Writing is like producing movement

Writing is like producing movement. There is the simplest kind of movement that is produced by the brain… it is produced as a fast reflex to a shock received from the world. It involves no thought. It is a simple conversion of one form of information into another, one form of energy into another. The movement that is released is informed by the stimulus. In the world of writing, certain kinds of translation work are similar to this movement.

Then there are movements that are still dependent on and are specified by the sensory information from the world. But these involve thought, a certain permission from the will of the performer.  But here too it is the world that does most of the work.

The more serious kinds of writing, something that can be said to be original, are like voluntary movements.  Here too there are types of voluntary movements. In the classification of William James, the 19^th century American psychologist, firstly, there are the ideomotor movements in which there is a pre-existing idea that guides the movement, like for example a well-practiced dance movement. This is like writing about the visit to a monument, or at a slightly grander scale about the history of a nation.

There is a second type of voluntary movement, - it is as voluntary as voluntary can get – in which movement emerges purely from within. Like a strong gush of fuming water from the depths of a geyser, it issues out of the depths of consciousness. It flies unaided, propelled by nothing but the strength of its wings, and soars free like a giant eagle. Writing always needs a subject. One necessarily writes about something. But there is a world of difference between writing that rolls out on a prefixed idea, and writing, in its purest and most original forms, that leaps out of the writer’s mind, charts out its own course, brings with it its own idea-companions, chooses the vehicle that can carry and stabilize its movement, with the writer remaining through the whole time a pure and transparent instrument and nothing else.

 

The best and the truest kinds of writing simply writes itself. The less the writer gets involved in the business the better. From somewhere inside... ideas and words and lines emerge, like dainty objects from a magician’s hat, from the depths of the writers being. Water molecules find their own clever pairings and form the enchanting geometries of the snow flakes, just when the weather is right. Likewise, in the purest forms of writing, torrents of words self-organize into lines that are lyrical, apt, shimmering with a supernal meaning. All that the writer has to do is supply that inner atmosphere and remain calm.

 

Sometimes the first few lines might be triggered and impelled by a few superficial objectives the writer may have on his mind. The first few words that emerge might be a clothing on those first thoughts. The Consciousness simply uses those thoughts as calling cards, an invitation for the writer to tune into Itself. Once the connection begins, and the channels of expression  open, the river of meaning that flows out is often vastly greater than what the writer originally intended to write about. He is pleasantly surprised by page after page, tome after tome, that seems to be welling up from within. Where is all this coming from? What exactly is in him? He will find his own depths bewildering. Because these depths are  actually not “his” depths, just as when you dig deeper than the foundations of your personal dwelling, very soon you will find yourself in the bowels of the Earth far from anything that is “yours.”

In this sense, writing is a form of exploration of the Self. Very soon the writer will come to realize that there is a whole universe of things inside, a universe that was there all along but he never knew. It would be too vain to say that that universe is inside him. A more apt language would be to say that the writer is only a channel, a willing or a fortunate portal onto the infinite world of Consciousness.

About the Author: V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy

V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy is a professor in the Department of Biotechnology, IIT Madras. He obtained his BTech from IIT Madras, MS /PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. His received postdoctoral training in the neuroscience department at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston. The Computational Neuroscience Lab (CNS Lab) that he heads works on developing models of the basal ganglia, spatial navigation, stroke rehabilitation and neurovascular coupling. He is the author of two books in neuroscience. He is the inventor of a novel script called Bharati, a unified script for Indian languages.