Another Shore: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Writing
Alma TettoUnpublished, Spring 2022
This paper is intended to analyze my creative text-in-progress, Another Shore, a mythopoetic memoir that explores the creative nature of grief, desire, memory, and meaning. The project offers a transdisciplinary approach to creative inquiry to explore boundaries between the known and unknown. In doing so, the project develops ways in which depth psychology can be understood in exploring and enhancing creative practice. It illustrates how depth psychology is important to art and creative practice and how, in turn, art and creative practice contribute to depth psychology. My project draws upon resources from both depth psychology and transdisciplinarity to offer a more holistic version of knowing and being through art and literature.
Transdisciplinarity is a relatively new way of approaching and engaging in inquiry. The term was first introduced by French psychologist Jean Piaget in 1970 (Piaget, 1972, p.144). The theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu took up the subject in his Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (1996), a primary text that sought to establish the values, principles, and methodology of transdisciplinary study. Transdisciplinarity differs from multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches where the former engages a perspective of two or more disciplines to enrich study, and the latter is oriented toward one discipline informing another via its unique methods and ontology. Transdisciplinarity, rather, is driven not by discipline but by inquiry, seeking to push the boundaries of preexisting assumptions within disciplines and knowledge.
“Transdisciplinarity concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all disciplines,” Nicolescu discerns in Manifesto. The space of between and beyond, under classical thought, has been understood to be empty—an abyss of nothing; theoretical physics has shown that what appears to be empty contains an abundance of possibility, hidden within the many layers of reality (Nicolescu, 2008, p.3). It is with this orientation toward generative potential that transdisciplinarity roots itself in inquiry beyond one level of reality to discover and integrate what lies beyond.
Another Shore seeks to find this space between, across, and beyond disciplines where it can express its own liminal ontology. The work grew out of the sudden death of my husband in 2018, an experience that induced a descent into my psychological depths and, shortly thereafter, the embarking of an M.A. program in creativity and depth psychology. Inquiry surrounding the nature of death in relation to life and my entry into the psychic borderlands where pronounced patterns between individual life and cosmos had come into focus prompted my study while also informing the text. As a mythopoetic memoir that seeks to recover the self by connecting the synchronous threads of past and present, inner and outer, personal and transpersonal, the living and the dead, Another Shore dwells in the between spaces.
Liminality is at the heart of Another Shore where the title itself points to a shifting landscape between worlds, a place that is ever-transforming, always in flux. The shore evokes a constant merging of parts, a repeated collision of elements both native and other that form an infinitely evolving another. Like the creative nature of complex systems, the shore is that middle place that converges knowing with unknowing to expand a self in a process of perpetual unfolding. It is here, in liminality, in convergence with the revealing world, where the artist-author locates meaning as layered, relative and supple, and eternally in renewal.
“The liminal is basically unascribable, undescribable, neither here nor there,” assert authors Gadoin and Ramel (2013). Liminality is a position of in-betweenness, “the margin of the unexpressed,” to borrow from Virginia Woolf (1932). Borders and margins characterize liminal space as a sort of generative opening into the unknown. “Liminality” stems from the Latin limen referring to a threshold, such as an entrance to a house (Online Etymology Dictionary). It is both a limit and an opening at once, an edge that both induces uncertainty and teases possibility. The liminal is a place between worlds, both a beginning and an end.
Another Shore was born in this generative margin, in a betweenness of ending and beginning. In many ways, the loss of my partner after two years of marriage and the birth of our daughter induced a personal death. It was a psychological death, a devastating loss of old ways of seeing and being. Like the mythic Persephone, I was thrust out of the playfields of oblivion into the reality of life wholly entwined with and informed by death. This was the beginning of an underworld descent, an opening into the depths of my hidden, unknown caverns of being. It was the end of life as I had known it—entwined in partnership with an impenetrable vision for how life would unfold—and the beginning of an unknown journey into the self.
Persephone on the banks of Lago di Pergusa, frolicking among the narcissi. At navel, a center.
Venture inward from an edge and you meet the other side.
The memoir opens in the middle of this underworld journey, on a visit to the coast of Oaxaca, nearly three years after the loss. It is the first time I am returning to this shoreline since my honeymoon, and the memory of place plunges me into a third space between past and present where the threads of time reveal themselves as potent links urging exploration. I find myself on the shore of a dazzling coral bay after a game of aimlessly following eagles with my daughter, and it is there that a story begins to unravel. There’s a felt sense of participation with the living world and the distinct spirit of place in the making of the story:
The particular arrangement and architecture of the organisms, the leaves and flowers, the curves of the rocks and hills: all beg me to implore them.
And, a feeling of divine guidance, connecting motifs holding clues for making my way through the labyrinth of experience. The genius loci, or the spirit of place, prompts a meditation on its nature:
Perhaps it is rather a thing more constant, a guiding thread. Like Ariadne and the golden string with which she guided her lover out of complex sin.
The third space is a central theme for Jungian psychology and transdisciplinarity alike. It is between self and other, between the known and unknown, a middle point and an erroneous mediating zone between subject and object. Nicolescu uses the term the “Hidden Third,” to describe this zone of non-resistance that unifies the subject and object within an immersive field. It is a “middle logic” and at the same time an encompassing sphere that extends to infinity (Nicolescu, 2012, p. 21). In transdisciplinary inquiry, “the Hidden Third appears as the source of knowledge but, in turn, needs the Subject in order to know the world: the Subject, the Object and the Hidden Third are interrelated” (p. 24).
A transdisciplinary approach to creativity and creative practice such as literature is to take into account the unknowable other, such as nature and its unfolding, as a participatory actor-creator in the work. Intuition also plays an important role as rising from an unconscious source. It is to invite permeability to the other in the creative process so to allow the art to evolve as an autonomous thing, with its own knowing and being. In this way, literature can act as a Hidden Third that can inform and expand the knowing and being of artist and audience alike. The literary work becomes that mediating field in which both subject and object are immersed and transformed by new knowledge.
To provide better understanding of transdisciplinary creative practice and to demonstrate how Another Shore works as a creative art to enhance depth psychological knowing, I shall venture into the domain of arts-based research, specifically the provocative new field of Jungian arts-based research, as proposed by Jungian scholar Susan Rowland. In her rich transdisciplinary study Jungian Arts-Based Research and the Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico (2021) co-authored with poet and digital literary artist Joel Weishaus, Rowland demonstrates how the frameworks of depth psychology and transdisciplinarity can be brought together through arts-based research (referred to as ABR). Jungian ABR acts to bridge and expand the perspectives and inquiries of Jungian, depth, and transdisciplinary studies; it possesses the potential to “extend the kinds of knowing and being possible in making new knowledge” (Rowland & Weishaus). It does so through its unification of the subject and object in the research process which, in turn, challenges, expands, and reforms existing paradigms for knowing.
The dominant, modern scientific model, rooted in the vision of Galileo in the 17th century, is founded upon the subject/object split to produce quantitative, empirical research. This dualist model demands the separation of subject from their objective world and their object of study so to produce repeatable results to “prove” the existence of universal laws. These laws, once “proven” through standardized experiments, determine what is real within this fundamentally dualist and hegemonic paradigm. In its attempt to detach the subjectivity of the researcher, reducing entanglement with their object of study, the quantitative scientific model continues to bolster its current paradigm for knowledge and knowledge-making (Rowland, pp. 26-7).
On the surface, ABR appears to be more qualitative in its approach to inquiry, specifically in the way the researcher is immersed in their object of study. Qualitative inquiry is approached in a creative and embodied way, however, as Rowland shows, it is rooted in the knowing and “meaning-making of the researcher.” ABR ventures into more revolutionary territory, rejecting entirely the subject-object split by honoring the object as an autonomous entity, meaningful in its own right (p. 15). In the case of ABR, the object of inquiry is expressed through the art-as-research which itself possesses its own knowing and being. The artist-researcher and their object of inquiry are entangled in an immersive field of the evolving art as a living, dynamic force that works to transform both.
ABR is radical in its refusal to assume definite modes of knowing, establishing itself as “groundless theory.” In this way, it shares in the groundless theories of both Jung and transdisciplinarity which recognize knowledge as living, dynamic, and inherently incomplete (Rowland & Weishaus, p. 37). Postulating the deep connectivity between subject and object, transdisciplinarity’s methodology assumes and orients itself toward a radical openness to multiple realities (Nicolescu, p. 10). There is a conscious awareness of the limited nature of one’s knowing; the process of inquiry is intended to help make transparent one’s assumptions so to alter and expand their constructs for making knowledge. Transdisciplinary practice stresses the making of new knowledge by recognizing the inevitable limitations of our constructs (xi).
Similarly, Jung recognizes the limited nature of consciousness, seeing the psyche as a dynamic, creative, autonomous, and unknowable whole of which consciousness is only a part. Beyond our conscious knowing lies the wild, unwieldy, unknowable depths of the unconscious. For Jung, psyche extends beyond the individual person; the unconscious is embodied and embedded in nature (Rowland, 2012, p. 38). Recognizing the impenetrable depths of the unconscious, Jungian approaches to inquiry are transdisciplinary in the way they challenge frameworks for knowledge.
Jungian psychology de-centers cultural norms because the intrinsically creative unconscious is always at work and cannot be absorbed wholly into any one philosophy, creed or practice. Jungian ideas are critical for all kinds of research because no set of assumptions can limit the possibilities of this creative psyche. (Rowland & Weishaus, 2020, p. 7)
The existence of the unconscious destabilizes certainty and rational knowing (p. 39):
It is not a question of … asserting anything, but of constructing a model which opens up a promising and useful field of enquiry. A model does not assert that something is so, it simply illustrates a particular mode of observation. (Jung 1947, CW8: para. 381)
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ ideas on the immeasurable depths of soul precede Jung’s groundless theories of the psyche. (It’s worth noting that our term for “psyche” derives from the Greek psukhē meaning “breath, life, soul” (Oxford Languages)). Heraclitus set the stage for depth psychology with his claim, “You could not discover the limits of soul, should one traverse every road—such is the depth of its meaning” (as quoted in Robinson, 1986, p. 305). By asserting the indeterminable nature of psyche, paradigms for knowledge become apparent as steeped in unconscious assumptions and thus invite the ongoing work of inquiry and reformation.
A transdisciplinary approach is rooted in and devoted to inquiry rather than discipline. Another Shore begins with an open inquiry to the living mystery of events unfolding in time. There is a potent sense of connection between inner and outer worlds, as nature reveals itself to be participating in my quest for meaning. As I sat down to write the initial verses of the text as they streamed forth from the unconscious, I was struck by the presence of a silk cotton tree, infused with a spirit of beauty that seized me:
A hillside patio in San Agustinillo: I sit in the shade looking out from my vista. Striped yellow & green fronds climb the silk cotton tree with pods bursting at the seams, the sea in the distance. The same sea— is it ever the same sea? Is it possible for a sea to remain itself? Its waters are constantly reconfigured, rearranged, changed. Even the sea isn’t eternal.
As the text continues to unfold along with my experience in real-time, the tree reveals itself as an integral, reflective participant in the inquiry. I was especially struck by the tree’s pregnant seed pods, bursting at the seams. In time I realize that this is a potent image that reveals a fertile process of knowing. The seed pods are bursting with cotton that hold and disseminate the seeds for renewal, in a state of eternal proliferation. This preoccupation with the nature of life as infinitely in flux is present throughout the creative process. The theme of the eternal weaves itself again and again through the text, as I grapple with the internal tides of change and knowing, as mirrored in external natural scenes: seashells morphing on the shore, the gasses of the sun and matter of the moon. As D.H. Lawrence contended in his essay about Thomas Hardy, the “real stuff” of literature is “the primitive, primal earth, where the instinctive life heaves up… Here is the deep, black source from whence all these little contents of lives are drawn” (as quoted in Sanders, 2016, p. 182). The natural setting and occurrences observed within non-human nature spark questions about the nature of the self and its connections to processes of change and unfolding. In Another Shore, there is an exchange with setting that conjures a sense of non-rational guidance and knowing in both author and reader.
For Jung, the unconscious is always driving the art and artist, whether the artist is aware of it or not (van den Berk, T). Jung’s unconscious psyche, embodied and embedded in nature, reveals the way nature can be the voice of the unconscious, working to expand and reform our ways of knowing. In “Nature and Silence,” Christopher Manes describes the ancient animist worldview that once held that the world is alive, “filled with articulate subjects, able to communicate with humans” (2016, p. 18). Manes draws on the comprehensive research of religious studies scholar Mircea Eliade who held that to study the language of the non-human world, particularly of animals and of birds, “is equivalent to knowing the secrets of nature” (as quoted in Manes, 2016, p. 17). The animistic view of nature faded into the realm of the superstitious and the non-literate, as rational humanistic ways of being and seeing rose to prominence in the western world, and with this loss, fell much of our sensuous interactions with the natural non-human world. These exchanges with that which is not human are necessary to our humanness, the philosopher David Abrams argues in his book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (1997).
Direct sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us. (p.9)
The participation of nature in the text’s creative process furthers Jung’s theory of synchronicity, a continual animating process of the universe made conscious through meaningful occurrence that connects inner and outer experience (Rowland & Weishaus).
Given that archetypes provoke synchronicity, they must inhabit nature and human nature. Just as nonhuman nature speaks through synchronicities, so too nature finds material expression in art. In fact, synchronicities are potentially contributions to art by making meaning from moments of interchange. (p. xx)
For Jung, these occurrences are “acts of creation in time” (Jung 1952, CW8: para. 965). Synchronicity points to the unus mundus, a term Jung borrowed from alchemy to describe the mysterious entwinement of the individual to the cosmos as a whole. “Unus mundus utterly confounds subject and object in a reality that will remain sacred because never fully rationally available” (Rowland & Weishaus, p. 36). It is that middle thing, the Hidden Third, that reveals the co-creating participation of subject and object, artist and inquiry.
It is this sense of the unus mundus as the liminal third that prompts my inquiry in Another Shore. The story begins to unfold at the precise place where the eagles delivered my daughter and me to a set of glistening coves inlaid with bright coral. The coral coves brought to surface a profound revelation from four months earlier when I came across a copy of A Coral Sea, the artist Patti Smith’s poetic literary tribute to her late friend and one-time lover Robert Mapplethorpe. I had long felt my experience of loss would express itself in writing; in this encounter I had a deep sense of the literary form this work would take. It was a profound revelation that struck me at my core and brought me to tears. This embodied connection of the coral sea, ushered to me by the eagles in a moment of synchroncity, contained a sense of the sacred, a numinous something beyond and outside of me, guiding me towards that which wanted to be expressed. Experiencing the yet unknown life of the art, I received a sense for what Nicolescu calls the mysticism of art:
a movement towards the hidden face of Reality, a living experience, a perpetual travel towards the heart of the world, a unification of contradictories, the infinity and the unknown as aspiration, freedom from any philosophic or religious system… a dialogue in the heart of any human being. (2008, p. 17)
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