Ryan's Response

[Anonymous]

#527

Perl writes, “ The move draws on sense experience, and it can be observed if one pays close attention to what happens when writers pause and seem to listen or otherwise react to what is inside of them. The move occurs inside the writer to what is physically felt.”

What comes up for me are images or ideas, always connected to a feeling. I’ve spent the weekend in bed because I have been fighting an illness that I have not yet won. While home, I’ve been watching HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.” An episode that caught my attention dealt with one of the supporting characters, a military sniper who had gotten half of his face blown off. He wears a tin mask shaped and painted to look like is ‘real’ half, born face. The storyline shows him thumbing through a scrapbook filled with selected photos, pictures, and drawings of ‘an ideal family life,’ happy couple, smiling children—a world the audience is to assume he thinks he can never have. After cleaning up, packing himself some food and an apple, carefully wrapped, along with his gun, he takes him self to a forest. He removes his mask. Cuts his apple. Takes a bite and lies on the forest floor. He takes his shotgun and puts it in his open mouth. While about the pull the trigger, a stray dog carries his mask off in his mouth. The man about to kill himself stops, takes the gun out of his mouth, and tries to get his mask back. The sniper’s moment to kill him self had passed because he faced a new obstacle, or possibly because the way in which he wished to die did not go according to his exact plan. He runs after the dog. He could have easily shot the dog, but does not. Two men in the forest discover him. The dog is near. The man his mask back. One man somehow gets the sense that the man with the distorted face was going to take his life. The man tells him, “These woods are for hunting, fishing, seeing what the birds get up to—these woods is for living—understand me there?” Essentially saying “don’t do what you were going to do.”

In wanting to get the man in the woods words exact, I went back to the episode. In doing so I discovered that the mask sniper’s name was Richard. I went back to the above paragraph to revise, put “Richard” in place of “He.” Once I did that, the ‘doing of it’ didn’t feel correct. In the moments of writing the above (which I did in “chunk” as described by Perl (I never go by phrase, or even line by line, but more so as a unit when I write. In poetry I sometimes do. But even then I like the get the overall essence, my “felt sense” down on paper before looking back. I paused “and seemed to listen…” and reacted to what was inside of me.

The entire experience: the reading assignment, the inspiration for my response, (influenced by what I watched before having read the Perl chapter) all came into play for what I’m creating, responding to here on this site.

The storyline of the half defaced sniper, Richard, had a great impact on me: The gun in his mouth. The gun to my brother’s chest that killed him. My brother’s decision to shoot himself in the chest and not his face, knowing my mother would want an open casket. Or my brother not wanting to destroy what he felt was beautiful. My brother shot himself in the heart. Not head.

Do I know these elements to be true or as fact? No. Did the men in the woods know for a fact that Richard was there to kill himself? No. But it was their “felt sense” I suppose. Writing from that place: “They show us the fallacy of reducing the composing process to a simple linear scheme and they leave us with the potential for creating even more powerful ways of understanding composing.” Perl.

Below is a “felt sense” poem I wrote before reading Perl’s “Understanding Composing.” I felt the need to write a poem after watching the episode of Richard in the woods. I hadn’t written a poem in years, but felt I should. After one line I judged myself. Retracted. “Why write about a moment that was already created so beautifully in the episode?” But because I had the ‘sense’ to do so again, I decided to trust my instinct.

Below is the poem, the reflection of my feelings about what I saw, and also my connection to the subject. My brother.

_____________________________________________
February 21, 2014

I go to the woods to live
Cut my apple
Take a bite

I go to the woods to live
Lay my body down
Hold my gun

I go to the woods to live
Touch the trigger
Open my mouth

I go to the woods to live
____________________________________________

Interesting that in my poem “What it’s like when your brother commits suicide” (in an earlier post) I wrote towards the end about seeing myself in a forest, alone, standing. And the mens words in the episode, “These woods is for living.” For me meaning ‘not just alive, but living.’ I saw the episode and wrote the poem on February 22. My brother’s birthday is February 21. Oddly, the WORD program on my MAC, while typing “February,” defaults to putting the current day’s date automatically. I contemplated titling the poem after my brother’s birthday. Yet, WORD somehow defaulted to the day before, February 21. After all this, I’m going to go with my MAC’s “felt sense.”

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

[Sondra Perl]

#540

Your story and poem are a wonderful example of recursiveness in reading, writing and viewing — all the way through. You keep going back and going back in order to go forward. Just great. And honest.

[Author]

Posts