Leavening - the work in rest
Bryoni Trezise, Performance
This is the part of the work of making where you leave it alone, put it in the drawer, the cupboard, the box and walk away. It’s the part where you are the opposite of working on it. Novellist Kate DiCamillo talks about writing a draft, putting it in the drawer for a month and then writing a new one from scratch just with the imprint of the first one lingering in her mind, but never to be read again.
When you make a dough with yeast you let it rest someplace warm to rise. Did you know that: yeast is a one-celled fungus that activates the fermentation that converts sugar and starch into the carbon dioxide bubbles and alcohol that are necessary for bread dough to rise?
I like this metaphor of fermentation for what’s going on when a work is at rest. The dough is in the warmth, damp cloth on top, growing itself without you there.
Some things I’ve leavened have been leavening for 20 years. Others for a few months. The thing about leavening is that I’m not aware I’m doing it, until I see what has arisen.
When your work is leavening, perhaps it is in some kind of warmth, with some kind of damp cloth on top, growing itself without you there.
Two projects I’ve worked on: one, I left one alone for a month over summer, and the other, I left alone for six months. I pull back the damp cloth, and:
what happens is that you open the file, and things become other things
what happens is that you see your writing as if it has been made by someone else
what happens is that parts that didn’t fit now find their place
what happens is that you have a split second in which to see the whole thing in its entire promise before it vanishes (again) from view
what happens is that you are momentarily situated outside of yourself – and have happened to forget the part of you that was with it and inside of it, back then.
(She disappeared with the work in that moment. She became someone else through doing that work in the moment.)
What happens is that the reason for it being a thing, being a work at all, appears again. It is suddenly – momentarily – crystal clear. At a chemical level, leavening is transformation. Things converge, take other shapes, become other things.
But what is that part of not-you that allows the not-yet-work to become itself while at rest?
That part of not-you is the writer. Is the work. Is the place and material and sediment of writing. But she’s very fickle and hard to pin down.
Given the time it takes to leave it and come back, this kind of newness or defamiliarising is only available to you for a small amount of time. When my work is in the stage of leavening, am I transforming or is it?