Writing through … from … to … underneath … over … in between … negotiating the force field of the unworded in the braided thesis mode

Words aloud the page, aloud the dab and dash of a pen, the swish of wrist, the nib is avatar, the ink is silent virus, moldwarp burrowing along, just beneath the surface, there I am, trying to slip between the nib and that which would be scratched out from my fingers, hand and arm. Trying to eke the groove of thought, its carve through language skin. Creative and critical writing hold in tension between them a force field that is essentially implicit and unworded. It is here that my practice-based and theoretical research, concerned with how a contemporary poetic practice might thematically and artistically engage with the unsaid and the unsayable, seeks to play. My focus is on apophasis, the rhetoric of denial and negation, which since classical times has been a means of using language to deal with what lies beyond language. Taking a braided form, this paper reflects on the process and experience of producing a blended thesis in order to explore, through an apophatic lens, the implications of collapsing the distance between creative and critical modes to write into and out of the force field of un-wordedness.