Writing, Meditation and a damp dog.

Touch and Go

One of the many things I like about Substack is the informality of it, the way it encourages you to treat it like a diary - a place to scribble out an idea as it occurs. It’s a place where I feel comfortable to think something out on paper. Sure, I will read back over everything and make sure it’s reasonably coherent, but I don’t feel the need to proofread the thing to death at the end, or line up a coherent train of thoughts before I begin.

Ah, the old man is rambling again, get to the point Martin. Well, I was walking my dog this morning on the beach and feeling the sand between my toes, and I gave myself up to the simple joy of remembering that sensation from so many beaches over seventy plus years. Yet here I was, on my beach, watching my dog, watching today’s waves lapping beside me, while simultaneously indulging in the powerful memories that this was evoking.

This led me to thinking about the similarities between writing and guided imagery used for meditation. So here I am, back from that walk, a freshly brewed mug of coffee on the desk beside me, the impossible-to-describe-acurately smell of a damp terrier on the rug beside me, the soft hum of my old laptop with its struggling heat fan at my fingertips, and you, my company of colleagues patiently willing me to become semi coherent.

I’m circling this idea as I write, and it's coming into focus now. I’m sure I’ve always known it, we all have, but today on the beach it hit me with a simple clarity - when we write a novel we are transporting a reader. Sure that’s obvious, but bare with me.

A novel is about transporting and keeping the reader in that other world. The words on the page are a powerful spell conjuring up another world so completely that the reader disengages from the real world. Other forms of writing challenge the reader to pause, step out of the book to examine a proposition and engage in a dialogue around an idea, but a novelist wants to keep you locked in their imaginary world, they want to enchant you so that your critical facilities turn off, they invite you to switch on your voluntary suspension of disbelief.

To do this, we focus mostly on harnessing one sense: sight. We describe just enough detail to trigger memories in our reader, be it of a carpet of bluebells, or a black and thundering ocean. Conversely, too much detail can conflict with the self-generated images the reader starts to build themselves.

We elicit the support of the second sense, hearing, through description too. We also do it, perhaps more powerfully, through our dialogue. By getting our character’s voices just right, believably right, our readers can hear each one talking and they will paint their portraits by fusing together ghost faces from real life, from the screen and from other novels.

Smell too, we describe, but not nearly as much. I used it earlier in my depiction of my office, knowing that just mentioning freshly brewed coffee and a damp musky dog would be more powerful than a visual description. Evoking a memory through describing a smell is so powerful that it needs to be used it sparingly, each smell a perfectly timed punch to evoke a very specific setting.

I’m leaving out taste here, that’s powerful too of course, and it links to smell. But the one that is the least used is touch. When it IS used, it is most often in a sensual setting. Fingertips on skin. Stroking a cat. Slipping between satin sheets. And today, sand between my toes. So why is it so powerful, and yet so under used in novels - compared to sight?

I think its power comes directly from that under use and where smell sits in the pecking order of our senses. For the sight impaired this whole conversation is redundant, you are already ahead of me in this discussion. Now here’s where I want to jump across to meditation and guided imagery.

In the mid seventies I worked in the medical electronics department at St Barts hospital in London. Our unit was at the forefront of developing biofeedback tools to help patients to use meditation techniques for stress management. It seems absurd to think of it now, but we were pioneers in the mid seventies as stress was not fully excepted as a negative factor in health outcomes. I was the first therapist to teach meditation and use biofeedback in any hospital anywhere in England. Back then it was considered shonky alternative medicine and the professor in charge of my department, my boss, Dr. Ann Wooley-Hart, was a very brave pioneer indeed.

Anyway, back then the most powerful guided imagery that I used involved invoking memories of touch. My patients were all lying down in my dark carpeted meditation room. I had them all wired to galvanic skin resistance meters on their palms, (sweat response) an EMG electrode taped to one jaw (reading muscle tension) and a simple set of EEG electrodes in a hair net reading brain wave activity. These allowed me to record three different sets of physiological parameters as they became more and moe relaxed. My patients also wrote subjective assessments after each session. The following is the one where the data from my instruments and their own assessments always reported the deepest level of transportation to the imaginary world of the guided meditation.

After some basic guidance on breath and relaxing their different muscle groups, I would ask them to imagine walking towards the front gate of the first home they could remember, one they had not returned to as an adult - perhaps their family home or a relative’s home. I would ask them to keep their eyes on the ground as they walked to the front gate. Then to take off their shoes and socks, and to keep looking at their feet on the ground outside the front gate. Then to feel the texture under their feet, was it gravel, paving stones? Concrete? Had it been raining? Then without looking up at the house, I would ask them to open the gate and walk up the path as they had done as a child.

Often I would find they had happy tears at the end. Most of them were transported back, most had no memory of walking barefoot to that house until I asked them to remember it in the session. Yet the memories were there, discreet packages of early experience that had never been overlaid. They remembered how huge the house looked to them; how long the pathway seemed; the height of the hedges. In some cases they saw their parents gardening or mowing the lawns. All from remembering the specific touch of that gravel or paving stone outside on the footpath, and the texture of wood or steel of that particular front gate and latch as they opened it and stepped up their path.

That is how power words can be. Not in themseleves. They can transport someone to another world because of the memories they unlock. A reader compiles a writer’s story universe themselves from a million fragments of memory. Their memories. They construct a close facsimile of the world you writer is describing. Writer and reader are engaged in a very intimate co-creation relationship. The result is one version of many thousands of interpretations, a multiverse of worlds that closely resemble each other, but are all uniquely different.

Now I must open my door and let the very real smell of my dog out.