Transcendent Writing

Here's the first hit I've got that's actually about what I'm looking for:

Elements of Transcendence in Fiction with Miciah Bay Gault—
"We’ve all read pieces that seem to transcend mere excellence. What are the elements that take a story from great to sublime? How do published authors move their carefully crafted pieces from tidy and proficient to something more memorable and far-reaching? Together we’ll read a few published pieces in hopes of finding out. Perhaps we’ll see moments of fluidity in point of view and narrative distance, or instances of unexpected speculative wonder. Maybe we’ll notice piercing exposition, or incantation on the sentence level. [...]—the transcendent flashes, the crescendos, the big finishes, the sneaky quiet moments of meaning, the chills, the heartbreak, the astonishment."
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And it's only—$495~? Wait, wha...? Dollars?!!? Oh, I see, it's not a book, it's a course. Ok, forget that. But if there's a course, maybe there are books as well. Does anybody know of anyplace where I could learn more about this, or another name for it? A book, article, or video?

Achieve Transcendence by Writing a Memoir?

That's the premise of this PDF article by Diana Raab, PhD:

• Creative Transcendence: Memoir Writing for Transformation and Empowerment (PDF)

I've long thought a person can reach Individuation (another term for transcendence) through writing or an art form, for a number of reasons I might not be able to articulate very well. Partly because working at an artform is a process that requires and causes growth, and partly because I believe re-conceptualizing your story (your life story) is a form of ritual magic, in the psychological sense (they're the same thing of course). Framing our story in narrative is a way of understanding who we are. We all have a life story, but it's largely random events and long meaningless stretches punctuated with sudden weird moments. But a big part of what makes us human is the ability to re-think that life story, to put it into better words, better terms, to give meaning to those meaningless stretches. Not falsely, that wouldn't be authentic, and authenticity is vital for something like this. It's got to all be true, but taking the time to put it all into words, in fact more than that—to think it through and find narrative drive and symbolism etc in it all. It was there before, but we never put enough work into understanding it or arranging it in a meaningful way. Doing that work (which is exactly what writing a memoir consists of) is the ritual re-organzing of the events of your story into meaningful order.

It's exactly what I was setting out to do with The Beastseekers, and to some extent with Season of the Witch. It was necessary in that story to change the protagonist into a girl, but in many ways Rachel's story is my story. I had come to understand something I later heard relating to Romanticism—something to the effect that Romantic poets or authors do their best work when relating their own stories, but through a character rather than a self-insert. A character who isn't the writer, but embodies some of their traits. It's got something to do with the fact that we feel most free to express our truth when wearing a mask, much more so than when completely ourselves. I learned this from a book called Impro, about improvisational acting, related to actor's training. It's also much better to transform your friends and other people you knew into characters, rather than do caricatures of them that they would doubtless not find very flattering. Those elements of The Beastseekers kept bothering me.

Again though, this is a side-trip, not the original meaning of transcendent fiction I was looking into. I'm interested in writing that achieves transcendence somehow, not stories about characters who do, or stories that allow the writer to achieve it. I have a feeling however that these side-trips are vitally important, partly because I don't think I'm going to find much about what I'm seeking (if anything). Possibly those few cryptic sentences I found about the course above are all I'll ever discover on the subject. And what's more, they might be enough. And it might be a good thing that I can't find more. This is one of those unteachable things I speak about sometimes. There's a teachable part of writing—story structure, character arc, grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. Acts, turning points, revelatory moments, inciting incidents etc. Those all come under the heading of the logical part of writing. As Kubrick once put it:

"There's a side to the human personality that somehow senses that wherever the cosmic truth may lie, it doesn't lie in A, B, C, D. It lies somewhere in the mysterious, unknowable aspects of human thought and life experience. Man has always responded to it. Religion, mythology, allegories—it's always been one of the most responsive chords in man. With rationalism, modern man has tried to eliminate it, and successfully dealt some pretty jarring blows to religion. In a sense what's happening now with films and popular music is a reaction to the stifling limitations of rationalism."

—Stanley Kubrick interviewed by William Kloman, New York Times​

The Varieties of Transcendent Experience

From the blog Philosophy for Life—the website of Jules Evans:

• The Varieties of Transcendent Experience

It's nice to have a good listing of these various approaches to transcendence. Another side-trip of course, nothing to do with achieving transcendent writing. But it is writing about transcendence, which is somewhat close I suppose?

He talks about what Aldous Huxley called Downward Transcendence, and I've called Dark Transcendence (very similar if not identical). Often attempted through drug addiction or sex addiction or various other negative means, like a life of debauchery, sin and crime. As lived and poeticized by those French poets Verlaine, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and their American desciple Jim Morrison, and many other rock stars, runway models and celebrities.

It just hit me how to express this more clearly—what I'm looking to find some good discussion about is not writing where a character or the writer achieved transcendence, but where the reader has a transcendent experience.

From What are you Reading Now?—

That's just about as well as I've heard it put. And of course it can't be dissected beyond a certain point. Probably the best way to 'study' it is to read some books that reach that level and try to think about how it was done. But more likely what you're really doing is getting a feel for how to approach it. I do think it could be excellent to read some thoughts on it from highly observant people. Hope I can find such things.

Bradbury reached it at times in Fahrenheit, and for me one of the times was with his description of books in burning houses becoming flaming butterflies. I can imagine them, caught in the immense updraft, in a world of pure intense heat and destruction, becoming beautiful emblems of transcendence in a hellish milieu. And it's important that he didn't over-describe it (like I just did), but used just the right words at the right times. He let it be a small detail and never lingered on it, just a momentary flutter in the text. That little detail really stays with me and rises above everything else about the story. Like Phoenixes (sp?) rising from not the ashes, but the intense peak of destruction itself, and when it cools down they're long dead and inert.

What I need to do is spend some time thinking about stories I've read that reached this kind of transcendence, dwell on them (meditate) and re-read the parts in question. Then do some freeform writing about it, thoughts that enter my noggin about it etc.

This one is an image (burning book-butterflies). I wonder if many of them are? Doubtless not all. But since showing turns out to be a vitally important apsect of poetry as well as fiction, with imagery being paramount, it probably comes near the top of the list. I want to try to catalogue different kinds of transcendent writing as I discover or remember them.

Interesting crossover—apparently some of King's writer characters are able to reach Individuation in part because of their autobiographical writing (memoir). I'm guessing part of it is that it allows them to contextualize events that horrified them at the time and were or seemed meaningless, but with the better perspective of years and of a mature writer's mind they can see some meaning they had missed before.

Also, his first few stories were about adolescents or adults looking back on childhood (such as Ben Mears in 'Salem's Lot, revisiting the town he grew up in and in particular the scary house where he had a terrifying experience).

I suspect King's reasons for starting off his serious writing period by dealing with adolescence and childhood is very similar to my own. Not that I quite know how to clearly articulate them—something about starting off by working with half-formed people, who haven't hardened in their atittudes yet, or in some cases even discovered them, and who haven't abandoned imagination yet for the practical aspects of grown-up-ness. I feel like I need to work in this area for a while before I understand how to deal with adults in ways that go beyond the standard social or romantic approaches. If you want to reach down to what's transcendent or what's formative in the adult, you need to understand the child within.

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I'm posting this mostly just as corroboration that the Hero's Journey character arc (AKA the Monomyth) is the journey of Individuation. Struggling up through the trials and travails of life, if you can make it, to reach some level of maturity despite all the obstacles. Not everybody makes it, and the ones who do don't often emerge unscathed. Life is difficult and dangerous. There's no guarantee anybody is going to make it. In fact suddenly I'm reminded of Dante's journey with Virgil through hell, where once you locate the level with your proper punishment (for whatever your worst sin was I suppose) you're forever stuck there in endless torment and can go no farther. It's a perfect metaphor, just like the descent into Hades was in The Odyssey, where shades of the dead drift morose and soulless. Death in both cases representing being frozen in trauma, while alive—a sort of living death.

This plays perfectly with what I've been reading in the book on King's transcendent writers. Transcendence is Individuation, which is represented mythologically by the Hero's Journey. It's the inner (esoteric) version of it, through the psyche. The myths are the externalized, symbolic version (exoteric), with dragons or monsters standing in for elements of the Shadow, or for those psychological obstacles that trap us at one level and don't allow us to grow beyond it. Unless you can find a way to contextualize the trauma that trapped you. This is the work of psychology or therapy. Or autobiographical/memoir writing apparently.

Stephen King seems to be entirely aware of this, and many of his stories deal with it, on a subtextual level. In The Body for instance (short story turned into the movie Stand By Me), a group of boys learn there's a dead body out in the woods and they set off to go see it, because what could be cooler? It turns out to be pretty traumtic actually, and several of them are so traumatised by something they've encountered that it freezes their growth and they remain stagnant for the rest of their lives, frozen at 9 or 10 years old. Gordon (the MC) is traumatized too, but because he becomes a writer (already was one really) and works off the trauma by dealing with it in his writing, he's able to contextualize it (find new and more mature ways to think about it that aren't so traumatizing) and gradually get past it. The one other kid who I think gets over it (but tragically dies young anyway) tells him the other two will do nothing but drag him down, he needs to get out of Castle Rock and away from them so he can continue to grow out of the trauma, rather than allow them to pull him down along with them in their misery. Man, once you see it clearly like this it's pretty obvious, but this is why the story is so powerful. Well, that plus King is a badass writer with a lot more subtlety and subtext than he's often given credit for. People assume because he writes horror that he's a hack. And of course not all of his stories hit like this, just a few that I'm aware of. But when he's good he's fucking badass!

A note on that last comment—it isn't seeing the dead body that caused the boys' trauma, that was more like a secondary trauma on top of their existing trauma, which was caused by things they had suffered already. Things done to them by their parents mostly as far as I can recall. But there was an indication—and this is clearly stated in the book—that the town of Castle Rock has a sort of abusive atmosphere or culture that makes most people who grow up there traumatized, and this is why their parents aren't capable of good nurturing parenting. They were all subject to traumatic upbringings—school bullying or other traumatic experiences that froze them at some level where they were just too shocked or broken to continue growing toward individuation. And it seems in just about every story with a Transcendent Writer character, they had to get the hell out of town quite literally in order to grow out of it. Away from that brutish, stubborn, small-town attitude that pervades Castle Rock, or whatever town the story was set in.

In Carrie's case she wasn't able to do that because, of course, she (Spoiler Alert!) dies while still a high school student. But she isn't the transcendent writer in that story, Sue Snell is, who serves as a main character rather subtly. Sue did grow up to write a book about her experiences as someone who knew Carrietta White, and it was because of Sue's selfless act of kindness (choosing not to go to the prom in order to let Carrie go with her boyfriend) that allowed Carrie to experience a few moments of transcendent bliss, even to the point of briefly becoming the Prom Queen. Of course that was also partly a wicked plot by the bully kids who did it just to humiliate her in public one last time, and who blamed Carrie for the fact that they kept getting in trouble—for bullying Carrie. Sue was one of the girls who bullied Carrie in the shower when she experienced her first period, but she was the only one who later felt bad about it and decided to try to help her out. The others remained hardened in their bully attitudes, which prevents any chance of individuation. It's an example of the kind of collective group thinking (mob rule) that pulls everyone down together, and this helps you understand how an entire small town could have a culture that does the same thing, that freezes just about everybody in some hardened egoistic attitude that prevents any real growth.

In writing about your thoughts and experiences, especially traumatic ones that happened when you were young, you can break out of those hardened egoistic attitudes and develop a more mature attitude about things. And it occurs to me it doesn't need to be in the form of a book, keeping a journal where you do a lot of self-reflective writing could accomplish the same thing. But of course writing. a book is a. huge. accomplishment, and if the book is centered on the traumatic event and your feelings/attitudes about it, and if it's done with real honesty and courage, then that causes you to keep writing in great depth about the very things you need to process, and hopefully in the right ways, since a book requires a progression of events (or experiences or attitudes about such exoeriences) leading to a resolution of some kind. Depending on what kind of writing you do, you're either going to further double down on the nasty attitudes that are preventing you from growing, or you might erode them away or break through them. And I suppose a knowledge of psychology (the kind aimed at overcoming trauma) is the best thing for that. It's a form of self-therapy where you're both therapist and patient, continually or repeatedly thinking through your terrible experiences and how they made you feel, and how you hardened your attitudes as a result. Retracting your projections onto other people, meaning removing the blame. Yes, those people may have actually done some terrible things to you, and it's important to realize that. Taking the blame yourself for things other people did is just as bad, but it's also important to understand that they were also victims of certain circumstances and undoubtedly developed hardened attitudes or coping mechanisms in youth in order to deal with some nasty events in their own lives. It's the endless chain of being. Most people (all?) are damaged, in various ways, some a lot worse than others, and some can deal with it better than others, and whatever damage somebody still can't deal with causes problems for anybody they know at an intimate level. Especially of course their own children, but it can include friends, students, neighbors, school bullies, and on and on. Each of us has to deal with the unsolved trauma of many people through our lives, and we all have our own weaknesses. It's all too easy to break at the vulnerabilities or the damaged spots under pressure.

I'm revisiting this thread because I just mentioned it on the message board and dropped a link, meaning I had to physically open this page. I became interested again in the idea of transcendence in writing (never dropped that interest really, but I mean I became interested again in Miciah Bay Gault and her course). I was always extremely tantalized by the whole thing, and if not for the high price tag, may well have just dove in head first. I believe the course was still active when i first discovered it, but it seems to be dead in the water now. So I'll transfer in the information from this page (I can't seem to find the original page anymore, why didn't I link to it?) (It probably doesn't exist anymore though):

Elements of Transcendence in Fiction with Miciah Bay Gault

$495

8 SESSIONS

OUT OF STOCK

ONCE A WEEK—WEDNESDAYS, 7:00 PM EDT - 9:00 PM EDTSEPTEMBER 13 TO NOVEMBER 1, 2023

ONLINE VIA ZOOM

We all appreciate a good story, and as writers we’re striving for excellence. And—we’ve all read pieces that seem to transcend mere excellence. What are the elements that take a story from great to sublime? How do published authors move their carefully crafted pieces from tidy and proficient to something more memorable and far-reaching? Together we’ll read a few published pieces in hopes of finding out. Perhaps we’ll see moments of fluidity in point of view and narrative distance, or instances of unexpected speculative wonder. Maybe we’ll notice piercing exposition, or incantation on the sentence level. Think of this workshop as an investigation. I don’t have the answers, but I love a good question. We’ll then workshop student work with this particular question in mind. Where are the moments and elements of transcendence in these pieces, and how might they be amplified? Using generative writing assignments when helpful, we’ll dig into what’s often overlooked in workshops—the transcendent flashes, the crescendos, the big finishes, the sneaky quiet moments of meaning, the chills, the heartbreak, the astonishment.

Course Outline
In each session of this workshop we will:

• Discuss a published story
• Workshop 1–2 student stories, focusing on moments of transcendence
• We’ll also reserve time for generative work (free-writes, list-making, or other writing exercises) to inspire revision toward transcendence.

Capacity: 12​

• Elements of Transcendence in Fiction with Miciah Bay Gault

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Here's another now-defunct workshop she taught last year (both were last year—I wonder if they might come back at same point?):

The Sentence Is the Story: A Sentence Workshop with Miciah Bay Gault

$150

2 SESSIONS

OUT OF STOCK

SATURDAY & SUNDAY11:00 AM EDT - 2:00 PM EDT AUGUST 12 TO AUGUST 13, 2023

ONLINE VIA ZOOM

This sentence-writing bootcamp highlights the pleasure and power of line-level reading, writing, and revision. Blending one-sentence-at-a-time workshop with generative writing exercises, we’ll approach sentences in terms of image, musicality, the “felt quality” of sound, and syntax and grammar as a necessity for beauty and clarity. Underlying all discussion is the notion that poetic devices are also at work in prose. Activities will include practice writing from our senses, rhythm and meter exercises, the meticulous and ruthless dismantling and resurrection of sentences, and the constant celebration of the beauty and order of the (often underappreciated) sentence.

Course Outline
Saturday

1. Sun Corseless Head: Apollinaire’s “Zone.” Let’s examine various translations of the poem to see how diction, connotation, rhythm, and meter affect meaning. Possible writing exercises involve connotation, word choice, the weighing of words.
2. Among the Flowers: image and sensory detail. Observation and writing exercises, with plenty of time to share.
3. Collaborative sentence workshop.

Sunday

1. Making noise, Hearing Voices, Listening for Secrets (or: Clusters, Mutes and Liquids) Writing exercises will involve rhythm, meter, and syntactic symbolism.
2. Sentence workshop.

Capacity: 20
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Of course this is largely stuff I'm already learning through my Poiesis thread. Apparenlty she's a lit-fic writer, or litfic chick as I sometimes affectionaely call them. I seem to want my own work, some of it anyway, to lean a little in this direction, hopefully without alienating genre readers, at least those who are a little bit adventurous. I suspect there's a close connection between these two interests—poetry in prose writing, and transcendence. Romanticism in writing.

Hey, how about I don't repeat my earlier mistake? Here's a direct link to that page in case I want to check back later and see if the courses are up and running again:

• The Sentence Is the Story: A Sentence Workshop with Miciah Bay Gault

And I'll go back now and do the same for the previous entry. You're welcome future me-dude! I checked their upcoming workshops and neither one is listed there. Well, you know what though? Sometimes you're better off with just a tantalizing hint of what some course is about, and you can figure it out on your own, possibly better or more thoroughly than by taking the course itself. I think my next course of action is to think of other terms besides transcendence that might lead to results.

She's also the author of a book called Goodnight Stranger (get out of my head Supertramp! It's Goodnight, not Goodbye!), I want to at least sample a bit of her writing, maybe the Sample on Amazon would be enough, to see what kind of writer she is. I have this sense now that she can answer some of my burning questions. She has become a familiar stranger to me (now Starship is in the old noggin. Or were they still Jefferson Starship at that point?). I was hoping she had written a book about transcendence in fiction, or maybe there was a website where you can download PDFs of the handouts from the course. Not that I've been able to locate.

Here is the heart and soul of the above information, from the post on her Transcendent writing course:

"Perhaps we’ll see moments of fluidity in point of view and narrative distance, or instances of unexpected speculative wonder. Maybe we’ll notice piercing exposition, or incantation on the sentence level. Think of this workshop as an investigation. I don’t have the answers, but I love a good question. [...] Where are the moments and elements of transcendence in these pieces, and how might they be amplified? Using generative writing assignments when helpful, we’ll dig into what’s often overlooked in workshops—the transcendent flashes, the crescendos, the big finishes, the sneaky quiet moments of meaning, the chills, the heartbreak, the astonishment."
​

So, she says she doesn't have the answers. Probably nobody does. I don't believe transcendence can be codified into a formula. Of course not, if anybody would try to do that it wouldn't be transcendence. It's always associated with what Jung called The Transcendent Function. He changed the name later, I forget to what. I need to look that up, it's important. The transcendent function happens when you're wrestling with what feels like an intractable problem. Generally it's when you seem to be stuck between the metaphorical rock and the hard place, and can't find a solution.

Then, often in a dream or on waking, possibly associated with a dream, a new idea arrives that solves the problem in a way you never would have come up with consciously, It usually is a complete reframing, a transposition of the problem into another realm, a higher framing than you were looking at it through before. That fabled view from the mountaintop, that was always so important to ancient philosophers. In other words, a step back, to look at the way you were looking at the problem, and from that new vantage point, you can see where in your limited thinking you actually created the rock and the hard place.

They became solidified in your imagination, too real to allow you to pass between then, as if the Scylla and Charybdis were too close together to allow you to pass safely between them. The transcendent function shows you a solution form the new perspective, a trick to get them separated briefly so you can sail on through. Maybe toss a useless red-shirt sailor overboard so long-necked Scylla goes for the bait, and while it's noisily devouring the poor sod, you can sneak on by. Though hopefully it's a better solution than that. Maybe a dummy-sailor made of pig's entrails and meat, good enough to pass muster? Made to thrash about by some clever inner mechanism cobbled together from slats of wood and springs? Lol wow, I'm really putting a lot of thought into this! It's fun, as well as bringing back my remembered understanding of the Transcendent Function. But yes, transcendence is always a function of the unconscious, a response to a problem that feels intractable. At least that's what it is in the limited format Jung was referring to, in the psyche. Well, it's always of the psyche of course, but I mean, there are other ways to achieve transcendence.

I need to think about those clues she gave, and how they could work in a story. In fact, I need to meditate on it for a while and really dig into what transcendence in a story means. Write about it creatively in my journal for a while, probably many sessions. I'll spare you all the indignity of those all being here on my blog, I'll just drop any good stuff that comes of it in here at some point. Unless it feels too good to share, as some ideas do. Like giving too much of an advantage to the possible competition. When an idea does that, you know it's a powerful one. Though I doubt most writers give a damn about all this transencdence in fiction stuff.

I don't think the Transcendent Function applies to the kind of transcendence in fiction we're talking about here. It would apply to a character achieving a moment of transcendence, rising above the problem he or she was trapped in. But that's a character achieving trascendence, which I specificallty said up above is not what I'm looking for. I want what feels like a transcendent moment for the reader. And I believe that would come more from the kinds of things she mentioned.

However, the important thing to keep in mind from the discussion about the Transcendent Function is that it emerges spontaneously from the unconscious. In other words, quite likely whatever you come up with to create a moment of trancendence, it will probably happen without your consciously directing it. Though certainly you can spend a lot of time thinking about what kinds of things can bring those glittering moments about, and experimenting with them in freewrites etc. And trying to allow it to happen inpaces in a story. But you must keep that axiom in mind—hold on but loosely. You can't force anything, it doesn't work that way. You can only suggest and coax, and hope something inside responds at the right moment in the appropriate way. I'm reminded of Schmendrake the magician (actually a magician's apprentice with delusions of grandeur) in The Last Unicorn, who kept trying to achienve what he wanted through spells and always got results, but the wrong ones, until he finally hit on the idea of saying "Magic, do as you will." Magic here standing in for the unconscious. Or is that the other way around? Actually they're the same thing, or the one is the home and source of the other.

Here's the clip:

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I love the way, after demanding that he do something, Molly Bloom (or whatever her name is) immediately blames him—"What have you done?!" when he actually said "Magic, do as you will." But somehow it's his fault. Gotta love that fickle logic.