Thought Ripples on Writing and Emotions

emotion icon (Photo credit: Łukasz Strachanowski)

I was blog-crawling yesterday and found several centered on the act of writing/journaling and the writer’s emotions. On Amber Lea Starfire’s “Writing Through Life” I found a post from last year of an interview with French writer Cendrine Marrouat.

Ms. Marrouat talked about poetry and the outpouring of one’s emotions while in the act of writing verse. “I see poetry more like a language of the soul and of the mind. It’s really a journey of the mind and the heart. When you write poetry, you share your essence, your self.”

It was easy for me to relate to this attitude and belief. As for most people, an undercurrent of emotion pulses through my mind most of the time. And like those same people, it takes little stimuli to bring an emotion to the surface to color whatever I might be writing.

Any time sufficient emotion is lacking or Muse has decided to remain mute, I plant headphones over my ears, and move to YouTube for a musical entrée or two.

I don’t court sadness. Yet, all it takes is something small to trigger sorrow; a particularly moving song by a favorite singer, a piece of chamber music I admire, or music for reflection.

By the time I get pen on paper to write a bit of poetry, whether to a prompt or simply because I need a piece of verse for submission, the music has done its job and provoked enough emotion for me to wring out a minimum of two-three decent poems. They might not be Robert Frost quality or that of Maya Angelou, but they are decent and have meaning for me. More than that, they have released something, either angst or withheld tension that needed release.

Oddly enough, I don’t write prose when I’m sad, as a rule. Of course, there is one exception to that: memoir pieces.

Writing memoir takes me to places that have sad elements. Doesn’t it do that for most people? When the average person thinks back to their pasts, don’t they remember those episodes of joyous abandon or sorrow before other recollections?

When I think of dementia patients or those suffering traumatic brain injuries, I also think of the severe stroke victims I worked with when I was in my twenties. Memories, those bits of ourselves which reside in tiny mental compartments meant only for our own perusal, encapsulate who we are as people, as spirits. When injury or disease disrupts that flow of personal identity, what is the patient really responding to in the present?

Is she/he locked forever in a spinning time capsule, one with infrequent and blurred stops along the way? When they talk to you, see you, are they inside a memory and actually talking to someone else? Unless a recovered patient can describe the experience, how can we know?

If those patients were encouraged to write or paint, what would they tell of us the emotions that whiz and buzz and slip-slide away in their everyday lives?

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 To read the complete interview with Cendrine Marrouat, please go to “Writing Through Life” at: http://www.writingthroughlife.com/interview-cendrine-marrouat

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