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?
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.
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.
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.