Not all writers, and certainly not all teachers, see it that way. And most students have not had the chance to experience it that way in school, a lamentable situation which I have written about often enough that I won't get into it again here. (There are several essays in the "Elaborations" section of the sidebar here that address the issue.)
Every once in a while I come across a writer who has a similar way of viewing the process of writing, but a unique and highly personalized way of working within that point of view. One such writer is Renee Gladman. Several years ago I ran across her book Calamities, and it basically tore the top of my head off.
The book is a collection of short explorational essays, most of which begin with the words "I began the day..." For example:
I began the day standing at at threshold of time—the beginning of something, the end of something. I had a method for standing that was called art, then writing. The way I stood allowed me to see how things could begin and end this way—simultaneously. It was hard to follow these opposing tendencies, especially when you were writing and couldn't see anyay, see anything other than these words appearing on the laptop screen. You were writing about something you weren't looking at. There had been a break. I was saying this on paper.... (31)
In this passage and in many others, Gladman is pushing a line of thought across the page while at the same time maintaining and articulating her awareness of the fact that she is pushing a line of thought across the page. She is in essence watching herself watching herself, which in another writer's work might come across as tiresome or gimmicky, but which by virtue of the originality and breadth and depth of her thinking winds up being surprising and often, to me at least, exhilarating:
I began the day transcribing some of Gail Scott's sentences onto the wall of my living room. For months I had been trying to say something about them, which when I went to say it became layered, thus impossible as an utterance. I had already argued somewhere that one could not express many different things at the same time in the English sentence, and so was not terribly surprised by my failure. I'd learned that to think in this language you had to be patient: you had to say one part, like drawing one side of a cube, then say the next part, like drawing another side, and keep on saying and drawing until eventually you'd made a complex observation and a picture-feeling... But when you were alone, when no one was there to listen to you unfold some puzzle in your mind, you coveted that ability to think in paragraphs with a single sentence, and ability you may never have had but that your instinct said belonged to you. (43)
Gladman often goes off on riffs that illustrate exactly the many-layered complexities that are inherent within the architecture of the sentence, which is to say, within thought itself, whether expressed in words or in images:
I sat down with the objective of pushing words off the page and bringing a picture into being and doing this for a number of hours in a row, for a number of days, all accumulating into a number of months, perhaps amounting to years, such that this became a picture in which was embedded many other pictures and that gave off a dimensional feeling, even though these pictures belonged to my thinking and were nestled in my mind, which like everything else in thought was not like a pot you could pour water into and heat up but rather was like seeing a pot and having a living vision of all the actions therein. You made a space that gathered all the possible pictures accreted through all the pushing of words off the page, and many times called the shape novel and a few times essay. I set the cup down. I pushed the words I set the cup down off the page, then picked up the cup and set it down. I drank from the cup, though I didn't remember this until I'd read the act on the page, my reading having become a picture of a body standing at a window with cars parking below. But it wasn't long that I was in this body thinking about the cup at my mouth or other things the body needed when I realized that all the cars parking were doing so all at the same time, and this was strange. It never happened this way. You never had a moment when all the cars had been gone and then returned all at once, all wanting to park and all finding a space to park and parking at the same time as all the others. Wherever it was that I was standing provided me with a vantage point in which the information that I gathered was becoming a problem for the picture that held me. I had to grab another picture and append it to this one, so that I didn't get stuck, perpetually sipping from that cup and looking over cars behaving bizarrely. (93-4)
Here Gladman is making total sense, and simultaneously skirting the edges of the surreal. Gladman's discipline in sentence-making—and she is all about sentence-making—is to follow the line of thought where it leads.
Any good critical thinker recognizes that all thinking is embedded in a point of view, and that at any given moment our thinking on a particular subject may be embedded in ways that are not readily apparent, if not invisible to us. It is one of Gladman's great strengths as a writer and thinker that she is always questioning and attempting to clarify for herself what lies behind her first thoughts, her first attempts at articulation: Wherever it was that I was standing provided me with a vantage point in which the information that I gathered was becoming a problem for the picture that held me. I had to grab another picture and append it to this one, so that I didn't get stuck...
The realization that one's situation—as a writer, as an artist, as a human being—is always precarious and to some degree untrustworthy is a necessary precondition for the development of a fuller awareness and understanding. We get to second thoughts and third thoughts only by questioning our first thoughts, a process which can be engrossing and sometimes a little frightening.
Later, Gladman talks explicitly about the embedded energies of the line in language, as well as in art:
Language was beautiful exposed; it was like a live wire set loose, a hot wire, burning, leaving trace. If you looked into language this way, you saw where it burned, the map it made. The wire was a line, but because it was electrified it wouldn't lie still: it thrashed, it burned, it curled and uncurled around itself. It was a line but one that moved, sometimes forward, but mostly up then back then over itself then out then up then curling in one place until the mark grew dark then out forward and up into a rectangle then inside the rectangle and around, circling with small, tight movements. I was amazed that I was talking about wires when really I was talking about prose. I was talking about how it was to write, but doing it through drawings (but drawings were language) and using wires to spell it out, but I was doing this on a foggy morning, where there were neither drawings nor wires. There was a table, upon which sat a computer, and I was staring at a screen imagining the drawings I had made and wanting them to teach me how to talk about the line, the line in art, which I could use to talk about the line in language, because you'd need to know they were the same line. There was not a thing different about them. (103)
She follows this up with another statement that I think is clarifying and elegantly expressed:
Monika Gryzmala said, "Drawing is a process of thought which is conducted by the hand," and she was an artist, and though she was using language to explain her art, it was her art that most concerned her. Drawing was a process of thought—that was true, and so, and especially, was writing. And we wrote through the hand, even if it was typing: we used our body to write. "Thus, drawing is writing," was how I wanted the quote to go on. And to write was to think; to make lines was to draw; and lines were the essence of writing. (104)
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