Writing as departure : a landscape

Jakobsen, Mette

Writing as departure : a landscape

Jakobsen, Mette

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Publication Type:: Thesis
Issue Date:: 2005

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Jakobsen, Mette
dc.date.accessioned	2017-01-23T05:39:36Z
dc.date.available	2017-01-23T05:39:36Z
dc.date.issued	2005
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/75673
dc.description	University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.	en_AU
dc.description	NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. Access is restricted indefinitely. The hardcopy may be available for consultation at the UTS Library.
dc.description.abstract	NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. Access is restricted indefinitely. ----- When writing the novella Desire and the Invention of the Telescope, I was aware that for me, there was something missing. I didn't know what it was. I liked the story. I liked the characters. I had fun. And I knew I wanted to explore the relationship between reason and emotion, a theme carried through in the writing that followed; in Darwin 's Wings and in Dance of the Hungry Ghosts, both plays. The only time I became both moved and excited in the process of writing was when strange poetic fragments arrived, unexpectedly and often out of context. A few words here, a line there, sticking out, not fitting in. One day I sat down on my living room floor with a pair of scissors, and cut from the text every fragment I liked, all poetic, without meaning. I didn't ask myself why I liked them, or what I could possibly do with them. And by evening my floor was covered with tiny pieces of paper, some grey and almost unreadable from the time where my computer was out of ink, others luminous, black and white, a mosaic of words. The pieces covered my living room floor for three days. I sat with them. I stepped on them by mistake. The breeze from the window blew them into different patterns. They looked funny, weird, mixed together like a puzzle straight from the box, and when reading them they conjured up strange associations, promising a whole new world, while at the same time being puffs of smoke, intangible, glimmering, there, not there, there, not there. The only way I could sense their potential was if I made familiar reference points loose. When that happened I got excited, ecstatic, feeling a strong sense of purpose. But if the voice of reason entered the living room, booming, with formulas, squares, propositions and firm ideas of how things should be done, or if I for a moment imagined someone looking over my shoulder, reading with me, the words turned into nothing but nonsense. I left Desire and the Invention of the Telescope behind before it was finished. Only a few of the poetic fragments were used in later writings. I started out again with a better sense of what I needed as a writer and began to experiment using poetic imagery in play dialogues. The pieces, then, that I have decided to include in this folio are: Two plays, Darwin 's Wings and Dance of the Hungry Ghosts, which both explore, in different ways, the relationship between reason and emotion. An excerpt from the unfinished novella, Desire and the Invention of the Telescope. A DVD featuring a series of rehearsal and performance shots of Dance of the Hungry Ghosts. This dissertation, Writing as Departure, a Landscape, is an attempt to create a landscape of the process of writing these pieces. It is a meditation - slow, deep, quick and a bit absurd - on inspiration, poetic imagery and storyline.	en_AU
dc.format	Thesis (MCA)
dc.language.iso	en_AU	en_AU
dc.rights	The author owns the copyright in this thesis including all reproduction and reuse rights for the work. The work may not be altered without the permission of the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from this thesis.
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
dc.title	Writing as departure : a landscape	en_AU
dc.type	Thesis	en_AU
utslib.copyright.status	closed_access

Abstract:

NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. Access is restricted indefinitely. ----- When writing the novella Desire and the Invention of the Telescope, I was aware that for me, there was something missing. I didn't know what it was. I liked the story. I liked the characters. I had fun. And I knew I wanted to explore the relationship between reason and emotion, a theme carried through in the writing that followed; in Darwin 's Wings and in Dance of the Hungry Ghosts, both plays. The only time I became both moved and excited in the process of writing was when strange poetic fragments arrived, unexpectedly and often out of context. A few words here, a line there, sticking out, not fitting in. One day I sat down on my living room floor with a pair of scissors, and cut from the text every fragment I liked, all poetic, without meaning. I didn't ask myself why I liked them, or what I could possibly do with them. And by evening my floor was covered with tiny pieces of paper, some grey and almost unreadable from the time where my computer was out of ink, others luminous, black and white, a mosaic of words. The pieces covered my living room floor for three days. I sat with them. I stepped on them by mistake. The breeze from the window blew them into different patterns. They looked funny, weird, mixed together like a puzzle straight from the box, and when reading them they conjured up strange associations, promising a whole new world, while at the same time being puffs of smoke, intangible, glimmering, there, not there, there, not there. The only way I could sense their potential was if I made familiar reference points loose. When that happened I got excited, ecstatic, feeling a strong sense of purpose. But if the voice of reason entered the living room, booming, with formulas, squares, propositions and firm ideas of how things should be done, or if I for a moment imagined someone looking over my shoulder, reading with me, the words turned into nothing but nonsense. I left Desire and the Invention of the Telescope behind before it was finished. Only a few of the poetic fragments were used in later writings. I started out again with a better sense of what I needed as a writer and began to experiment using poetic imagery in play dialogues. The pieces, then, that I have decided to include in this folio are: Two plays, Darwin 's Wings and Dance of the Hungry Ghosts, which both explore, in different ways, the relationship between reason and emotion. An excerpt from the unfinished novella, Desire and the Invention of the Telescope. A DVD featuring a series of rehearsal and performance shots of Dance of the Hungry Ghosts. This dissertation, Writing as Departure, a Landscape, is an attempt to create a landscape of the process of writing these pieces. It is a meditation - slow, deep, quick and a bit absurd - on inspiration, poetic imagery and storyline.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10453/75673