Karyna's Response

[Robert Greco]

#754

As a researcher who aligns herself with phenomenology as an epistemological tradition, I was very excited to read this text. As a very visual person, I was even more excited about the author’s analogy of writing with painting when he writes “Just as a painter draws the world so the phenomenologist tries to use words to evoke some aspect of human existence in a linguistic image.” For me, this statement is the closet to home. I tend to think of concepts visually, and even during the felt sense exercise in class, all that came up in my mind were images. A short story that I wrote afterwards has almost no action or dialogue, but detailed descriptions of rooms, feelings, thoughts, etc. Drawing through words or painting the experience is how writing happens. This, however, raises a question of the role of language in our experience. If felt sense precedes the verbal and if images precede the verbal, than is it possible that felt sense is often in the image and not just the body or is the image the next step after the felt sense before the words come?

On the other note, I tend to disagree with the author about writing being a solitary act. Yes, we may be alone in the room or even the entire building while we put our pens to paper or fingers to keyboard, but I don’t think that we are ever alone in our heads. Our consciousness is inherently social and the notion of the other or the audience hardly escapes it. I wonder, how many times have you ever written something without ever considering the other even for a second? I know that I didn’t…

[Sondra Perl]

#770

I think the movements between felt sense and image are more fluid than lock-step….I think one can occur before the other in either direction and they can also co-occur. What’s needed is the patience to quiet down and look inward to see what might come. And to ask questions of oneself (which may mean that the inner words evoke the space of felt sense.)

I agree with you that we carry others’ voices with us all the time and certainly when we write.Van Manen’s notion of the solitary writer is, I think, based on his experience of feeling responsible to the text and to readers as in “Yes, I said this; these are my words, my values, my story. I offer what I wrote as a stand I am taking about the world, about myself.” Not to deny that what he says comes from many places but to claim a kind of ownership.

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