Stories Voice What Can't Be

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"I have said that feelings are the hardest of human responses to put into language. Stories express feelings we recognize, and permit us to identify them, to experience them in language."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 105

An Essential Relationship Between Play and Pleasure.

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"There are four distinct phases of the playing experience: brooding, attachment, immersion, and satisfaction.

Play begins in brooding, in the brooding moment.  It can be a moment of absolute horror.  The uninitiated experience the terror of a formless moment . . . The brooding moment is not only the child who tugs at your sleeve saying, “I don’t know what to do,” but also the writer staring at a blank sheet of paper . . .

The second movement is attachment.  Out of brooding comes attachment, a spark of intensity.  Attachment requires the ability to recognize what has intensity, to feel the resonance.  In the midst of brooding, although it remains unseen and unconscious, and important process unfolds.  Pattern and form circulate until the structural resonance finds alignment.  Then the writer finds the sentence . . .

And then comes immersion, the moment of being lost in play.  This is the transitional state, a different state of consciousness . . . Immersion is the sense of fantasy activity becoming “real.” Then the writer feels the story writing itself and hours are lost . . .

Finally, there is satisfaction—a sense of resolution and release.  There is an essential relationship between play and pleasure.  Enactment releases the tension.  The satisfaction in play, I think, is a result of the sense of completion, not necessarily of achievement."

- D. Stephenson Bond, Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life. Shambala, 1993 pg 113-114

Exercise Your Memory - Read

"Literature helps you to exercise your memory because your memory is keyed to feelings associated with memory and literature specializes in calling forth feelings."

- Gold, Joseph. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 259

Feelings are Prelinguistic

"Feelings, in other words, are prelinguistic; we feel before we 'think' in language. Language is thought. Feeling is more basic, more connected to the animal part of us. Language seems to be best for describing the world outside ourselves; it does not seem well suited to describing our feelings."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 102

Language Fails

"Language is more efficient than any other form of human communication except in one or two special cases, where a touch might be the most efficient signal."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 68

Sometimes language fails. It's at those times that a hug is the only thing you can say. Great quote.