When I read things that I wrote in the past, I clearly see the incongruity between what I thought and felt and what I wrote. Like, something might have been a big deal to me, but I barely mention it. The text is basically about that but I hardly write about it.
That reminds me of how, in his poem, Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798, Wordsworth doesn’t actually mention the abbey itself, and how deconstructionist criticism suggests that that’s because the abbey was a major influence on the poem.
It also reminds me of Jung’s idea of the ‘shadow’. The things that we repress, influence us more than anything we are conscious of. And Harold Bloom writes that ‘Every forgotten precursor becomes a giant of the imagination’.
But I’m not talking about repression and consciousness, I’m talking about thinking/ feeling and writing. So, it’s interesting. Maybe there is some correspondence between the transition from subconscious to conscious and that from our minds, to what we express in writing. And actually, I’m sure that Bloom would say that that is the case.
In fact it’s one of the central tenets of his theory. Bloom uses Freud’s concept of the way our minds use certain mechanisms to defend themselves from perceived threats, and one of these mechanisms is repression. Writers use tropes and figures to evade the literal in ways that correspond to these mechanisms because the literal represents death (to the poet qua poet) – the ultimate threat.
So there you go. When I express myself I am actually being quite creative.
caeusura 