Yangchenma Arts & Music

“After you have settled yourself in a place as favorable as possible to the concentration of your mind upon itself, have writing materials brought to you. Put yourself in as passive, or receptive, a state of mind as you can. Forget about your genius, your talents, and the talents of everyone else. Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that lead to everything. Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to reread what you have written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard.”

- André Breton, from “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 1924

Sharing our lives through writing is a very special thing. It’s an act that touches our deepest inner part and allows us to feel every little detail of our inner movements. Our memories merge with our feelings and allow us to pin down the flow of words erupting and overflowing from our heart and mind, sometimes subdued, sometimes imperious. 

We are the memory that floats atop an unknown sea, from a system jagged of sensations, feelings and drive that sometimes we try to condense into actions but that always remains, in the words of the great psychoanalyst James Hillman, “wrapped in the cradle of the language that surprises us and belongs to the realms of life and beyond”. 

To listen to that subtle voice that can constantly describe us it’s an incredibly effective way to get to know ourselves, to enter our most intimate universe and make it become a mark, ink on the paper of our skin, an incessant mirror of growth and evolution. 

This course, divided in eight classes, it’s a journey into our deeper self designed to learn, through this particular writing technique, parts of our spirituality and our ability to feel and touch deeper parts of ourselves. We will explore the works of four great authors, learning four different modes and approaches to writing and describing, without any censorship, the mysterious being that we are or that we think we are. 

The course will include selected readings, tailored exercises and short meditations; we will analyze and connect with the work of four important authors. 

Automatic Writing: an exercise in transparency 

In this first part we will learn about the origins and philosophy behind this writing technique, born within the spiritualist environment and later adopted and readapted by both the surrealist movement in the 1900s and the psychoanalysis academic system all around the world. 

We will have an overview on the multiple purposes of the automatic writing technique with the intention of acquiring a comprehensive understanding of the “descriptive modality” that will be used during the whole course. 

We will learn about the importance of the surrealist movement and automatic writing through the lens of author André Breton’s work. 

Virginia Wolf: The Poetry of Psychoanalysis 

In this second segment we will learn about the remarkable life of great author Virginia Wolf, her intimate voice and storytelling, filled with meanings and parallelisms to psychoanalysis, an important message that she was able to project onto a worldwide audience through her own publishing house at the time. Virginia Wolf establishes a new alternative stance on writing when compared to the literature world that was present at that moment, her unique, groundbreaking approach ignites the start of a poetic revolution that will be carried on by an array of authors from that point on, two of them are the subjects of the next sections of our course. 

Jack Kerouac: The Inner Journey 

Following the thread of the dynamic of inner-self revelation though automatic writing, we will discuss the world of Jack Kerouac, an author that though his creative approach to writing gave birth to the Beat Generation, a cultural revolution. Kerouac pioneered a specific writing style, a way to describe our inner feelings and internal movements through a very immediate type of automatic writing, almost without catching a breath, a system in which we find great space to express our poetry and visions. 

James Joyce: A Revolution of the Senses 

Through James Joyce, the great Irish author, we arrive at the pinnacle of our journey into the realms of the automatic writing technique. Also thanks to Joyce, along with other great writers, a world audience in that historical moment, is witnessing the birth of the so-called Stream of Consciousness -another important cultural revolution. Not too dissimilar from what the great composer Schoenberg achieved in the music world, the Stream of Consciousness as a writing technique tends to eliminate any form of grammar and syntax rules, fully entering the realms of dreams and subconscious: the language of choice through which it’s possible to get a closer look to the concept of “reality” and its definition. 

Each one of the sections described here above will be deployed in two separate classes/sessions: each second class will allow some time for the teacher to review the participants’ homework assigned during the first class. It will be possible to ask questions directly to the teacher and have dedicated answers.