Helene Cixous offers the following portrait of the writing landscape: “Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.” (The Newly Born Woman, p. 72)

Whatever it might be remains to be discovered by each of us in our creative endeavors - writing and otherwise. The "infernal repetition" too must be loved, for it is deeply related to the raw encounter with otherness that demands both escape and creative encounter. In writing, we creatively grapple with the limitations and freedom of our existence. We discover and create at the selfsame moment. We enter interstices within the established, dualistic order and play in the realm of paradox.

Cixous has written many texts in which she lauds, loves and offers gorgeous writings by her favorite authors who dare remake the world. One of her favorites is Kafka. She cites one of Kafka's letters to a friend: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy...? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief." (Kafka, 1978, in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, p. 17).

There is writing (our own and others) that can unfreeze our hearts, inspire us to die to our old, too-small selves and catalyze us to new iterations of aliveness, to wake us up from the conventional nightmare that causes so many of us to want to escape "reality" rather than creatively find our way through.

Writing is a most potent source of soul redemption. It takes us out of the wormhole we have buried our selves into with conventional words, the dug-in familiarity that is our script, our barricade to fresh air, to light. There, in even deeper darkness, writing invites us into the unconscious - that flesh trembling and exciting uknown - and reignites our passion. 

The literal word, once seen through, excavated, dug under, and clawed down to its root, becomes form and energy of symbolic consciousness and potent transformational juice. Writing becomes less the "writing on the wall" and more the doorway through which we enter creative being and living. The archetypal polarity of the world reveals itself along a continuum from the literal to the symbolic. Conventional modernity tends to lean heavily, almost exclusively, on the literal. We must, through our creative speaking and writing, help rebalance the resonant energy of the word, and thus the world, in our flesh.

Recommendations for reading about writing – some of the best treatises on the open-ended, life-changing, transformative possibilities of writing I know:

    The Passion According to G. H., by Clarice Lispector
    The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram
    The Newly Born Woman, by Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement 
    Stigmata: Escaping Texts, by Helene Cixous
    Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, by Helene Cixous
    In the Vineyard of the Text, by Ivan Illich