Hilarie's Response

[Website Services Admin]

#593

Perl: Foreword
I love Elbow’s phrase “nonverbal space” and the way he links it to the “here” that is felt sense and that is hopefulness (xv). The almost equal footing that he gives these three elements helps me to clarify the way that felt sense frees (instead of limiting) the creativity of emotion (where fear is usually the limiting device); leverage seems like the perfect word to delineate the relationship. I also love the way he sets off “nonverbal space” and “here” with italics instead of quotes. I’m not sure why. I just feel drawn to it. Along those lines, “words for the meanings inside us” (viii) is both poetic and useful. I’m wondering if thinking this way might help with the Gendlin videos we watched. How can we apply it to the process of implying? Are the words implied by the (pre-existent?) meanings?

Perl: Intro
I really like the way the colleagues who are having trouble applying Sondra’s methods use the vocabulary of felt sense to describe their confusion: (can’t) “figure out,” “like,” “makes me uncomfortable,” “seems” (xiii).

This seems (see?) to connect to Sondra’s use of the phrase “language-ing ability” (xvi). The addition of the gerund makes the sometimes scary, sometimes stilted, usually formal-feeling word “language” into a thing of play. Maybe suffixes could be even more helpful in dispelling the colleagues’ fear. If we think of “serious” verbs as “-ing” or adjectives as “-ish,” they’re not quite as disarming. Does informality confer this kind of power automatically, or does it depend on how we use it? (Sondra says “knowing” rather than “knowledge,” for example – how purposeful is that?)

Perl: Ch 1
The “come” and “form” distinctions (2) also seem like they’d be helpful in the implying scenario. (From my notes on the video:

What happens in the living process always happens into
It happens into the implying of the living thing — the environment happens into the implying, and it changes the implying into the living thing’s next implying

You get what he calls a process

He says a process in this sense is an occurring into an implying in such a way that it carries the implying forward to its next implying

Living things imply process)

SO. “What lies beneath the words” (3), in Sondra’s gorgeous phrase, is this iterative (I think) motion of feeling underneath (I think?) or independent of thought (simultaneous with but not conditioned by?).

Is it going too far to say that we’re trying to get back to childhood by getting in touch with our felt sense? We’re definitely trying to find the place where language and fear get out of the way of creativity. Are all writers/artists/creatives better off tapping into their toddlerhood?

• This topic was modified 11 years, 1 month ago by Website Services Admin.

[Sondra Perl]

#601

Hi Hilarie,
I love the way you are pulling things together, using Elbow and your notes from Gene’s video. I am with you all the way (especially about the power/usefulness/aptness of gerunds) — until you link to ‘toddlerhood.’ I take that word to mean ‘childish’ — although you may want it to mean something more akin to ‘abandon’ or ‘playfulness’ — (See Gene’s use of the words having no set meanings). But for Gene, I think, felt sense is a concept and experience that leads to mature thinking and is based on a kind of mature patience and allowing. That is why the ‘tapping into childhood’ strikes me as not quite accurate.

[Website Services Admin]

#608

Hi Sondra,

This is so helpful! I should have said playfulness – both that and abandon are closer to what I wanted to say.

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

#643

Hilarie,

I loved where you write: SO. “What lies beneath the words” (3), in Sondra’s gorgeous phrase, is this iterative (I think) motion of feeling underneath (I think?) or independent of thought (simultaneous with but not conditioned by?). Sondra’s invocation of “patience” feels really powerful to me here too. She writes in the book that in “some ways the guidelines are based on a paradox. they don’t start with words but with what is prior to words, with what is unsaid, not yet said, or not yet articulated but felt in the body nonetheless”(9).

Felt sense has really resonated for me since Sondra taught it to us last semester and since I read her book. I realize that I often talk about writing and thinking like this: things feel powerful; they resonate. I have for a long time. I’ve trained myself to write in ways large and small that create options, trusting that I will always feel the strongest choice. Elbow calls that “honoring the wrong word and dwelling in the experience that tells us its wrong” (1). Maybe that is his way at getting at the patience part– what you call here moving away from language and fear that get in the way of creativity.

–Sean

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