One of the spiritual processes that should have fascinated me but never really has is automatic writing. The other night, however, I found myself compelled to it, and what came up was interesting, so I thought I’d share.
I had my word processor open anyway, because I’d intended to broach the subject of the Law of Attraction and it’s connection to magick. It’s one of the big ideas floating about at the moment, and I want to make a start looking at its implications for real life. But I can’t write while I eat, not unless I’m in a cafe, for some reason, so I put on a film while I demolished a particularly fine soup concoction. I just picked up the nearest DVD to hand and it turned out to be La Dolce Vita.
I haven’t seen the film in about twenty years, so I only had very vague recollections of it. Is it me, or is it unbelievably long? It just seems to keep going and going; but then perhaps that’s part of the point of the film itself. The days when films had a point beyond entertainment, eh..? Anyway, I got to the bit just before Steiner makes his famous speech to Marcello (recounted in translation in The Divine Comedy’s wonderful song ‘The Certainty of Chance’ - itself the suggestion the title for a later post) and suddenly felt this compulsion to express something welling up within me. It must have been the dialogue about Marcello’s writing that did it, but it was building before then.
I knew it was something about writing and much more beyond it, but I also knew that if I stopped to think about it my conscious mind would get in the way. So I flipped the laptop from the DVD player to the word processor, took a deep breath, and just started banging away at the keyboard. No idea what I was typing. Just breathing and typing. I wasn’t looking at the screen, but up at the wall in front of me, as though I was near the front at the cinema. I just kept going until I knew that most of the feeling had emerged. There were traces left, but the main emotion was clear, and it was time to make some tea.
So I got up and put the saucepan on the gas, and made some. Pulled some coko piskoty malinove (raspberry jaffa cakes to you) out of the fridge, and went back to the film. I think part of me was worried that what I’d written would just be random gibberish. That there is a reason my conscious mind edits and filters the ramblings of my deeper self. So I thought I’d watch the last bit of the film and have a look at what I’d written later, before I hit the sack.
Finally, finally, at just the perfect point, the film finished. I made another tea, ejected the DVD and switched to the word processor.
Shock one was that it definitely made sense. Shock two was that there was only about forty typos.
Something about the tone and content embarrasses me slightly. And that’s why my conscious mind would have edited it. So I want to share it, because it’s Truth at a real level. This is not something I would sit down and write in the normal course of things, nor think because my internal voice has neither the tone nor the timbre of this, so I have gained something authentic about myself that I could not have learned in another way. If, when reading it you too can sense that authenticity, then it opens the possibility that it could be a useful tool, and I want to share that possibility.
What would come up for you? Might it lance a boil or reveal a treasure? I think I want to broaden the notion of automatic writing from the sole domain of spirit communication at a macro level and open it to soul communication at an individual one. I used typing, because my fingers to some extent know where the keys are. But most people seem to use pen and paper. The standard method is to keep it by the bedside and if awoken with the need to write, just bang it down without really waking up. Then when you do wake in the morning, have a read and see what Spirit says. What I’m suggesting is that another way might be to use the same technique when an emotion is surging or washing around and you know that thinking about it is going to miss, suppress or destroy the real nature of it. Grab paper, grab pen, stare at the wall and let it go. Who knows, half of it might be in pictures or doodles, but I think you will know what they mean.
Give it a go, and do let me know if something interesting comes up, or if you find some method to add to this.
Here is what I wrote:
I want to write. I want to write with such force and heat and fury that is in my heart. And yet still I cannot bear to hurt anyone, to change anything; I see the perfection in everything, even the things I despise. Beauty and wilderness, untouchable by me; I can only reveal it, and let it speak through me. When I was young I was outside. I was your awestruck observer, biographer, ghostwriter, mirror. Glass and alchemy. I opened wide and drank in gulps. You touched me and tore through me. Like a surgeon’s scalpel in the hand of a curious child, going deep with shocking ease, mind spinning in its implication and delivering its lifelong effect.
But now I am become subtle. I am mercury zephyr and stroke with a lover’s practiced feather, while for long years the sharp end of that quill carves unfathomed lifelines and fine skeins into my palm.
What heat is this? What fury? How am I to express what is within me? The wounds of a thousand sunrises, the beauty dread of countless private tidal walks of lunar torture. Mine, all mine, and rising up to meet the day - how can I carve this upon what I see, this perfection that will go on without me, when I hide away beneath quiet grasses in centuries to come? Who cares what this heart holds? How can I sweep the hair from your eyes, caress the line of your cheek to hold your chin to face me? No you shall not look away - look at me - look at who I am: that which nature has made of me. How can I weave such careful porcelain subtlety when such storms as you have laid within me are scalding urgent and seeking such physical expression? Magma; I inherited no mantle.
Let me write it – you can hold the lens, now. I cannot take any more in, I am full, and it is sharp not swollen, there are no soft curves here, only bright arcs of sweeping scored intention.
I will leave a mark. I have no need of posterity; who will remember me? But I cannot be present without this. There is nowhere left to retreat to observe from. My presence is now express force, and that must and shall affect.
I must touch, and I must love. But I shall hold your face in both my hands and I shall look you in the eye. Your heart shall beat or stop, eyes wide, changed forever and you shall know me. Nothing and no one that comes close can remain unchanged now. Too close now for measure and perspective. It is part of me. And I have fire in my moment.
Comments