Query
Sky of mind, courtesy Wassily Kandinsky, "Sky Blue"
Is there really a boundary between skill and inspiration? Or do these components of writing intersect?
What’s your experience?
Memories, memoirs, meditation—1
Recently I went to a reading and discussion by my friend Joyce Zonana. Joyce is an Egyptian Jew, born in Cairo and brought to this country by her parents in 1951, at the age of 18 months. Though she grew up in Brooklyn, her parents resisted assimilation and kept their home steeped in Middle Eastern culture. So she remained the odd one out among her Eastern European Jewish friends who insisted that anyone who didn’t understand Yiddish or eat gefilte fish couldn’t really be Jewish.
Last year she published a memoir, Dream Homes: From Cairo to Katrina, an Exile’s Journey, about her journey to find a place she felt was home.
At the reading Joyce shared the stage with another Egyptian Jew, Jean Naggar, whose family remained in Egypt until 1956, leaving for England when she was 18. Jean wrote her memoir, Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt, for her grandchildren, whose lives were quite different from her own “perfect” childhood in the “lost world” of Egypt before Nasser.
Though their experiences of childhood and immigration differed considerably, what struck me was that for both women the memory of life in Egypt remained a cynosure, a kind of holy world—all the more striking in Joyce’s case, since she has no actual memories of Egypt. The past is the foundation of the present, Jean insisted—it never disappears. They strove to keep alive their connection to the past, making pilgrimages to Egypt as adults. Their audience at the reading was full of other Egyptian Jews, all tightly tied to each other through this common heritage.
A few years ago, I too made a sort of pilgrimage, to the house on Long Island where I grew up, which I hadn’t seen since 1976, when my parents moved out. It’s in a relatively old suburb; by now the skimpy saplings planted by the developer are huge and full, and the ticky-tacky houses have been remodeled so no two are alike. The boring little subdivision I remembered now looked like a fantasy village painted on a plate. And I felt no sense of connection to it or to the house; it didn’t seem as though I’d actually lived there.
It’s been in my mind lately, though, because my brother has been scanning his collection of photos from our childhood in that house and emailing them to me. Some set off a twinge of nostalgia. Then I thought: what’s to be nostalgic about? I wasn’t happy then.
Memoirs are big sellers. But these recent experiences made me wonder: how involved should we be with the past?
In 1996 a New York Times reporter interviewed the Burmese peace activist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, only recently released from house arrest and living in her parents’ home. She had sold her parents’ furniture to the military junta when she needed money for food. “Did you try to get these items back once you were freed?” the reporter asked. “They had belonged to your parents.”
“My father is dead. My mother is dead,” Suu Kyi answered. “Why should I cling to their furniture?” A very Buddhist response.
“The past is like a dream and the future is ‘the not yet come.’ The only thing of any interest to anyone is now.… there is no moment other than the present one,” says Ayya Khema, a wonderful dharma teacher, in her book Being Nobody, Going Nowhere: Meditations on the Buddhist Path.
So why write a memoir? My thought is that one’s childhood, whether happy or not, banal or dramatic, retains a mythic quality—just like the origin stories of a culture—and that’s the source of our compulsion to revisit, explore, and interpret it. But how much of that is good for us?
Let your unconscious do the work
A previous post described using reflection to plumb your own depths for inspiration. But what about just going to sleep and letting your unconscious do the work?
I learned this trick from an author whose book I edited when I worked for a publisher. Carol (I’ll call her) was preceded by her reputation: she drove everyone crazy. But when I met her I realized she was just extremely right-brained and hyper-feminine—by which I mean she operated as far from logic and linear thinking as a person could and still be a full professor at a prestigious, male-dominated university. She had gotten her Ph.D. at a time when few women got Ph.D.’s, at another, similar university that was then quite hostile to women scholars, especially those who didn’t “think like men.” As I reconstruct it, she survived by surrounding herself with a kind of fog that made everything slightly unclear, effectively muddling the male professors who otherwise would have prevented her from doing her research the way she wanted.
She’d certainly created a muddle at my office. Her book was to have many illustrations, but nobody knew exactly how many. Everyone told me a different number. Under cover of this confusion Carol was set to slip far too many photos into her book, except that I checked her contract. When she showed up with an armload of prints, I said, “Your contract only calls for 100, so you have to cut 20 of these.” To my surprise, she went off happily and did it. I realized later that when she met me she knew intuitively that I couldn’t be muddled but I was also sympathetic to her vision for her book—and she was actually relieved that someone was cutting through the confusion.
So we got to be friendly, and she told me a couple of stories about how she worked that wound up profoundly influencing my own writing.
- Back before computers (not to mention the internet), note-taking for research-based books was done with index cards. On each card you recorded one fact (or maybe a couple of related facts). You organized your book by arranging your cards. Most people filed them in shoeboxes. One box might hold the facts for a chapter, sorted in order. You pulled each card in turn out of the box and wrote its fact into your chapter.
Carol, however, made notes on little slips of paper which she threw into a bag. Whenever she needed to find something, she had to paw through the entire contents. (Knowing her, I visualize it as an embroidered silk or velvet bag.) “It took me six months longer than anyone else to write my dissertation,” she told me, “but going through all my research over and over like that enabled me to thoroughly absorb it and deeply integrate it into my thinking.”
This tale inspired me when I did my own research for my two books, Slaying the Mermaid and The Women Outside. I couldn’t stand the notion of index cards, so I took notes on yellow lined pads. (No laptops then to take to the library.) My facts weren’t as thoroughly mixed up as Carol’s scraps of paper, but I still had to read through everything when I was hunting some detail. Computer searches are a lot more efficient, but Carol was right—your material doesn’t sink in in quite the same way.
- Even more critical for me was Carol’s second tip. “When I have a writing problem,” she confided, “I just put it into my mind before I go to sleep at night. Then in the morning, I know the answer.”
I’ve never done this precisely, but I’ve learned that the unconscious does a lot of work in the background while you’re otherwise occupied. If I’m not sure exactly how to frame an article, or how to express a certain idea, I have a choice: I can sit at my desk for hours and beat my brains out trying to come up with a solution. Or I can write the piece out as best I can, then put it aside and forget it for a couple of days. When I next pull it up onscreen, I pause at the first problematic passage and the right phrasing or idea just pops into my consciousness.
This is why I never, never let assignments go til the last minute. I always want those two days of off time to let my unconscious do the heavy lifting.
Not only does this tactic make assigned articles much easier, it’s just crucial for personal work. Not that I don’t sweat my brains out over that. But I do it so much more efficiently!
Writing & anxiety
At a meditation retreat recently I discovered that even when all sorts of events were going on in my body and mind—physical pain or tension, intrusive thoughts, uncomfortable emotions—I could inhabit a place of stillness, where I was aware of these things but unaffected by them. To get to that place, though, I had first to experience fully each disagreeable detail. This was new: I realized that previously I’d let my mind jump away from the really unpleasant sensations. Plus, instead of accepting their presence enough to get that complete experience, I’d been very subtly trying to get rid of them.
- Example: constant tension at the base of my throat, most intense during the pause between the out breath and the in breath. My mind would fly out through that little gap and start generating thoughts. But as I made the effort to track every single moment of the out-pause-in sequence, the stillness appeared.
"Anxious face," photo by Wrote
What’s the connection with writing? Think of the unpleasant events that go on while you’re trying to write—like anxiety. As noted before, I learned a long time ago that being anxious about writing something doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It means you do it while you’re anxious. I may use my trick of pretending I’m just doing a first draft that doesn’t count. Or I simply summon up some determination and grit my teeth. In either case the anxiety becomes like those distracting body/mind events: I can coexist with it while staying focused on the job at hand.
The key is to change how you relate to the presence of anxiety: instead of feeling victimized by it, or making heroic efforts to ignore it, make peace with the fact that it exists. It’s just there. So?
A great benefit of meditation practice is learning to handle negative emotions. One teacher I sat with remarked, “If you’re not afraid to feel a feeling, there’s nothing else it can do to you—it has no power over you.” It’s very liberating to find that these mood states—fear, anger, whatever—don’t have to control you. For sure they’re unpleasant, but that’s all.
More on reflection
I’m still reverberating slightly after a meditation retreat last week. It resonated on several levels, but what’s relevant here is that I developed a better understanding of reflection.
Based on the teacher’s instructions, it seemed that I’d actually been practicing reflection for a long time, before I ever started meditating. I described to her my process of lying on the couch and letting my mind sink, and she confirmed that this was indeed what she’d been talking about.
100-year-old water well in Argentina, lined with hand-laid bricks. Photo: Carlos Ponte
Reflection, at least in this sense, isn’t thinking. It’s like putting a question into your mind and then holding it there while looking down a well to see if anything floats up out of the shaft. The trick is learning to train your attention on the empty space inside the well, without letting your intellect fill
it up with a lot of ideas.
What eventually surfaces can be an image, a word, or a phrase. In the case of this blog entry, it was both. I sat down and reflected in order to decide what to say here, and what came up was the phrase “reflection isn’t thinking.” I starting writing that down, and the well image followed before I had finished.
Reflection is a powerful tool for me. I use it to solve all sorts of problems, not just writing problems—for example, to figure out what’s really going on when something upsets me, so I can respond effectively, or to make tough decisions. What I understand now is that although this process is related to meditation, there’s a difference, which has to do with intention. Problem-solving reflection is goal oriented. Meditation is not. I was concerned that the one might be contaminating the other. But the teacher gave me some advice that works in either case: don’t let the reflection tip over into obsession. The acid test is falling into repetition: the same thoughts cycle back over and over, and you can’t let them go. The well shaft doesn’t stay empty—it overflows.
The inside of my head
The graphic just below is not a tag cloud but a WORD cloud, generated by a site called Wordle, which is just amazing. Paste in text (or give it the url of your blog, as I did) and it presents you with a randomly formatted cloud of words sized according to their frequency in your text. Then you can redesign your cloud using the many available fonts, layouts, and infinite colors.
It’s like looking into the inside of your own head. You suddenly, literally, have a picture of what’s on your mind. How come I used the word “book” so much? Why is “really” so large? It was a surprise to see that “something” and “everything” appear a lot in these posts. I don’t like abstract words. Was I being lazy? Did I not have a clear idea of what I really meant? (Click the image for a larger, legible size.)
This blog as a Wordle
Though I initially saw Wordle as a mirror of my mind, when I looked through the gallery of clouds other people had posted, I realized that was only one possibility. You can create designs deliberately by manipulating your text, like the person whose “dog breeds” Wordle is dominated by an enormous yellow terrier. Some people make Wordle form whole sentences pointing in different directions. Others send a message, like this advocate for the food democracy movement.
After making my blog Wordle, I tried passages of work I’d done for clients, and saw that my notion of the mind mirror was actually quite limited. I’d been thinking just in terms of concepts. But the Wordle is also a graphic representation of your writing style. Some of my clients like long words, some short; the respective texts create different visual patterns.
Much meditation for me lately is about reflection—nonconceptual reflection, that is, as opposed to thinking. So here’s a completely nonconceptual way to reflect on writing.
Writer’s block? Foolproof trick for breaking through
… At least it always works for me. I generally freeze up when I’m afraid I don’t have the chops for whatever the job is: an article that requires synthesizing interviews about a topic I don’t feel totally in control of (especially if one of the people I spoke to intimidated me); a book chapter whose concepts are so complex that I fear I’ll never be able to fit them together in a satisfactory way.
So I tell myself that I’ll just sit down and write something. It doesn’t matter whether the copy is any good, since it doesn’t count —it’s just for practice. This little maneuver relieves the pressure, and I do produce “something.” If I’m lucky my energy starts moving, I get connected, and the “practice” turns into a productive session. Even if it doesn’t, and what I write turns out not so great, I put it away and don’t look at it for a day or so. In the meantime, I’ve given my unconscious a chunk of material to work with. When I revisit my copy, either I discover it’s halfway decent or I suddenly know how to really do it right.
The funny thing is that this trick has saved me time and again, even though I’m totally aware that it’s a stratagem I’m using on myself. It breaks through whatever the resistance or the fear is. I don’t know exactly why—I’m just grateful.
Writer as flypaper
Have you noticed that when you’re deeply involved in something, you turn into a magnet for anything related to it?
I once interviewed Kay Gardner, a musician and composer of healing music (sadly, she died in 2002), who told me that during a time when she was intensively exploring the physical effects of sound—teaching experimental workshops and reading extensively—all sorts of information found her. “People sent me books and articles. Books would fall off shelves. A book would be handed to me through a crowd—just a disembodied hand like one of the aces in the tarot deck.”
In that state of focus, you become like flypaper—things sail in out of the universe and stick to you. That’s what it feels like, anyway. To take just one example: writing my book on homeless women, I struggled to untangle some complex ideas about what these women meant to people inside society. I was tackling a chapter about mental illness–which I was choosing to call madness, a term that gave this condition a lot more meaning.
One bright Saturday afternoon, walking down my block toward a nearby park, I came across a stoop sale, which included a bunch of books. (In my brownstone New York neighborhood, we don’t have front yards, but everyone has a stoop, so that’s where we set the items out.) I was tempted, but figured I’d check it out on my way back.
Not the book I read, but MK's own account of her life
A couple of hours later, the sale was still going on. I stopped and glanced through the books. A little paperback caught my eye: Six Medieval Men & Women. Why that? I wasn’t interested in the Middle Ages. But I picked it up. It consisted of brief narrative accounts of the lives of six notable characters. One was Margery Kempe, and I guess some significant aroma wafted up at me from the page, because I paid the quarter or whatever they wanted and took it home.
Turned out that Margery was a 14th-century woman who in her extraordinary eccentricity amazingly resembled the shopping bag ladies I worked with at a shelter for homeless women, down to her patchwork dress, her hysteria, and her loud proclamation of truths from God that she alone was privy to. Unlike them, though, she fit into a defined social niche: recognized as a minor mystic, Margery went on pilgrimages, conversed with learned theologians, and was appealed to for help at moments of crisis, as when the local church was endangered by a fire (she saved it). She died peacefully in her home town at an advanced age.
This brief story was the key not just to that chapter but to other large chunks of my book. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was that I happened to pass that house on the day someone decided to hold their sale, and that no one else snatched up the book while I was in the park. But was it really luck?
I’d call it synchronicity, and it’s one of those unexplainable but absolutely reliable mysteries of writing. When you’re obsessed with anything, you become a magnet for it. Who knows why—I’m just grateful. And would be happy to hear more examples of this phenomenon.