Audio
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[No audio]
White letters appear in a black box set against a clay-colored background, reading: "If to Move the Soul a Writer."
[String instruments and synthesizers play sawing, mysterious tones in minor key.]
The title screen is replaced by a 16-bit pixelated room, a clay-colored background with tufts of grass and a white point lattice on the ground. A white sprite, hands at their hips, stands at the top of the screen.
[The instruments crescendo into a plaintive, slightly off-key chorus.]
The player walks to the first point on the lattice, and the following message appears: Here is a writing that creates a space where multiple moments of experience (multisensory, visceral, aesthetic, intellectual, cyclical-temporal) intersect (Prakash, 2019). Through what looks like performative wandering, an alternative design emerges.
[Beneath the high-pitched string instruments, a low bass counterpoint forbiddingly emerges, as the treble line merges with and through it.]
The player moves right, to the next point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. The following message appears: 1. Communicative competence in traditional academic scholarship means "state, then elaborate," the Eurocentric model of writing, but my diasporic composition practice has always involved lateral thinking and subtle clues. After I became disabled, the latter began surfacing in my scholarship, as intermittently as chronic pain and fatigue in my bodymind.
[The layered music becomes increasingly tense.]
The player moves down, to the next point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: If I mythopoetically analogize my situation to that of Karna, who is thrice cursed: stoicism punished with brain fog; infliction of pain in providing aid answered with environmental affliction; a hunting accident met with the promise of death during distraction.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves right, to the next point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 2. In family lore, I stopped breathing when I was born and brought something back with me when I revived. According to my parents, its preternatural contours are intermittently perceptible. This is the closest thing to difference that was said about me at home, but home isn't where my ways of knowing were different.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves right, to the next point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: To similar effect, brain fog, environmental affliction, and distraction materialize in my clinical and academic encounters.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves right, to the next point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 3. Travis Chi Wing Lau (2022) describes being an "undisciplined cognator": a person whose arrhythmic states of cognition—disorderly thinking, stuttering, disoriented responses—renders their capability, professionalism, and "fit" for the needs of a job suspect.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves down, to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Move through these blank interstices and see how such curses are invisibly woven into every design I create. Traditional scholarship might be associated with discrete piles of rice flour, but where the field appears to contain nothing, the unsayable lurks, and with it, your silent, complicit approval.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: The parallels I can draw between these three curses and biomedicine and academia. Their inhospitable conditions. Their tendency to ignore and dismiss until emergency arrives and it is too late to act. How they use distraction, deception, and repression to compel and confound.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Soul and body are one in Advaita Vedanta, but the clinic and the academy atomize them: physical and psychiatric; cognition and meat. Bodies, composition, knowledge systems that conform to Eurocentrism. The blood from this cleaving desiccates the whole field.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 1. I'm an Eelam Tamil American writer with chronic pain and fatigue, and as is the case with so many BIPOC and disabled folks, academia's demands are slowly killing me in body, mind, and spirit.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 3. Suvendrini Perera's (2016) survival media: the spaces, practices, narratives, and artifacts produced by refugee bodyminds and the generation after them, the ones who never lived it but are silently charged with keeping the memory alive.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: A psychiatrist named Dr. Eleanor Smith, a referral to rule out mental illness before insurance will approve specialized physical exams, diagnoses my pain, fatigue, and non-psychotic hallucinations as anxiety; my credibility thus downgraded, I am cursed to months of clinical encounters focused on psychosomatic disorders.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: WRITER (n.): 1. An individual who wrote a specific text, 2. An individual who writes books and/or stories as an occupation, particularly in creative genres, 3. An individual whose Greats are known for mental illness and substance abuse, who trades in fabulism, who must be treated with agonistic skepticism in patient intakes and nonfiction.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Transforming scholarship from an embodied kolam to Eurocentric, thesis-driven, linear writing compounds my chronic pain and fatigue. Through my own actions, I'm cursed to more labor: removing rasa aesthetics from article drafts, reformatting my digital dissertation into the static PDF the university requires. Thus distracted from my body, I graduate, but miss that I've gotten sicker.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 2. I grew up in New York, an ocean away from ethnic conflict, but my parents brought it with them when they immigrated and, due to conflict, couldn’t return home. Names were rarely offered. Just dates, deaths, disappearances. Who did it was left ambiguous, even when my parents had answers. I inherited this relationship to mystery.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Biomedicine curses me. For openly displaying and transmitting my pained affects, the clinical space itself turns hostile. At the critical moment, I forget to temper my desperation and patient expertise with rationality and deference. Distracted by administrative labor around healthcare, I become less able to replicate Eurocentric standards, disqualifying myself from academia.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: And the ER nurse who prescribed unasked-for codeine that makes every clinician for a year perceive me as drug-seeking, and my M.F.A. thesis workshop professor who said I should just go home, and the surgeon who scorned my 2007 referral for chronic appendicitis because I wasn't doubled over in pain, and the pain specialist who says "Relax."
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Multimodal composition as intentional folk performance: a ritual response to the curses of Eurocentric biomedicine and academia.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 1. I'm watching myself fade a little more with each uphill battle about what my composition process and product should be to succeed: a transparently purposeful, linear process, a disembodied, monolingual, monomodal, autonomous text (Canagarajah, 2023; McRuer, 2004).
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 1. If there's a classical Indian analogue to European rhetoric, it's rasa aesthetics, always embodied and enminded. Wilke (2018) calls it "a concept of rhetoric which surpasses mere intellectual persuasiveness and conviction but includes body, mind, and intellect in a holistic manner." Banerjee (2004) describes it as an affective phenomenon of emergence, "an aesthetic gustatory pleasure and […] a cognition"—the indescribable flavor or essence imbued in a work by its creator. Rasa aesthetics produces non-corporeal affect through corporeal presence, inscribing emotion in craft, mediality, space, time, embodiment—be it anomalous or otherwise.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Composition as a Euro-American field curses me. Academic spaces turn inhospitable when I enter, my chronic pain and fatigue a vexing reminder of the field's intentional exclusions. Accepted to a doctoral program unprepared to support work and bodyminds like mine, expected to conform to disciplined cognition, I overtax myself to keep up, such that every critical moment finds me injured. Distracted by the interminable onslaught of academic work, all of it presented like an emergency, I become less able to doggedly pursue healthcare while appearing less sick due to productivity, disqualifying myself as a good patient.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Into the kind of world where so many of us die unheard.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Folk stories that have become mine: at night, under Kallady Bridge, the fish sing, and by dipping one end of an oar into the lagoon and pressing the other to your ear, you can hear it. A bullfrog's croak, a cosmic borborygmi. Unlike the cry of the ulama, the demon bird, that roosted in Amma's backyard and screamed for three nights, and each following morning the sun rose on the news of a death on her street. The deaths end when Paata shoots it. It's largely agreed that, during the war, the fish were silent.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 2. I present an oral-aural-visual version of this at the 2024 Conference on College Communication and Composition. That academic audience ranked their preferences, in order, 3, 2, 1. Ironically, I've been told only disciplined cognition is a good fit here. Writing like this—the only shit my pained, fatigued, immune-dysregulated bodymind can produce right now—isn't that.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Performance is essential in this kind of world.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Using this medium is limiting, means this pixelated kolam can't be made to look like a rice-flour kolam, just like the academic presentation fragments produced when the avatar encounters a white pixel don't read like Eurocentric disciplined scholarship.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Rasa, Advaita, kolam: These structuring concepts, as close to a traditional writing that I can come, disturb standard academic habits, bending toward the embodied and relational, the formless and unfinished.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 1. Tamil literacy assumes that texts exist in a communicative ecology and are always intertextual, and that readers want an interpretive puzzle to solve and take pleasure in the exercise of constructing, connecting, and creating meanings.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 3. Suresh Canagarajah (2023) says: "We cultivated a writing that deployed subtle clues to weave the textual threads together rather than offering the thesis on a platter."
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: And the dean who suggested if I wanted to keep my health insurance I could take one week off, the minimum recovery time, from academic work after my appendectomy, even though I still can't stand or breathe deeply without pain, and the white academic's reflections on Sri Lanka invite sympathy while mine earn silence, and the white man OB/GYN I saw post-appendectomy who said without even opening my chart that I was too young for uterine problems, and the man in my Ph.D. cohort who mocked my difficulty climbing a flight of stairs, and.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Diasporic tendencies that privilege the reader's right to enjoy interpretation, relying on intuition and instinct, trusting—unlike so many members of the healthcare and academic communities—that it is only by not looking for the important thing that the important thing is found.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Tradition holds that kolams are drawn on the veranda with rice flour, offering sustenance as a sign of welcome to the other beings we harmoniously coexist with, from ants to birds to spirits. Over the course of the day, creatures, weather, and footsteps wear away the design, which is made again the next morning.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 2. I always found pleasure in differentiating noise and signal, in interpreting their interplay and locating the text in a larger communicative ecology. I find similar pleasure in composing literature whose interplay of noise and signal and subtle relationships within a communicative ecology is functionally aligned to a public staging that exceeds information delivery, sensory-affective through interactivity if not orality.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Maybe this—that I find the important thing by drifting, not searching—doesn't show in my body or work, which is what clinicians and academics agree is the most desirable outcome.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: She says she just wanted to go home that day: Amma was in high school, her teacher was over an hour late, the whole class was restless, and she incited a revolt. School was a sealed campus, but she marched to the locked gate, followers in tow, hiked her saree up, and climbed over the wall. She says she's not a revolutionary. The way a saree is not good for climbing but in the right circumstances becomes a sleeping mat, menstrual rags, a tent, a sandbag, a death shroud.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Can I call this a visceral performance? An attempt, at least, at hybridizing languages and compelling embodied interaction across the class stratifications of academia? If not, can I call it restorative justice? An old family friend once witnessed a boy cheat at cards and torment a cat, and when he wasn't punished, lit a firecracker in his eye. With justice sensitivity, a possible component of both neurodivergence and generational trauma, inaction in the face of perceived injustice can exacerbate chronic pain. You do the math.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 1. The Eurocentric tradition is filled with binaries: mind/body; human/nonhuman; representation/object; normal/abnormal. School taught me anomaly is deviancy, in both bodymind and writing, so I lean hard into writerly techniques and disciplinary names that help disguise or legitimize my diasporic-disabled composition practice.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: And the promotion of instrumental clinical evaluation and academic composition, both designed to linearly organize and clearly represent based on the fixed approaches and scripts of medicine and scholarship? Everything but what is sought is excluded, and what is sought is not what is important.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 2. The Batticaloa Tamilness of my composition practice was so insidiously acquired I really bought my bullshit when I said I was entirely Americanized. Through the epics, parables, and stories Appa taught me when I was a kid, I learned and internalized Advaita philosophy, a flat ontology that understands existence as interconnected, mutually constitutive and cooperative, that values relational ethics and communal care (Canagarajah, 2022; Poonamallee, 2010). Through stories of local sorcery and relatives who channeled the supernatural, I learned there is magic in writing.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: The friends from my M.F.A. cohort who stop inviting me to socialize because "It's not like you'll come out, anyway," and out of frustration, the woman in my Ph.D. cohort who says "Just be happier," and the distant relatives who call this karma, and the physician who says my labs are nonspecific and clinically insignificant and, despite my symptoms, refuses further testing, and my ex-roommate who breaks our lease without telling me while I sleepwalk through increasing pain and fatigue and violence and displacement in the Vanni, just as the word "genocide" begins to be used, and,
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 3. Too often, "the successful text is the one that murders me to protect you" (Manivannan, 2022).
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 2. Illness must be disciplined on and off the page. I write this as a clinical object of study, treated like an anomaly in Euro-Western biomedical and academic traditions. I write this knowing that most of the academic institutions and organizations with which I'm affiliated could give a fuck about genocide or public health risk mitigations or my disclosures, except as clinical objects of study. I write this unable to intensely engage with anything.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 3. Cecilia Van Hollen (2003) characterizes her writing as a kolam: a design that intersects with and loops around various non-hierarchically arranged points, with no identifiable beginning or end. Rather than making a single, overarching, neatly packaged point, her writing "loops and swirls around several key points of reference, each of which is given equal valence. Each point in the kolam maintains its independence, suspended in space in the interstices of the looping lines which pull the individual points together into one web of interlocking boomerangs flying in different directions."
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: (Like the dots around which the kolam loops, the constraints for this design until this sentence were:)
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 1. In our ancient epistemological traditions, "literature was functionally aligned to memorizing, oral-aural performance, public staging, and sensory-affective effectiveness and persuasion beyond the semantic meaning aspect, rational argument, or mere delivery of information" (Wilke, 2018, p. 52).
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 3. Fictocriticism: A form of writing for which there is no blueprint, specific to the writer's politics of poiesis; as Anna Gibbs (2005) puts it, "a self-conscious mixing of registers and (already mixed) genres that mimics both a multidisciplinary approach—which may encounter areas of incommensurability in the overlaps between disciplines—and the 'methodological impurity' of cultural studies."
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Numbered fragments, where 1 indicated thesis statements, 2 offered context, and 3 made space for intertextual meaning-making, for you to reflect on the content you were most moved by, that most made you move, and,
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 1. Annette Wilke (2018) describes rasa as the "pre-reflexive, sensory-affective, non-notional experience triggered by sensory mediation." It's a theatrical aesthetics that enjoins readers to relish texts, to participate and respond to them corporeally; invites writers to write texts that preserve the auditory and gustatory dimensions of rhetoric; insists that the text itself wield its agency to channel and evoke emotion. This is what I mean when I ask if the text moves you.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: A sentence, whose every word tells a story of a person or event that cursed me in the clinic and academy, that uses the subtle clues of my diasporic tradition to suggest this to you—
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 3. Scott Felluss (2020) observes that rasas lose their liminality when placed into neat, gridded compartments, and actors trained to occupy each box like regimented subjects lose their emotional agility. In process and product, evocation is enhanced by refusing the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 2. Creating a kolam is an embodied, artistic, and mathematical performance, sometimes ceremonial, sometimes routine. According to Amma, we never did it, ambiguously meaning our family, Batticaloa, or all of Sri Lanka. But we sort of did, in America. We had a 1980s edition Spirograph when I was little. We all played with it. Amma showed me how to avoid slipping the gears and interrupting the pattern, but creating a continuous curve was more important than avoiding or correcting anomalies.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: A postmodern fiction reference, a title, and—
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 1. It's not that staging rasa is easier. When chronic illness limits my capacity to intensely engage, to juggle multiple registers in my working memory, I default to the associative leaps and participatory sense-making of my diasporic composition practice.
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a blank interstice in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: Whose result, if you didn't keep track, is this: that
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 3. Brahma Prakash (2019): Using games, with their intrinsic modes of interaction, to produce "the special mode of interaction, close to synesthesia (syn-together, aesthesis-sensation) in which activation of one sense leads to involuntary activation of another sense or senses, coming together through sensations" (p. 176).
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 3. A. H. Reaume (2021) says: "I do not see examples of how my brain works or my days move in 'good writing.' What bodies does that 'good writing' come from? What kinds of cognition? […] What if the refusal to fix a thing as just one thing is a Crip aesthetic? […] Why do we crave meaning that exists only in one valence? What kind of worldview is that aesthetics the logical outcome of? And more importantly, what kind of world does that logic help build?"
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 2. Senior scholars told me "traditional" work is easier for academic audiences to understand, but isn't it insulting to imply that this audience doesn't want to work for it, is too inflexible to vary its monolingual, monomodal reading orientation and hermeneutics? Not to mention the Eurocentric audacity of it. The use of rasa, magic, and intentional ambiguity is what makes my work traditional (Trawick, 1990).
[The music repeats.]
The player moves to a point in the lattice; in their wake, an intricate white pattern appears on the ground. A message appears: 1. Rasa is the linguistic production of emotion. The sphere of literary production never forgot this abundance. A design emerges. I can no longer tell if I've ended or just begun.
Title: If to Move the Soul a Writer
Author: Vyshali Manivannan
Platform: Made with Bitsy HD (Fred Bednarski) and Bitsy Audio (candle), hacks of Bitsy (Adam Ledoux)
Music: tyops - Mysterious Dramatic Music, Freesound, Attribution 4.0
Average Session: 30 minutes
Updated: April 5, 2024
Published: May 2, 2025
Languages: English
Inputs: Keyboard
Excerpts presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication 2024.