The Use and Value of The Meditation in an Advanced Composition Course: A Meditation on Meditations

Jan Z. Schmidt

After reading James Moffett’s article, “Writing Inner Speech and Meditation,” in which he stresses the value of meditating as a tool prompting students to discover “forms of thought.. . that constitute the real art and worth of writing,”1 I was prompted to re-examine and evaluate my experience using the meditation as the basis of a descrip­tive writing assignment in my advanced composition course. I examined more fully my goals for the meditation assignment, the particular teaching strategies that I had developed, and the specific ways in which the assignment had improved my students’ writing abilities.

I began using a meditation assignment as a means of teaching descriptive writing after reading Gordon Rohman’s “Pre-Writing: The Stage of Discovery in the Writing Process” and Donald C. Stewart’s The Authentic Voice. Both men view meditating as a process of thinking and of writing prompting the discovery of subject matter and ideas. According to Rohman, meditating, a pre-writing device, motivates students to interact with a subject, to view a subject in new ways, and finally to develop “insight[s]”2 about a subject. Stewart, drawing upon Rohnian’s explanation, regards meditating as an “instrument for personal discovery,”3 as a process in which “writing gets thought as often as thought begets writing.”4 Both Rohman and Stewart base their discussion of the process of meditating on the model of Jesuitical meditation.5 As Stewart explains, the process of meditating involves first a “composition of place” when students interact sensorially with and record reactions to a subject; next an “internal colloquy” when students ask themselves certain questions about their subjects (Ques­tions may concern the subject’s significance or its relationship to other aspects of a person’s life); finally a “resolution” when students try to answer the questions posed in “the colloquy.” Often times these answers are the discoveries fostered by the process of meditating.6 I began using the meditation as the basis of a descriptive writing assignment hoping that the process would prompt students to create more original main impressions for their descriptive writing and develop their work with more effective supporting descriptive de­tails.

In “Writing, Inner Speech, and Meditation,” Moffett more fully discusses the ways in which meditating generates original concepts and subject matter for writing. First he determines that writing and meditating are “naturally allied activities” (231) connected by the presence of “inner speech” (231) which he defines as
an uncertain level or stage of consciousness where material may not be so much verbalized as verbalizable, that is, at least potentially available to consciousness if some stimulus directs attention there, and poten­tially capable of being put into words because it is language-congenial thought.... (231-232)
This stage of consciousness he further theorizes actually is a “conflu­ence of streams issuing from sensory receptors, memory, and a variety of more or less emotional or logical kinds of reflection” (232). He then suggests that effective writing consists of “some revision of inner speech for a purpose and an audience” (233) and that meditating becomes one means of tapping inner speech and then directing it with a purpose in mind. He contrasts this process of tapping and shaping inner speech with writing assignments formulated by some English teachers—assignments in which learners do not develop concepts or subject matter but rely instead on “filling in ... instances to fit someone else’s generalization” (233). Such writing, Moffett argues, “retards learning because those writers have not worked up [their] generaliza­tion themselves” (233). Tapping inner speech through meditating results in a process that Moffett labels “authentic authoring” (231) and takes students beyond what he calls “copying and transcribing, paraphrasing and plagiarizing” (231).

Moffett constructs a model for meditating more developed than either Rohman’s or Stewart’s. First he suggests that students ought to “gaze” (236) at an object and maintain “rapt absorption in [an] outer object” (239). Next students should “close [their] eyes” visualize and imaginatively reconstruct the object (236). Then they should “witness” the stream of inner speech and next should “focus” (237) on one aspect of inner speech—a beginning for writing. Finally, Moffett maintains that the final aim of meditating ought to be to “suspend inner speech” (239) and experience a state of “rapture” (239) similar to the ecstasy of Eastern mystics. According to Moffett, meditating moves from “watching . . . to focusing . . . to suspending.. .“ (236) the stream of inner speech.

Moffett also explains how an instructor can integrate meditat­ing and writing. He suggests that the teachers first should have students develop the skills necessary to each phase of the meditating process, that its students should be taught, for example, how to observe more fully, or how to relax, or how to cultivate through yoga a non-cerebral, receptive meditative stance. After these skills have been developed, the instructor next should have students move back and forth from meditating to writing until a finished written product emerges:
I would recommend that teachers coach students on how to get them­selves into a meditative state of unusual absorption in a subject that interests them and then to visualize, imagine, feel and think everything they can about the subject. ... After students have brought to bear on a subject all their faculties and thus focused intensively for a time their inner speech, then they would write down some version of these thoughts and proceed from there to work up a composition, presuma­bly with mid-writing response from others and as much repetition of these inner and outer processes as is appropriate for student and sub­ject. (243)

After reading Moffett’s article, I recognized that I had devel­oped more extensive goals for the meditation assignment than those I began with, goals coinciding, in fact, with Moffett’s stages of medi­tating. First I wanted my students to “gaze:” to become more active perceivers of their worlds. I wanted them to recognize their complex sensory reactions to their environment and then verbalize these reactions. I reasoned, of course, that such recognition and verbaliza­tion would provide them with more detail for their descriptive writ­ings. Second I hoped that my students would visualize their subjects because such imaginative reconstructions of their subjects would stimulate a process of association involving sensory and emotional reacting as well as reflecting. For example, a vision of a red wheelbar­row (to borrow from William Carlos Williams) might lead a student to respond to the color, then recognize a positive reaction to the object, perhaps related to pleasant memories of summers spent on a farm. Third I also hoped that my students would be submerged in the stream of inner speech and experience the chaos that comes with the discovery of ideas and subject matter. Too often, I reasoned, students chose the first ideas for writing because they wanted to avoid the uncomfortable confusion that accompanies the working out of ideas. Fourth I wanted my students to learn how to “focus,” how to siphon part of the stream as the basis of writing, how to make choices about appropriate subject matter. Fifth I also hoped that students through meditating would begin to view the writing process as a voyage of discovery leading them (as Moffett suggests) to “unsuspected connec­tions that illuminate both [themselves] and the outside objects of [their] thoughts” (235). Sixth, I wanted, finally, my students to experience the emotional excitement derived from the discovery of ideas. For it is this excitement that spurs the professional writer, that propels both the writing and the revision process. In "The Writer Writing is not at Home,” Barrett J. Mandel maintains that “we [as teachers] owe it to our students to free them from inaccurate lessons in good writing so that they too can discover the joy of insight in their own writing.”7 This joy, different from Moffett’s state of mystic rapture, does produce its particular excitement and exhaltation.

After more fully defining my goals from the assignment, I then realized that I had developed systematic procedures for meditating. I ask students to do the following:
1. Focus on a subject.
2. Concentrate on that subject.
3. React sensorially to the subject (Use all five senses if possible).
4. Explore other reactions to the subject. Associations with present or past aspects of your life; memories of people and places; associations with an abstract state of mind (grief, depression, fear); associa­tions with goals, values or changes of thinking.
5. Connect with the subject. Try to imagine what it would be like to be the subject. (e.g., You are a pebble on a beach—what is to your right, your left, above you, beneath you? What do you hear, see, etc.?)
6. Focus on discoveries gained through the process of meditating.
Students follow these procedures first without writing anything down and then free write for fifteen minutes following the same instructions. For example, a student might concentrate on the wall of the classroom, free write, noting its color, texture, and materials. Then he/she might move on to other associations with the wall—other rooms from other schools, or other kinds of rooms. These associations might lead to reflections about the nature of school or the significance of a particular class or teacher. The student might then merge with the subject, become the wall, staring at students all day! Finally the student might focus on revelations gained through the process: the role school has played in his/her life, the effects of early schooling, or his/her present attitudes towards education. Notes from the free writing might include the following:
The room is cold looking. . . off white cement block walls.... The room reminds me of Mrs. Gren’s elementary school classroom. I hated that room. I was so bored. I wouldn’t talk to anyone. It had horrible green walls and all you could see from the windows were the tops of dark brown buildings certainly was a jail cell.
School is a place which I find cold and confining.
After the students complete their free writings, several students read them aloud. The class and I pinpoint discoveries that could be effective main impressions for descriptive writings and also note particularly evocative descriptive details. Next students exchange papers and analyze each other’s work in the same way. The students then outside of class shape their free writings into meditations. (The writings may be organized in essay form, or they may follow the pattern of thinking of the meditation itself). During a subsequent class period the students bring in their drafts and evaluate each other’s writings using an evaluation checklist for meditations that I have developed and provide. Before students evaluate each other’s drafts, however, I have them use the checklist and analyze meditations by professional writers. Several writers, including Sally Carrigher, Thomas Merton and Loren Eiseley, write quite effective meditations, but I frequently use excerpts from Thoreau’s journals or from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The characteristics of an effective meditation include the following:
1. Clear focus on a single subject.
2. Clear organizational pattern moving from description to dis­covery.
3. Sensory details that give the reader a factual picture of the subject.
4. Sensory details that give the reader the writer’s emotional reaction to the subject.
5. Impressions of the subject gained by the connection of the self.
6. Comparisons that provide an enhanced view of the subject.
7. Discoveries about the subject and/or the self.

I also connect the procedure for meditating with the resulting charac­teristics of the writing: focusing and concentrating lead to factual description; sensory reacting to factual and emotional impressions of the subject; exploring other associations with the subject and connect­ing with the subject to comparisons and discoveries.

The class and I, for example, frequently analyze this excerpt from Thoreau’s journal:
As I was going up the hill, I was surprised to see rising above the June grass, near a walnut, a whitish object, like a stone with a white top, or a skunk erect, for it was black below. It was an enormous toadstool, or fungus, a sharply conical parasol in the form of a sugar loaf, slightly turned up at the edges, which were rent half an inch in every inch or two. The whole height was sixteen inches. The pileus or cap was six inches long by seven in width at the rim, though it appeared longer than wide. There was no veil, and the stem was about an inch in diameter and naked. The top of the cap was quite white within and without, hoariest at top of the cone like a mountaintop, but smooth but with [a] stringy kind of scales turned upward at the edge, which declined down­ward, i.e., down from the cap, into a coarse hoariness, as if the compact white fibres had been burst by the spreading of the gills and showed the black As you looked up within, the light was transmitted between the trembling gills. It looked much like an old felt hat [that] is pushed up into a cone and its rim all ragged and with some meal shaken on to it; in fact, it was almost big enough for a child’s head. It was so delicate and fragile that its whole cap trembled on the last touch, and, as I could not lay down without injuring it, I was obliged to carly it home all the way in my hand and erect, while I paddled my boat with one hand.
...
It suggests a vegetative force which may almost make man tremble for his dominion. It carries me back to the era of the formation of the coal measures—the age of the saurus and pleisosaurs and when bullfrogs were as big as bulls. Its stem had something massy about it like an oak, large in proportion to the weight it had to support . . . like the vast hol­low columns under some piazzas, whose caps have hardly weight enough to hold their tops together. It made you think of parasols of Chinese mandarins; or it might have been used by the great fossil bull­frog in his walks. What part does it play in the economy of the world?8
Thoreau first focuses on the object describing it factually: “It was an enormous toadstool, or fungus, a sharply conical parasol . . . slightly turned up at the edges;” its “whole height was sixteen inches"; “the pileus or cap.., six inches long by seven in width;” the “stem was about an inch in diameter and naked.” Next he reacts sensorially to the subject. First he responds visually to “the top of the cap . . . quite white within” and then tactiley to the “coarse hoariness, as if the compact white fibres had been burst by the spreading of the gills . . .." Next he connects with the subject, feeling the “light. . . transmitted between the trembling gills,” imagining how the fungus would feel if it were touched. (“The whole cap [would] trem[ble] at the least touch... .") He also compares the object to other things: the cap to “an old felt hat;” the stem to “the vast hollows under some piazzas” or to “the parasols of

Chinese mandarins.” Finally, the process of meditating leads to discoveries. The fungus, evoking a “vegetative force which may almost make man tremble for his dominion,” leads Thoreau to ask: ‘What part does it play in the economy of the world...”

I also frequently use this excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which Dillard concentrates more on merging with her subject:
Out of the dimming sky a speck appeared, then another, and another. It was the starlings going to roost. They gathered deep in the distance, flock sifting into flock and strayed toward me, transparent, and whirling, like smoke. They seemed to unravel as they flew, lengthening in curves, like a loosened skein. I didn’t move; they flew directly over my head for half an hour. The flight extended like a fluttering banner, an unfurled oriflamme, in either direction as far as I could see. Each in­dividual bird bobbed and knitted up and down in the flight at apparent random, for no known reason except that’s how starlings fly, yet all re­mained perfectly spaced. The flocks each tapered at either end from a rounded middle, like an eye. Over my head I heard a sound of beaten air, like a million shook rugs, a muffled whuff. Into the woods they sifted without shifting a twig, right through the crown of trees, intricate and rushing, like wind.
After half an hour, the last of the stragglers had vanished into the trees. I stood with difficulty bashed by the unexpectedness of this beauty, and my spread lungs roared. My eyes pricked from the effort of trying to trace a feather dot’s passage through a weft of limbs. Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, birds winging through the gaps between my cells. . . . 9
First Dillard focuses and observes a “speck,” then the starlings, “flock sifting into flock.” Next she reacts visually, tactilely, and auditorally, responding to the vision of the starlings, “flock sifting into flock... transparent and whirling like smoke.” She then compares this vision to “a fluttering banner,” and “unfurled oriflamme” and conceives of the shape of the flock as an “eye.” Finally, due to her merging with the starlings she is moved to state: “I stood with difficulty, bashed by the unexpectedness of this beauty and my spread lungs roared.” She also is moved to ask: “Could tiny birds be sifting through me... winging through the gaps between my cells?” Dillard’s meditation leads her to recognize a new beauty and spirituality of natural phenomena and later her tie with nature.

I used the meditation assignment in my Advanced Composi­tion class because the students, English, Legal Assistance, and Politi­cal Science majors, all I had assumed would be more used to (in Moffett’s terms) “copying and transcribing, paraphrasing and plagia­rizing” (231) than to “authentic authoring” (231). This assumption proved to be valid. Writing a meditation awakened students to the possibilities engendered by listening to inner speech as the beginning point for writing. One student’s case serves as a prototypical example. A Legal Assistance major, this student during the first few days of classes, looked at me in disgust. When I later questioned her about her attitude, she suggested that she always had hated English and dreaded taking Advanced Composition (a course required for her major). In her diagnostic essay written on the following topic:
Imagine you are a member of a society which strips people of their in­dividuality. At fourteen each person must go before a tribunal and pledge that he/she will give up those qualities of individuality that make him/her distinct. You are to go before the tribunal and present yours and several aspects of your background, upbringing. interests or values, that you feel make you—you. Demonstrate to the tribunal that you do not want to lose aspects of your identity.
She quite competently described the setting and encounter with the members of the tribunal; however, the crux of the essay, those aspects of her identity that she would not relinquish, was missing. When I questioned her about why that aspect of her essay was undeveloped, she explained that she couldn’t figure out what to say about herself. She was uncomfortable with the prospect of relying on her judgment of her character. Furthermore she felt stymied by an assignment which demanded that she rely not on secondary sources but on subject matter she generated to present ideas. Meditating led her to rely on inner speech. She wrote quite a fine meditation comparing the span of a rose from stem to bloom to a person’s life span:
The rose is the symbol of the human life. The upward span from the smooth open green stem to the thorns and leaves, to the rich delicate red blossoms, symbolizes the span from birth through life, and to eternity.
When I asked her about the source of her conception for the medita­tion, she explained that she was looking at objects in her room, focused on a piece of stationery with a rose on it, realized that she loved roses, began exploring her reactions to a rose’s shape, color and texture, and then the metaphor “came to her” (to use her own words). The meditation assignment then prompted her to observe more carefully, to submerge herself in the stream of inner speech, to focus on one aspect of inner speech, and then to discover a concept for writing that broadened her view of an object in her world. Furthermore, she enjoyed writing, particularly the exhilirating moment when she dis­covered the central concept for her essay. Later assignments she handled in a similar manner. When she was asked to write a human interest column for a weekly newspaper, for example, she compared a visit with an aunt in a nursing home ten years before with a recent visit with another relative in a nursing facility and reflected about changes in health care for the elderly. When the assignment was a narrative, she wrote quite a moving piece about a visit with an uncle who was dying and her inability to cope with her fear of death. In each assignment after the meditation, she relied more on inner speech as the source of her ideas. Her experiences mirrored other students’ in the class.

More specifically I noticed several ways the assignment devel­oped students’ abilities to write fresh descriptions. Students wrote quite specifically and concretely. One student, for example, describ­ing frost, depicts it settling in “tiny spider webs of frozen water” that give a “salt and pepper effect [to] wood.” In this writing the wood gains a precise shape, texture and color. Another student, describing the war games children play when they are little, creates this battle scene:
Deep in the jungle, a boy with a gun crouched and watched. The rain careened off of his helmet with a machine gun-like staccato. Yet this shower did little to cool the hot, musky earth around him. The droplets would form small pools until the heat turned them into streams. Then the vapor would rise to his mouth and choke him with its sticky sweaty taste.
The sensory details create the boy’s jungle milieu: “the rain careened;” the earth was “hot [and] musky;” and droplets “form[ed] small pools.” Then the writer describes the milieu’s effect on the boy: “the vapor would rise to his mouth and choke him . . .." One gains a precise sense of the boy’s imagined physical environment and mental state. An­other student, describing a tree carved with initials in front of her childhood home, clearly suggests the kind of tree, the color and texture of its bark, and the exact shape of the engravings on the tree:
Looking a few yards to the left, I recognize a tall, sturdy silver-maple tree. It is scarred with the initials of children who have long since moved away. With five guarded steps, I am within reach of the tremendous olive and cinnamon brown monument. My fingers begin searching the rough texture of the bark. Here are my sister’s initials, bold and heavy. After passing over several other monograms, my probing fingers come to an abrupt halt. They are still here. Positioned just underneath the lowest branch, three initials, JLN protrude. ...
The reader travels back in time with the writer visualizing precisely a setting from the latter’s childhood.

Not only did students’ meditations excel in descriptive detail, but the unifying concepts also were quite original. For example, one student wrote a meditation comparing popcorn to the state of the human personality: the corn’s outer hull suggests the roles that people adopt while the hard core symbolizes the unchanging kernel of personality. Another student, writing about the door to his room, pictures it as a sentinel engaged in a “silent vigil,” witnessing, “listening and looking . . . unable to communicate any feelings that are within the human capacity to experience.” This sphinx-like state he con­cludes constitutes one of “life’s mysteries.” Another student nicely describes how fingers reveal a person’s character:
[They] are adaptive. [They] adjust to the personality that owns and operates [them]. [They] are grubby, short and scarred on an eight year old boy. Yet on a shy teenage girl, [they] become sweaty and nervous, and [their] nails are bitten to the quick. On a rich, sophisticated woman, [they] are long and thin, polished with slick red paint, adorned with elaborate diamonds and emeralds, and skillfully balancing a cigarette between [their] tips....
She closes her meditation theorizing that fingers, “like a whole human being... have personality and character.” Students (to use Rohman’s terms) through meditating discovered “insight[s]” that caused them to view objects in their worlds in new ways.

Finally meditating led students to discover more about their past experiences and their present values. One student, writing about a childhood home that she and her family have long since left, connects the house with the “lost days of her childhood”—days that she associates with “family closeness.” She concludes her meditation commenting, “The house I remember is made of family and love.” Later she revealed to me that she did not recognize until she wrote the meditation the extent to which she associated that house with ties to her family that have become more tenuous. Another student, focusing on the barn that she and her younger brother played in on her parents’ farm when she was a child, realized through writing that she and her mother shared the same kind of childhood. And she understood more completely her tie with her mother and a tradition that she hoped that she could perpetuate. She ends her meditation with the following statement: “I am going to tell my children about my experiences and hopefully they will have an even happier childhood than I did.” Meditating also helped students understand their present values. One student, for example, writing about the experience of baking bread compares the fact that she never knows how the bread will turn out with the “unpredicta[ble] quality of life” that she relishes. The student suggested later that writing the meditation made her recog­nize important aspects of her personality, her need for change and her abhorrence of personal stagnation. The meditation assignment then prompted students to discover more about their past worlds and their present identities.

This process of discovery motivated students to become more actively involved in writing and revising their meditations. When I asked them if they enjoyed the assignment, they commented that they didn’t think that they were going to when they started, but as soon as they began free writing, they were astonished by the range and depth of their feelings, thinking and reflecting. They also suggested that they were surprised by the comparisons and insights generated by the process of meditating. This process of discovery they also indicated spurred them to revise more carefully and completely.

A fitting way to close this article on the value of the meditation as a classroom writing exercise is to provide excerpts—discoveries—from my own “meditation about writing meditations.” I first realized the role as writer that I conceived for my students:
I want my students to be like Wallace Stevens’ “virile” poet and I want them to use their imaginations and produce visions of their worlds that “extend the limits of the actual.”10
Comparing my expectations for my students with Wallace Stevens’ behavior of the poet made me realize how much I wanted my students to be transported by the meditating on a voyage of discovery that would provide heighted and clarified visions of their worlds. And another insight provided me with my primary aim for the assignment:
I remember a quote on my office mate’s wall: "The limits of your lan­guage are the limits of your world.” I hope the meditation will create new limits for my students’ language that expand the limits of their worlds.
I realize after rereading this section of my meditation that each time I give the assignment I hope that my students will be adventurers, involved in a voyage of discovery into uncharted mental territory that will bring them home, aware of new ways of perceiving, feeling and thinking—of fresh new worlds that they can inhabit and then describe for themselves and for their readers.

SUNY College
New Paltz, New York

NOTES

1College English, 44 (1892), 231. All subsequent references are to this article.
2 "Pre-writing: The Stage of Discovery in the Writing Process,” College Composition and Communication, 16 (1965), 110.
3Donald C. Stewart, The Authentic Voice: A Pre-Writing Approach to Student Writing (Dubuque, Iowa: William C. Brown, 1972), p. 117.
4Stewart, p. 117.
5See Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), pp. 25-39, for a complete discussion of the pattern of Jesuitical meditation. Martz suggests that the meditation is comprised of three parts: “composition of place;” “analysis;” and “colloquy.” In the “composition of place,” the person meditating attempts to visualize concretely the subject of prayer whether it is heaven, hell, a state of sinning, or a scene from the life of Christ. Next the meditator analyzes the scene and explores the subject of prayer according to certain ”points” of analysis. Finally the meditation ends with a “colloquy” resulting in a deeper understanding of the subject and a stronger union with God. Martz suggests that the meditation moves “from a particular situation, through analysis of that situation... to some sort of resolution of the problems which the situation has presented” (p. 39).
6 See Stewart, pp. 105-118.
7College Composition and Communication, 31 (1980), 377.
8Heniy David Thoreau, Thoreau’s World: Miniatures from his Journal, ed. Charles R. Anderson (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971), pp. 96-97.
9Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), pp. 39-40.
10 See Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), especially pp. 63-64 for his definition of “the youth as virile poet” and his conception of the poetic process.