I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE
My earliest memory is mostly visual. Bright sun, green grass, the bliss of bare feet. There was a warning; “don’t go out in bare feet! You know what happens.” Mom. But I am two or three and can’t resist the call of that yellowness, greenness, my toes are greedy. And so I run.
As thrilling as the moment we let go of hands, furniture, walls and walk independently, nothing quite beats the moment of running, using all that hard-earned balance to propel breezily through the world. Running! My first-born walked at 9 months and ran at 10. Once on his feet, he never strolled. Ran, hopped, fled. One of his favorite activities was running back and forth over steel doors in the sidewalk in front of a local bar. B-bang, b-bang, over and over. Mid-day drunks inside never complained to me, but I imagine the clang of small feet on steel did little to soothe their morning hang-overs.
But I digress. My first memory. Sun, grass, bare feet. And bees. I don’t know if this memory is a composite, certainly this is where the warning comes from. But in the midst of all that joy, and I can stop it, stop the memory here, a tow-headed girl child running gleefully amid tall grass, music swells, roll credits. I can stop here. But the next thing might be why this memory is so clear. I am stung by a bee! That aspect of the memory is blurry. I know there was pain, I know what beestings feel like, but I don’t remember that. Instead I remember Mom racing across the yard to pick up sobbing me, and she’s angry. This is the contrast I remember; bliss and anger.
Memory is strange. The mechanism behind it guarantees it’s faulty nature. Our senses are impressed, literally, by sights, sounds, smells, touch, taste of any given occurrence. Then, later, one of those senses sparks the rest of that earlier impression, Proust’s madeleine. The feeling of grass under bare feet. And then we re-live the memory in our mind. Except it isn’t the actual event this time. This time, our mind travels back using those stimulated synapses to reconstruct the event.
In my memory, my mother tells me, “don’t go out barefoot!” but I go anyway. Did it happen this way? Or do I remember Mom picking me up from the grass and scolding me, “I told you!” so I added the earlier memory? Or, as I suspect, is the entire memory not one, but several occasions in which I ran barefoot through bee-full grass and got stung? Sometimes my siblings are in this memory, laughing at me. But was this because they often played tricks on me? Am I again creating a collage around what I like to think is a single memory?
Writing is all about memory. Memoir writers recall childhood traumas and joys; journalists recall interviews and supporting material; even fiction writers use memories of actual people, places, things as building blocks for their imaginary worlds. So how best can we, as writers, use memory to inspire us?
Think senses. Not merely sight, but scent, touch, taste and sound. Where one goes, others follow; scent of lilacs leads to a profusion of purple, maybe a bird singing, the outline of a well-loved house. The taste of a perfectly ripe peach leads to wet sticky juice on lips and chin, the sound of laughter, bleating goats, the smell of manure. Follow your senses, and they will lead you to a richer, truer writing place.
My earliest memory is mostly visual. Bright sun, green grass, the bliss of bare feet. There was a warning; “don’t go out in bare feet! You know what happens.” Mom. But I am two or three and can’t resist the call of that yellowness, greenness, my toes are greedy. And so I run.
As thrilling as the moment we let go of hands, furniture, walls and walk independently, nothing quite beats the moment of running, using all that hard-earned balance to propel breezily through the world. Running! My first-born walked at 9 months and ran at 10. Once on his feet, he never strolled. Ran, hopped, fled. One of his favorite activities was running back and forth over steel doors in the sidewalk in front of a local bar. B-bang, b-bang, over and over. Mid-day drunks inside never complained to me, but I imagine the clang of small feet on steel did little to soothe their morning hang-overs.
But I digress. My first memory. Sun, grass, bare feet. And bees. I don’t know if this memory is a composite, certainly this is where the warning comes from. But in the midst of all that joy, and I can stop it, stop the memory here, a tow-headed girl child running gleefully amid tall grass, music swells, roll credits. I can stop here. But the next thing might be why this memory is so clear. I am stung by a bee! That aspect of the memory is blurry. I know there was pain, I know what beestings feel like, but I don’t remember that. Instead I remember Mom racing across the yard to pick up sobbing me, and she’s angry. This is the contrast I remember; bliss and anger.
Memory is strange. The mechanism behind it guarantees it’s faulty nature. Our senses are impressed, literally, by sights, sounds, smells, touch, taste of any given occurrence. Then, later, one of those senses sparks the rest of that earlier impression, Proust’s madeleine. The feeling of grass under bare feet. And then we re-live the memory in our mind. Except it isn’t the actual event this time. This time, our mind travels back using those stimulated synapses to reconstruct the event.
In my memory, my mother tells me, “don’t go out barefoot!” but I go anyway. Did it happen this way? Or do I remember Mom picking me up from the grass and scolding me, “I told you!” so I added the earlier memory? Or, as I suspect, is the entire memory not one, but several occasions in which I ran barefoot through bee-full grass and got stung? Sometimes my siblings are in this memory, laughing at me. But was this because they often played tricks on me? Am I again creating a collage around what I like to think is a single memory?
Writing is all about memory. Memoir writers recall childhood traumas and joys; journalists recall interviews and supporting material; even fiction writers use memories of actual people, places, things as building blocks for their imaginary worlds. So how best can we, as writers, use memory to inspire us?
Think senses. Not merely sight, but scent, touch, taste and sound. Where one goes, others follow; scent of lilacs leads to a profusion of purple, maybe a bird singing, the outline of a well-loved house. The taste of a perfectly ripe peach leads to wet sticky juice on lips and chin, the sound of laughter, bleating goats, the smell of manure. Follow your senses, and they will lead you to a richer, truer writing place.
WHOSE MONSTER?
If you’ve had the good fortune to write things you like, to spend time creating on the page, you are familiar with the bliss of giving your imagination free rein, allowing your mind to repurpose memory and paint pictures in words. There’s real joy here, even when the writing’s not so hot. The bliss of words streaming onto the page or screen is glorious. And addictive. And, like an addict, some days you may find yourself sitting with pen in hand, or laptop open to a blank white page, waiting for the hit, the fix, that marvelous feeling… and being unable to start. What the hell is going on?
Like the shadowy figure standing in the doorway of your closet, ghost, demon, creepy guy, making you terrified until you turn on the light, there is no ghost, demon, or man to be found. Just a piece of clothing dangling on hanger. So it is with our obstacles to writing. If we pull them out into the light, they shrivel up into something we can ignore and maybe even laugh at.
So let’s drag that creepy thing kicking and screaming from under the bed, grabbing all the nasty dust-bunnies it can hold.
My Buddhist teacher recently told me, “Uncertainty is your jam.” Great t-shirt, right? In the context of Buddhist practice this means sitting with what’s happened. Not pushing away things we don’t want; Will it ever stop raining? Will my pet get healthy again? Is the pain in my hip something really bad? As applied to writing, there’s so much uncertainty involved — how do I finish this? will anyone read it? will anyone ever publish me? — it can completely shut us down.
Uncertainty. Believing there’s a good chance you’ll fail, that sweet spot of writing won’t come, you’ll prove to yourself and the world how unworthy you are… so you don’t even try. If you knew for sure that it would work, that sitting and writing would give you pleasure, you’d never avoid it, never leave a page blank or screen empty. You would cheerfully and happily write. But there’s the monster under the bed. I might fail!
One of the origins of the word ‘fail’ is from Latin, fallere "to trip, cause to fall;" and "to deceive, trick, dupe.” So I ask you, whose monster is it that’s keeping you from what you want to do? Are there outside forces paralyzing your fingers and fogging your brain? Or is the monster in your head? If so, you can change. You can write for fun and pleasure. There’s no block but the one you’ve constructed.
As one of my students wrote recently, “things can always get worse, right? Then can’t they be better?” If there’s a chance for failure, isn’t there a chance for success? Take a page from Samuel Beckett and fail better. Isn’t the only real failure failing to begin?
If you’ve had the good fortune to write things you like, to spend time creating on the page, you are familiar with the bliss of giving your imagination free rein, allowing your mind to repurpose memory and paint pictures in words. There’s real joy here, even when the writing’s not so hot. The bliss of words streaming onto the page or screen is glorious. And addictive. And, like an addict, some days you may find yourself sitting with pen in hand, or laptop open to a blank white page, waiting for the hit, the fix, that marvelous feeling… and being unable to start. What the hell is going on?
Like the shadowy figure standing in the doorway of your closet, ghost, demon, creepy guy, making you terrified until you turn on the light, there is no ghost, demon, or man to be found. Just a piece of clothing dangling on hanger. So it is with our obstacles to writing. If we pull them out into the light, they shrivel up into something we can ignore and maybe even laugh at.
So let’s drag that creepy thing kicking and screaming from under the bed, grabbing all the nasty dust-bunnies it can hold.
My Buddhist teacher recently told me, “Uncertainty is your jam.” Great t-shirt, right? In the context of Buddhist practice this means sitting with what’s happened. Not pushing away things we don’t want; Will it ever stop raining? Will my pet get healthy again? Is the pain in my hip something really bad? As applied to writing, there’s so much uncertainty involved — how do I finish this? will anyone read it? will anyone ever publish me? — it can completely shut us down.
Uncertainty. Believing there’s a good chance you’ll fail, that sweet spot of writing won’t come, you’ll prove to yourself and the world how unworthy you are… so you don’t even try. If you knew for sure that it would work, that sitting and writing would give you pleasure, you’d never avoid it, never leave a page blank or screen empty. You would cheerfully and happily write. But there’s the monster under the bed. I might fail!
One of the origins of the word ‘fail’ is from Latin, fallere "to trip, cause to fall;" and "to deceive, trick, dupe.” So I ask you, whose monster is it that’s keeping you from what you want to do? Are there outside forces paralyzing your fingers and fogging your brain? Or is the monster in your head? If so, you can change. You can write for fun and pleasure. There’s no block but the one you’ve constructed.
As one of my students wrote recently, “things can always get worse, right? Then can’t they be better?” If there’s a chance for failure, isn’t there a chance for success? Take a page from Samuel Beckett and fail better. Isn’t the only real failure failing to begin?