walt Whitman, but the work flows democratic and en masse. In other words, all our stories are the same. Take another breath and prepare yourself. Your work may benefit from new forms and meanings at the deeper level of thought. Choose from among the superabundance of coloratura -- the elaboration and coloring of your ideas.

When I find that mortal poem to fix, I wonder if I might find the antonym that could work to replace a homonym? Or am I suddenly bilingual enough and ready to allow a universal language to take over? Or am I only searching for a next emphasis in the range of thought? I almost cannot bear resolving this one since it can be like reaching the last pages of a novel. Revision requires a kind of re-entry that confirms what has already taken place.

I said it first. I am working with something I overheard. 

If intercourse is a given, consider what has gone on between us already, the poem and me. Yes. It hides behind the desire to live on, to give birth to something immense and, as works of art go, infinitesimally small. But I see it – two lines that look absolutely sweet together. Talk about making love. It's a little mad, isn't it, the consciousness required, the temptation to jigger things in and out of existence. But do not let this thought depress you. The work is primal. Get naked and take it on; it is your own science to explore.

You are charged to do it. Do it before you die. Don't hesitate to take it on in the most urgent way possible: you might grab the Medusa and turn her into a pretty scalp with your tender fingers. You might write: boy meets girl and then force a slight turn, a dance, in another direction. At any rate, you'll be helpless to leave the disarrangement of your life and those fearless preparations you took for it out of your revision.

In return, you may hope to newly experience the diametrical opposite of what the poem started out to say – an uncoupling which both you and others understand.

Fire: Three Worlds

By Sarah Stone, Faculty member in the Department of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry, and author of The True Sources of the Nile

“The progressive cultural evolution of humanity will lead us to understand that we are animals among other animals.”

Sandy Skoglund

It’s an animal thing, how writers need the other arts. We need to be fed differently, to be knocked down differently, in order to understand everything we don’t see when we bury ourselves in one art. So, after days of being knocked down and re-formed by AWP, Ron and I went to the museum.

Sandy Skoglund: “Fox Games” – installation

You can walk through it, climb the stairs and look down into it. Red restaurant red chairs red floor red tablecloths red breadbasket red knives red forks red plates red vases red roses. Blue-gray foxes climbing, crawling, rolling, pouncing, their faces crafty and intelligent in animal ways, a series of intensities (like glee, like curiosity, like fierceness, but those aren’t the names for those animal ways of thinking). You walk through it. You can’t be part of it. You walk back the other way. One red fox. One reddish-painted fox fur, the real stripped-away skin, draped over a chair. More like a dream than a dream. What a dream would be, if it were possible to imagine this.

Jonas Burgert: “Second Day Nothing” – painting

Not clear whether the fluorescent green – scooped up, poured out, stirred in cauldrons – is the source of the catastrophe, an additional burden, or some kind of effort at repair. The worlds broken together. Bosch and sci-fi, hard-boiled crime fiction and shamanism, ritual acts and toxic spill, the other world and the future we fear. The wooden underpinnings of the destroyed ground, the man passed out or dead, the interruption of gray/brown normality. Where the red and turquoise break in, the moments of yellow. 

Tony Oursler: “Zero” – video-sculpture

A little doll/puppet propped upright in a trunk or suitcase, old-style fabric body, her arms and legs black tubes, sticking straight out. Her largish oblong stocking-mask head, a video screen, shows just her face, a creature going through every emotion, sitting stiffly in her box, calling out orders, asking for help, uttering speculations, whispering or exclaiming: 

“Maybe nothing this exciting will ever happen again!” 

“Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero.” 

“Hey, what’s going on?” 

“Fire! Fire? Fi-i-ire. Fire!” 

The trunk is stuck back in a corner in the half-dark, though her voice can be heard in other rooms. (I had thought she was saying, “Liar! Liar!”) Spectators come up and start laughing immediately, a painful laughter, looking around to see if other people see the bitter wit of this doll with its fierce and self-contained dramas.

Politics of the Dancing Body: Covert Acts and the Transmission of Less

By Anne Bluethenthal, Professor in the Department of Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry and Artistic Director of ABD Productions

I am a lover of covert political art. This is not to say I don’t love, appreciate, and perpetrate abundant overt acts of political art. But I get a special thrill from the surprising twist of language, image, form, structure, and mere presence that turns some piece of the world on its head, stretches my brain, catches my breath, and extracts from me a sly smile of recognition.

I swoon watching the delicious, tall, brazen, butch presence of Peggy Shaw--lesbian theater artist--whose presence on stage is itself an act of cultural subversion (“I’m so queer I don’t have to talk about it, it speaks for itself!”). She doesn’t need a diatribe of gender theory to justify her work. She is the diatribe incarnate.  And I’m moved to tears watching aerial dance matriarch Terry Sendgraff hanging naked and fetal from a bungee cord; gradually, systematically revealing her one-breasted chest as she hovers precariously and confidently above our heads. The normalizing of the radical has a special place in my art heart.

That sense of “normal” has intriguingly evolved and changed in the Bay Area arts scene over the past 2-3 decades. When I first started making dances professionally, it was not at all usual for women to be lifting each other, much less lifting men. When my dancers worked with each other in this way, absent any gender assumptions, this was a radical act, made covert in the sense that the dances were not overtly concerned with gender. These were abstract dances, dances about the environment, about family, spirituality, relationship. The radical act that excites me has to do with the presence of a certain vocabulary or physicality that, by being intrinsic to the dance creates a visceral revolution. Now, the act of women lifting men or each other is neither radical nor noteworthy – at least in most of the contemporary dance scene. In some archaic forms, of course, the old gender roles are alive and well and perpetuating old ideas through kinesthetic and visual cues.

Beyond even the usual covert acts – the assumption of a certain presence on stage, the subversion of visual and theatrical or gender norms – are the politics of the body itself. How the body performs the culture, how we physicalize our economies and our cosmologies has been an interest – obsession actually – for most of my life. I see the potential to awaken and rupture hegemonic views through conscious acts of kinesthetic art. When western thought and action aspire toward the sky in an unreflected passion that defies gravity, denies body, and disconnects from other beings, it becomes a radical act to cultivate a technique and language of the body that allows, that opens, that surrenders to gravity, that dissolves the barriers between body parts and among bodies. This is even subtler, more covert work. The soft ankle that opens the foot to the earth, the sternum that yields rather than hardens around the heart, the arms that hang and follow from the spine rather than forming themselves into preconceived lines and curves of fragmented speech – these are silent statements of revolution. This art is about the absence of striving, rather than its replacement with another sort of effort. Absence is not usually consciously perceived. Instead, it slips into the consciousness of the observer not through even the visual image, but viscerally, through the kinesthetic sense, transforming through the subtle transmission of…less.