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But this is not something afforded by the simple act of
writing, the mental and physical process of stringing together
words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and so forth,
but, perhaps even more so, by the thinking that vivifies it.
While you can think without writing, you cannot write without
thinking: thinking before you write about what you want or need
to write; thinking as you write; thinking about what you wrote
after you’ve written it. In a sense, they are inseparable. In
Writing Without Teachers, Elbow suggests that, if writers are to
free themselves, and their writing, from the control and order
that can suffocate the process, they should “[L]et things get
out of hand, let things wander and digress” (32-3). I believe
that Elbow’s advice, which embraces that freedom found in
Uncertainty, applies not simply to what the pen or the keyboard
put down upon that blank page but to, again, the thinking that
embodies those words, like a soul. That said, I would return to
Hélène Cixous and recall something from the first chapter. For
Cixous, when we write …
We go toward the best known unknown thing, where
knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will
know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be
afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing
the invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the
unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking
is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the
thinkable is not worth the effort. (38)
What Cixous is promoting is not only the marriage of writing and
thinking but the need for both of Uncertainty: the pursuit of
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