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.
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!
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.
Structuring a book = working a jigsaw puzzle
My years as a manuscript editor taught me how to structure a book. Many authors are experts with great info to impart, but when they try to produce a book they end up with a shapeless mess. Book writing is a craft, a professional specialty, like making violins.
For the past few months I’ve been working with a client who has terrific material and a clear idea of what she wants to say—in general. But she’d only written articles and hadn’t a clue about how to put everything together into a book.
I began by making her do an outline. Now we’re working through the chapters, honing the concepts for each one. It’s making her brain sweat. She knows her data, but has never thought her ideas through at this level of detail. When you work on the scale of a book, you need to create connections that never come up when you’re only presenting a bit of your data in an article. A comment in chapter 5 seems to conflict with a piece of evidence already presented in chapter 3. Are they really contradictory, or did you just not realize all the implications of that piece of data? It’s in actually working with the text that you really figure out what you mean to say.
- Years ago I went with a friend to hear Grace Paley speak. Paley talked about how she wrote one of her short stories, explaining that she found out what the story was about by writing it. My friend was baffled. She has a capacious, logical mind and had produced her own book by creating a conceptual structure based on her research, organizing all her notes, then writing everything out. But my own process—even though I write nonfiction—is like Paley’s: it’s through struggling with the connections of the clauses in a sentence, then the sequence of ideas among the sentences themselves, that I learn what I really mean to say.
I explained to my client that putting together a book is like working a jigsaw puzzle—when you get everything properly arranged, the pieces all fall into place with a click and the structure is solid. In an extended piece of writing, the structure—the organization of ideas—is actually itself a concept. All the subsidiary concepts in the separate chapters must fit snugly into this overall conceptual structure. When they do, the argument is not only clear, but pleasing.
- Tip: repetitive passages are always a sign that something is wrong with the overall conceptual structure. Reorganize your presentation of ideas, and the repetition will vanish.
For me, putting the puzzle together is another part of the pleasure of writing: first, sinking into intense concentration, seeing deeply into your material, and shaping your concepts to agree with it; then, fitting everything into place with that aesthetically satisfying click!
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.