Making Meaning of Memory

In the woods that surrounded the main building, according to no discernible plan,

stood a bunch of cabins and outbuildings submerged in perpetual deep-green shade. Michael Chabon 

When she died last summer at 94 years old, my Auntie Sara still subscribed to and read Bon Appetit and Vanity Fair. That alone says something about the fire-cracker she was. In the cleaning out of her things, my cousin Larry forwarded her Bon Appetit subscription to me.The latest issue, featuring an expansive layout of Thanksgiving dishes ("46 for the Big Day"), reads like a luscious art book.  

It also features Michael Chabon's thoughtful, sober essay, "The Comforts of Not-Home" an unconventional look at the Thanksgiving holiday. A Berkeley writer, Chabon writes about a place that no longer stands, about people he's lost, about accepting reality. It's a sort of plea for the value of what my parents always called "catch as catch can." But it's more than that.

Chabon's 1,400-word memoir essay recalls a ten year old experience, reviving the memory to make an unusual point about family holidays. I was drawn in immediately. He opens the essay in the second person--a risky choice that works here. Right away he establishes the tone, purpose and theme of the essay--showing, rather than telling, his family's brand of the unconventional . 

He illustrates relaxation, joy, comfort, and revival. He shows how unacquainted people bond--"long walks on chilly beaches, the playing of board and card games...hazy, hot-tub-and-wine-soaked" adventures." It's a lovely essay and instructive in its economy and expansiveness. He sums up his purpose--fitting, but surprising-- toward the end:

And that, to me, is the meaning of Thanksgiving. Of all the Thanksgivings before and since, the one spent at Manka's stands out for me as the truest, even though we were far from our origins. Nothing lasts; everything changes. People die and marriages dissolve, and friendships fade, and families fall apart, whether or not we appreciate them; whether or not we give thanks every waking moment or one night a year. 

photo credit: James Baigrie

The Artist's Fears

Fears about art making fall into two families: fears about yourself and fears about your reception by others.

Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking is a great go-to book for immediate inspiration. David Bayles and Ted Orland seem to be right on, every time.

What are these fears?  

~~In many cases it's the fear of failing to create something of significance. 

~~We also fear that what we have created is, after all, meaningless. 

~~We fear we won't measure up to our ambition. 

~~We fear boring the reader or viewer. That's the one I fear the most.

~~and more

Bayles and Orland address these fears and more. They talk directly to the writer or artist who doesn't feel legitimate, who fears he or she lacks talent, who is tricked by a desire for perfectionism, who hits a dry spell, and so forth. It's a book well worth reading over and over. It's written in short sections; you can pick it up anywhere and learn about yourself as an artist, or aspiring art maker.   

A writer asked me recently about talent, saying he feared he didn't really have any. I told him talent is over-rated. I think that's true after spending so many years in the classroom observing wasted talent and rewarded effort. An artist who creates one perfect sculpture and only one never does it the first time. A writer's insightful and thoughtful essay comes after years of practice and willingness to fail. We often want immediate results, yet we aren't genuine artists unless we are willing to spend more time than most people can imagine at the desk.

Bayles and Orland reveal the bottom line on the first page: 

...fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your reception by others prevent you from doing your own work. 

Doing "your own work" as a memoirist means knowing yourself. We find out about ourselves as we write our life experience and, we hope, turn it into artful literature.

Composing Unequal Things

"Remington Upstrike No. 7" by Joe Carter

Just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable. Fortunately, the world is rich in the interweaving of the two, which can be found almost everywhere, and not least where one lives.                                         Mark Helprin                                                                                                                             

~gaining inspiration from objects in our homes
In his essay, "Bumping into the Characters" in Wednesday's New York Times Mark Helprin reminds us of the value found in the quotidian. He writes about "lovely accidents" which reveal the "purely serendipitous" connections in our worlds, about the accretion of knowledge that builds upon itself, the layers of revelation that can occur when we keep our eyes open, when we are actually present.

The essay is either a memoir in the guise of a how-to essay for writers or vice versa. He talks about something important to memoirists--personal objects laden with storied value. He refers to the serendipity of discovery:

It happens all the time, and where it gets quite interesting is in your own house, because what leaps out at you is so often conjoined with your preferences and your history.

Written to describe his process of creating fiction, Helprin also shows the process of crafting memories from random incidents and coincidences. He tells writers to prize their material possessions and actions, to see the worth in everyday objects and insights. 

John Ruskin's definition of composition as "the arrangement of unequal things" means much to the memoirist especially. It recognizes the importance of finding connections in the material and immaterial "things" in our lives. 

~a collection drives the narrative

Coincidentally, a book I'm reading now, The Hare with Amber Eyes, traces five generations of the author's family history with a focus on a material object. The writer, Edmund de Waal, references a collection of netsukes, one in particular, as a through-line, or thread, in the narrative. This collection and the author's search for its origin and significance drives the narrative with a meaningful purpose.

~a painting as symbol

In her complex memoir Leap, Terry Tempest Williams traces the significance of one painting, Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights." The painting, a significant leit-motif throughout the narrative, grounds Williams' memories and personal change.   

~more about the power of objects

Yesterday's New York Times Style Magazine features Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk whose 2009 book, The Museum of Innocence has spawned an actual museum of the same name to house objects that figure "in a memory Pamuk invented for the characters he imagined." Pamuk got close to his characters by inventing and valuing objects with personal meaning to each. 

 ~ ~ ~ 

I'm cognizant of the many material things in my home that await memorializing--a lock of my mother's red hair taped inside her silk-covered baby book; my paternal grandmother's wedding veil she carried from old Armenia, crossing the Atlantic in steerage on an Italian steamer and through Ellis Island; an ebony head of Buddha I brought home from Bali, an object that has gazed at me for fifteen years, patiently suggesting that I slow down, put the past in its place and grant the present its due. 

Things we love to touch, to hold gently and respectfully in our hands, blend their own antique history with ours; our attraction to their power says something about us. Finding out what that is and writing it can memorialize your life experience and give others insight.  

Writers unite unequal things with the glue of reflection, thought, insight, conclusions, and fractious memories fragile as shadows. And we "get" epiphanies if we listen closely enough to ourselves. Helprin closes his essay as a model of such composition:

Houses, rooms, our designs of all sorts and all material things will eventually vanish. Because they cannot last, their value is in the present, in memories that die with us, in things that come unbidden to the eye and in the electric, immaterial  miraculous spark that occurs when by accident and design they jump the gap and, like life itself, are propagated into something else, becoming for a moment pure spirit, thus to become everlasting. 

Helprin in the mid 1950s                       NY Times photo

Doubting in Good Company

Writing in the first person takes courage. Writers need to express an attitude (tone) that invites a reader into the the writer's world. Neither bravado nor its reverse, acute self-effacement, draws readers. The first person essayist needs to be what could be called a good interviewee--a people pleaser as well as an honest reporter of self. And not a sell-out. That's hard to do. 

Because writers are often cursed with self-doubt while composing, they are frequently told to turn off the "inner editor," to get into the zone and not think about a reader's possible reaction (write as though no one is reading, so to speak). 

In an article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, called "Junot Diaz Hates Writing Stories," Diaz is asked "how to unbraid the critical and the creative." He answers,

You've raised one of the thorniest dialectics of working, which is that you need your critical self: without it you can't write, but in fact the critical self is what's got both feet on the brakes of your process.

Writing fiction, as Diaz does, or nonfiction challenges writers to learn to jettison self-consciousness, to be unconscious of our need for others' endorsement. Even those who have full confidence in their ideas know they are writing for a reader. The work has to sell--figuratively and literally. 

Nearly all writers want to be alone in self-imposed solitude and write "for themselves." In the fall  edition of Bookforum, Gideon Lewis-Kraus reviews David Foster Wallace's recent work in "Viewer Discretion," saying that DFW "was at his best when he kept in mind that his work was doing something for himself as well as doing something for the reader." 

The review explores Wallace's obsessive exploration of the relationship between desire and resentment, pointing out that we often come to resent those whose approval we seek. Lewis-Kraus says "The real work of [DFW's] writerly life has been to overcome the dilemma of self-consciousness, of a self caught between forlorn pandering and pedantic resentment."  He says DFW believed that nonfiction writers "have to perform the overcoming of contempt." So doing something for the reader, perhaps, keeps the writing balanced and purposeful.

The more praise a writer gets, the more he or she has to figure out how to decode it. When we think any sort of praise is undeserved, we begin to dismiss it as pandering. I too find it difficult to trust the source and motivation for praise. It's often both surprising and implausible to me. Early in my teaching career I was told to ignore both the highest praise and the lowest criticism. It worked well for me and it works for reactions to one's writing. 

Similar to Ted Hughes' belief (last week's post) in honoring the attitude of the inner child, DFW talks about his admiration for David Lynch's films where "a child's ingenuous (and sociopathic) lack of self-consciousness" shows the antithesis of caring too much for others' opinions. Lynch shows disparate realities and expects his viewers to make the whole.

So a balance of caring and not caring, of writing for the self and for others, is a complete conundrum, one we each have to work through independently, in a way that enables fluency and confidence. 

Finally, toward the end of this enlightening article, Lewis-Kraus describes the paradox for David Foster Wallace:

Work like [DFW's] makes us experience the tension he felt all the time: how to be alone, how also to be together.