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The Sultan's Seal by Jenny White Excerpt from The Sultan's Seal by Jenny White, copyright 2006, reprinted by permission of the author and in accordance with the Fair Use Act. The dust jacket of the first edition of Jenny White's debut novel notes that the book is "rich in sensuous detail". This observation is so exact that I want to focus on it and its implications for a while here, to the exclusion of the other important aspects of the novel, all of which of course deserve equal attention. One of the reasons I want to do this is that White's prose, descriptions, and the situations she presents are excellent examples of the kind of writing that's ideal for readers to use in trying to practice the concept I would like to call DEEP IMMERSION. What's that? DEEP IMMERSION greatly resembles the technique known as visualization from psychology (particularly sports psychology and the sort of psychology used in self help and personal development). I can't possibly get into visualization in any kind of detail here, as the literature is enormous and the books and articles on the subject probably number in the thousands. For our purposes, as they relate to literature, we can say that DEEP IMMERSION is practiced when we take a passage from a work of imaginative literature and try to recreate the sensual feelings it describes as vividly as possible in our imaginations. We do this in order to create the most elemental, fundamental, foundational sense of identification possible with the characters - we recreate, in our own bodies, what they feel. Obviously, in order for this to be sufficiently worthwhile, the writer has to excel at this kind of writing, and White does. Her writing is often sensually driven, body driven. This, when coupled with her intellectual interests and her knowledge of the faraway land she writes about, makes for a very sophisticated reading experience. Please consider the following passsage: Every morning, my dayi, Ismail Hodja, put a soft-boiled egg in his mouth and sat without chewing, eyes lowered, until the egg was gone. It was not until I was in my twenties that I understood. Anticipation is the brilliant goad to pleasure. The dynamics of this passage are myriad. In the first place, it describes a blow-away, drop dead type of sensual experience that the reader can actually practice for herself. We all have access to an egg; would that we all had access to the kind of patience required to perform this action. Yet we don't have to actually do what Ismail Hodja does because it is as an opportunity to practice deep immersion that the quote excels. It helps us to "live the literature". Conjuring up the smell, taste, texture, and look of an egg is something that might take a few moments. Most of us will be able to do this without much hardship. So, sitting quietly for, say, fifteen minutes in an environment where we won't be interrupted or disturbed, we can try to "live" this passage in our imaginations and in our bodies using all our powers of thought and perception to stimulate all five senses and bring the scene to life inside your own body. TBC |