Rediscovering the Stream of Consciousness

Come in, it's twilight at the beaver lodge.

The stream of consciousness is often described as a narrative device designed to make a reader feel as if they’ve dipped into the movements of a particular character’s thoughts and feelings, into the flow of impressions that is idiosyncratic and unique to that one individual. I don't think that's the whole story, though I do believe that feeling, of having dipped in, can be created for a reader by a writer who dives underwater far enough to get there. 

The other night, I delved into beaver lore after exploring McLane Creek Nature Trail. While I didn't spot beavers, their presence lingered. Post-dinner, I researched, and the cozy evening unfolded with facts about these marvelous creatures. 

^{A beaver lodge in Northern Finland. Image: Wikimedia Commons}

Beavers are impressive architects. They build lodges with underwater entrances. They work nocturnally, using the nighttime for stockpiling: bark, stem, twigs and other vegetation in an intentional heap near the lodge, pinning it in place with rocks or mud. Social beings, they live in extended groups. Writing, like beaver gatherings, need not be solitary. Magical things happen when people come together, each diving into their private well of images yet ending up at the same lodge. 

Have you ever felt surprised by how good it can feel to write in the quiet presence of another person also writing, or even a group?

Perhaps you are accustomed to writing while alone. There is nothing wrong with that. Though there persists, even among poets, an idea of that writing poems must take place in isolation. And it's true that even long before the pandemic, modern life (capitalism) keeps us isolated from one another, too busy or tired or anxious or depressed to gather. But truly magical things can occur when people come together and write. If you have had the fortune to experience this, then you know what I mean. When care is taken, the social and the private elements of writing need not conflict with one another at all, in fact they make each other possible. We are now approaching the stream.

^{People writing and drawing alone-together in a short workshop I taught in Lynda Barry's Comics Room in 2017, the same room in which I'd taken a semester-long workshop with her in 2013.}

In The Unthinkable Mind workshop with Lynda Barry, we wrote and drew individually, yet the collective experience was profound. We didn't even know one another's real names. It was not, in a certain way, "a social situation." Yet when we wrote together, drew together, and shared our works-in-progress, the world absolutely split open. As a matter of class policy, no one was ever forced to share, though people often wanted to, and no one looked at the person who read. When someone across the room from you read aloud something they'd just written, we doodled in our notebook and let ourselves be transported into where this person right in our midst had gone in the last 5 minutes, while each of us had gone somewhere else into our own well of images, our own resonant particulars. It was startling to find ourselves right there with one another through the writing. Writing privately, we nevertheless found ourselves together. We each dove underwater through our own notebooks, following the images and stories, exploring the stream's depths and arriving at a shared lodge. 

 Sometimes a lodge is built so well that several generations of beavers will use it, fixing it up as needed. The entrance to the lodge is underwater and positioned several feet below the lodge itself; this design creates a water lock that keeps the lodge totally dry. This hidden opening also keeps the lodge safe from predators. To enter the lodge a beaver must dive underwater; it’s the only way in.

^{A page from What It Is by Lynda Barry. A collage of image and text reads, "What are thoughts? What is an iceberg? How is a thought like an iceberg?"}

Reading Ira Progoff's  At a Journal Workshop, the familiar practices of deep focus and an atmosphere of privacy, even anonymity, resonated for me, as a student of Lynda Barry, who studied with Marilyn Frasca, who has trained in and taught Progoff's methods. 

"We each go down individually into the well of our life. The well of each personal existence is separate and distinct from every other. Each of us must therefore go down our own well, and not the well of someone else's life. We find, however, that when, as individuals, we have gone very far down into the well of our life, we come to an underground stream that is the source of all wells. [...] We are all connected here in the unitary continuum of being." (Progoff 33).

If you expected a demystification of “stream of consciousness," apologies. Let's return it to cosmic possibilities. It's the space we create when writing together—craft that mirrors spellcraft. It's not just rendering one mind's flow but offering a reader a companion in the stream. 

I believe the stream of consciousness is this place we meet, it's what we do when people come together to write, and it's what we make possible for each other. It's "this solitary work we cannot do alone" (Progoff 34).

^{Illustrated diagram of a beaver lodge, depicting two underwater entrances, and dry eating and nesting chambers inside the lodge. Image: Encyclopedia Brittanica}

Joe Brainard's I Remember, and the endlessly generative invitation it offers for others to write, and Bernadette Mayer's sonnets, are lodges within the stream. Mayer wrote, "I looked through my past poems in the morning and discovered I’d been writing the always somehow peripheral sonnet all along without understanding the forms of brief conclusive thought the poems had been taking so often in 14 lines without me," poems which she describes as "headlong sonnets which are a way of thinking amidst our hemispheric faults," I believe she was describing having happened upon a kind of lodge within a shared stream of consciousness. Certain lodges like the sonnet, built sturdily enough, stay in use across generations but are also renovated/innovated over time.

Poetry, like riparian zones, thrives along waterbodies. Forgotten the toasty warmth of the lodge? It's ready. Join the stream, a place where private dives lead to shared lodges, brimming with poems.

Here's Lynda:

"I began keeping a notebook in a serious way when I met my teacher Marilyn Frasca in 1975 at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

She showed me ways of using these simple things — our hands, a pen, and some paper — as both a navigation and expedition device, one that could reliably carry me into my past, deeper into my present, or farther into a place I have come to call “the image world” — a place we all know, even if we don’t notice this knowing until someone reminds us of its ever-present existence." —Lynda Barry, Syllabus

Reading, prompts, workshops, residencies, mentors, friends who write together... all of these have been ways that I have entered the stream of consciousness in the social presence of others. Moving through the portals of your own images, particulars, observations, memories and imagination, you'll find a warm and dry lodge full of poems.