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In the course of working with a therapist, I had brought to him something I wrote--feelings about a recent experience. He dropped the pages to the floor, dismissing what I had written as being cognitive. He did this without even reading what I had written, his message being that written communication lacked immediacy. It was a mental exercise that lacked the potency of the feelings out of which it grew.
For me, though, writing is lively and alive. That's true both in the process of working with words and also in the response those words can evoke in those who read them. Each of us has multiple levels of being--emotional, physical, mental, psyche, psychological and spiritual. As an extension of ourselves, words can express and embody any and all of those levels.
What follows, then, is the response I wrote to this person in the wake of his dismissal of my writing as being a mental exercise, devoid of other expressions of self. I wrote this in an effort to help him have a better understanding of writing as the personal and potent experience that it is for me.
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Excerpt from "Being/Cognitive"
{Copyright © 2003-2008 by Mimi Sandeen }
I achieve a state of inner awareness and an empathic, if you will, or perhaps somatic, experience through words, when I read. Good writing shouldn't be about ideas only. It should also bring out feelings in its readers. Words work that way for me. It's not just a cognitive experience. When I read Ray Bradbury's passages that evoke the senses, or I read Edgar Allen Poe's the "Tell-Tale Heart", or Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow", or Faulkner's "Pantaloon in Black", or the prose-poetry of Thomas Wolfe, I can feel it, taste it, smell it, hear it. I can sense it. I become it, within my psyche. It becomes a world inside of me that I live, myself the skin for these feelings.
This is the same dynamic underlying the process of writing that makes working with words such a personal expression for myself. In the act of writing, I may struggle to find the right words, analyzing, hunting them in my mind, crafting them into a shape and form. Those words then become the feelings, as well as the ideas. They are not just a practical, or elegant, architecture for ideas. They can live and breathe, inspiring the sensibilities and the emotions of their readers, becoming a form of transformative energy that evokes whole dimensions of feelings, broad in scope, yet also subtle and delicate - whole worlds breathed into the imaginations and even into the physical bodies of their readers. That's what the experience of words can evoke, as well as the cognitive processes that they support.
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