Following my reading of and writing in response to Impassio Press’s anthology In Pieces, An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, I began a book American philosopher Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything. The rich effects of reading each continue to bounce together in my mind. Wilber’s book offers a stirring discussion of the view that our universe is an “emergent Kosmos,” which counts on creativity, the movement of chaos into form. The term Kosmos, introduced by the Pythagoreans, means “the patterned nature or process of all domains of existence, from matter to mind to God.”

In his discussion, Wilber introduces 20 tenets of the Kosmos, the first being that, “Even the ‘Whole’ of the Kosmos is simply a part of the next moment’s whole, indefinitely. At no point do we have the whole, there are only whole/parts forever.” He adopts writer Arthur Koestler’s term “holons” for these “whole/parts.” Each holon strives to maintain its “wholeness” and its “partness.” Each has in it the ability to maintain its autonomy and its ability to fit into a whole. Additionally, each has this agency and communion on a horizontal level and on a vertical level which moves it up toward self-transcendence and down toward self-dissolution. In sum, the four pulls on holons are: the pull to be whole, the pull to be part, the pull up, the pull down. Fancier words: agency, communion, transcendence, and dissolution. I re-experienced the way the fragments in In Pieces had me experiencing all of that. In this one selected from Eberle Umbach’s “Weiser River Valley Pillow Book” I resonated with the way I saw the holons building into a larger whole:

Spending the Whole Day Writing Music

When it’s easy, it seems that the sounds are already there, all I have to do is listen. All it is, is suspending fear, listening past panic and sense.

Rapture is simple, but not comfortable.

That night, sleeplessness: the sound of rain dripping onto the straw
bales unbearably loud, the moths crashing into the screen window.

I felt like I was reading an apt description of immersing oneself in creating any art with the first stanza and I felt complete. I read the second short stanza and I thought about its comment on the feelings involved in making art because of the first stanza, but I also saw making art as only one form of rapture. In the last of the three stanzas, I felt as one feels when we are listening hard, working too hard at the listening. I was moved and transported back to the opening stanza. Each stanza a holon, each building a whole.

 Ken Wilber describes the process of a poem like this when he writes, “The continuous process of self-transcendence produces discontinuous leaps, creative jumps,” and “the ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty…out of sheer Emptiness, manifestation arises.”

Writing can accrue meaning and depth from parts that each in themselves have a beginning, middle and end but also rely on being one among several parts for achieving depth and resonance–whether that be fragmentary writing, lyric essays (which take shape “mosaically” as the editors of Seneca Review write) or 3-6-9 short fiction, written in three subtitled parts, each having only 69 words, as Bruce Holland Rogers has popularized.

Experimenting with writing in parts without knowing ahead of time how they will knit into a whole, even as they remain unconnected, can help a writer develop trust in her ability to create design and make meaning.

I have devised 11 prompts for taking ordinary daily images and building lyric essays. Using these prompts, you will learn to trust in your abilities to reflect and to allow details to resonate with one another until seemingly unconnected images and anecdotes unite to evoke larger meaning from your experiences, knitting them together into whole cloth. You will experience the way in which, as many poets say, “the words are smarter than we are.”

1. Title a piece with your name or the name of your street, partner, or child. Take the letters and write a short meditation on each of the letters.
   Take the letters ABC and write a short meditation on any subject by starting each paragraph of three paragraphs with a word that starts with each letter: an A word for the first, a B word for the second and a C word for the third. Call this meditation the ABCs of whatever subject you are writing about. It will probably evoke ease about the subject.
2. Take the letters XYZ and write a short meditation on any subject, starting each paragraph of three paragraphs with a word that starts with each letter: an X word for paragraph one, a Y word for paragraph two, and a Z word for paragraph three. Call this meditation the XYZ of whatever topic you are writing about. It will probably evoke the difficulty of the topic you have chosen.
3. Put scrabble tiles or children’s letter magnets in a pile and pick one or just point randomly to a letters in something printed. What letter did you pick?  What day is it and what must you do today? How does the letter you picked go with the day you will live or have lived? Do this writing in three parts to match the three questions.
4. Take a product out of your cupboard. Write down its name. Now use those letters and write a meditation: i.e. Oatmeal: O A T M E A L. I’d write a seven-paragraph piece, beginning each one with a word that starts with the corresponding letter of the word oatmeal.
5. If you could have special parking space at work, on a street you visit often, and on one in your childhood town earmarked just for you, what would the words reserving each space for you say? Why?
6. Think of a problem in your life that you cannot resolve or about a situation that you are not able to change. With this problem in the back of your mind, describe the view outside your window. First, describe what is stationary in the view, then describe what is moving. Subtitle part one, “Stationary” and part two “Movement.” Title the whole piece after the problem you have in the back of your mind, “Now that My Children Must Adapt to Joint Custody” or “How Will I Find the Time to be a Caregiver?”
7. Imagine where you live is a place you have come to visit. Select someone living or dead to whom you might write postcards from this place. Write a series of postcards to this person similar to the kinds you would write if you were traveling as a tourist–include observations, vignettes, snippets of history, anecdotes about your “travels.”
8. Imagine that you change your outgoing message each day on your voicemail. Make up messages for each day of the week.
9. Think of things you haven’t shared with someone close to you. Write about them under a title like: “Never Mentioned” or “I Wished I’d Thought to Tell You”
   What is the large emotional or spiritual picture for you? Find it out by making close observations about your own writing. Find the five most repeated nouns you use. Write a short paragraph or stanza about each of these objects. You might call this piece in parts “Panorama.”

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Wilber believes that “creativity not chance builds a universe.” He prefers “Emptiness” as a term for Spirit because it means unbounded or unqualifiable.” The blank page, the blank document template on my computer screen, my mind when I have no idea of what I’ll write–the perfect starting places, along with the trust that one part, one holon at a time my writing will accrue in meaning, in depth, in making something knew from what has gone before, each moment “part of the next moment’s whole, indefinitely.”

When you write in parts, you are emulating the emergent universe, which you are a part of; you can relax a little knowing you work in a larger flow. You may have to revise and polish to brighten the holons you put on the page, but I think you will see the bright kernels of them even in your early drafts.