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—2
Between 1968 and 1970, I lived in Chicago, where my then-husband was in law school. I hated Chicago, partly because the winters were so cold—I kept getting sick; partly because the South Side, where we lived, was then a dangerous place where women especially couldn’t walk around freely; and partly because the “Battle of Chicago” between antiwar protestors and the police during the Democratic Convention of 1968 left in its wake a miasma of hatred that you breathed in with the coal soot in the air.
Chicago Skyway with skyscrapers very faint in background
So when we finally left, and I gazed backward as we drove along the Skyway toward Indiana, I was astonished to feel a wave of nostalgia sweep over me at the sight of the city center skyscrapers receding behind us.
Just like when I visited my childhood house, only more surprising, since I had no long-standing history with Chicago: nostalgia from nowhere. But it made me see that attachment to the past can be a trap your feelings play on you, not a true, healthy connection.
Still, those feelings are there. We need to know them, if not necessarily believe in them. So perhaps the memoir is the way to do this.
Recently I tried my hand at memoir with an essay about an experience of community I had some years ago when I was quite sick. Writing about an experience is quite different from thinking—or meditating—about it, since writing forces you to formulate and organize your thoughts far more rigorously. So I figured out things I’d never have understood otherwise.
Perhaps there are two levels of experience: absolute and relative. On the absolute level there is no past, only present. But on the relative level, what happens in the past still matters. Perhaps the trick is to understand how to move between them.
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?
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.
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.
Writing & pleasure, part 2
I’ve always loved pens. I used to keep a journal, and aside from its value as an aid to reflection, the physical act of writing in it gave me pleasure. Many people are passionately attached to fountain pens; they’re particular about nibs, ink, and paper. But I love all pens, even the cheap ones. At conferences I go for the free ballpoints; I don’t care about the tote bags.
When I got serious about being a writer, I developed the same sensory fondness for my typewriter. I’ve read comments by writers who say they need to start out with longhand drafts in order to feel the connection between their ideas and the sentences they produce. I felt that connection on the typewriter, as a flow of energy from my gut through my hands striking the keys onto the paper. Organic. When I had to switch to a computer, I worried I’d lose that feeling because the keyboard was so different. But all it took was getting as proficient at word processing as I’d been at typing. By now I enjoy the physical sensation of keyboarding as much as writing longhand and typewriting.
Typing is only pleasurable, though, when it produces sentences. I don’t get any enjoyment from filling out an Excel spreadsheet. But I do get it even from writing a report for a nonprofit, a training manual for a body therapist, or a newsletter article.
Best of all is writing a book—even if it’s someone else’s—because that introduces another factor—the pleasure of fitting together the pieces of a puzzle. More on that in next entry.
Image as analytic tool, part 2
I started out writing fiction—short stories and then an attempt at a novel. Then, without having planned to, I found myself committed to write a nonfiction book about “shopping bag ladies,” and when I sat down to think about what its focus might be, the image of the witch popped into my mind. At the time I was doing a Jungian analysis, which uses dream images to investigate the contents of the unconscious, so it was natural to me to follow the witch image wherever it led. This method felt not just congenial but deeply satisfying; right away, I was hooked. An image constrains and focuses thoughts while still allowing great freedom in moving around within it: you can come at your material from many different directions without losing coherence, since the analysis acquires its form from the structure of the image.
A witch and her familiar
I used this method for both my literary nonfiction books:
- For The Women Outside, a study of homeless and marginal women, the witch figure.
- For Slaying the Mermaid, about women and self-sacrifice, Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid.
The Little Mermaid, illustration by Vilhelm Pedersen for H.C. Andersen's fairy tale
While in the process of developing my witch image, and feeling doubtful whether using a single image to organize an entire book was really kosher (what about logic? rational analyis?), I asked a panelist at an academic seminar about it. She recommended a book called The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, by Jonathan D. Spence, a historian. It was an academic study of a Jesuit missionary in 16th- and 17-century China, who undertook to teach the Chinese the European system of building a “memory palace” or mental construct of images, a method in use since classical antiquity to help people organize and remember large amounts of information. Adapting the memory palace theme to his book, Spence built each chapter around an image, as expressed by a Chinese character. He didn’t use his images in quite the way I was using mine, but his book made me feel much more comfortable about what I was doing.
Actually an image like my witch or mermaid is rather like a memory palace in reverse. In the original version, you build your palace as a way to store specific data. You add one room after another, and as you create them, you furnish them with objects, attaching a particular datum to each object. You can store different categories of information in different rooms. To remember your information, in your mind’s eye you move through the rooms and look around at the furnishings.
For me the process is precisely reversed. The image is already there, and my job is to explore it. As I move through it, I discover new wings, levels, ells—all sorts of additions, which furnish new components and additional layers of meaning for the conceptual structure of my book. Either way, I think, images are magical.
Image as analytic tool, part 1
When I first encountered the homeless women I wrote about in my book The Women Outside, I was struck by the way they talked. At that time, a large proportion of “shopping bag ladies” were former inmates of state mental institutions, tossed out into the “community” when a so-called reform emptied the hospitals but failed to provide adequate follow-up or care. On their own, these women couldn’t negotiate the bureaucratic requirements of the welfare system and wound up on the street. Years of institutionalization plus the disorientation induced by life outdoors gave their conversation a fragmented quality that reflected the shattering of their inner vision.
Trying to describe this in an article for a small feminist journal, I remembered Lila, a woman I’d met some time before on a visit to a small rural Texas town. On the wrong side of a piece of shelving paper, she drew me a family tree: roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and acorns. A squirrel sits on a root holding an acorn, and a pig roots for more acorns beneath the branches. Each branch, she told me, was a member of the family and the smaller branches were their children. Beneath the drawing she wrote a poem celebrating the “beautiful sweet world God created”—not excluding the “storms” and “broken hearts” introduced by the devil.
Together Lila’s tree and poem conveyed a marvelous wholeness of vision, setting her own family connections, past and future, into the larger natural cycle. By contrast, the images that the homeless women spilled out were jumbled shards of their real past or fantasy past, nightmare representations of unacknowledged rage or terror, bits and pieces of their daily lives, and dreams of a wished-for future that would never come.
My ideas about the family tree image developed as many ramifications as a real tree and turned into the conceptual structure of the article—my first use of an image as a method of analysis.
I thought: how does a tree work? The roots draw nourishment from the soil and the trunk sends it upward to feed the leaves and produce the fruit. So the tree represents wholeness and natural cycles. It diagrams the family’s roots in the past and its continuity in the present and into the future.
But to connect this image to the homeless women, I had to go further. The tree also represents the development of a single person: the self grows to fruition by tapping into nourishment buried underground and transforming it into a rich harvest. For the homeless women, this tree was cut off at the roots. They lacked that vision of wholeness, as though the vessel of self bearing the image of their tree had been shattered, with only the shards remaining.
My article went on to draw parallels between those outcast women and women inside society that no longer seem quite so valid to me. In fact the whole piece now feels rather over the top. But it taught me how to use an image to pursue meaning, one ramification at a time (as it were). From then on I had a tool that freed my imagination.