Support For an Authentic Writing Practice, Profession, & Community

        

 

RAP #3: FROM IMAGE TO IDEA, FROM WHAT HAPPENED TO SO WHAT

Try to remember one of the first times when you experienced love.  See the place.  The surroundings.  Feel the air.  Hear a sound.  Feel what happens in specific parts of your body.  In your notebook, just describe the images.  Don’t compose.  Just record the images.

Where does love come from?  Where does the idea "love" originate?

The big abstract ideas--love, suffering, valor, honor, integrity, courage, justice--stem from concrete experiences and images.  The work of cognitive linguists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff suggests that our ancestors received information from their eyes and ears, from their immediate experiences, and from those experiences later derived concepts.  They experience through their bodies the physical fact of walking a path, of encountering brambles and boulders in their way.  They use their hands and bodily strength to work around or to remove those obstacles.  Their bodies and minds feel relieved when they do so.  When walking such a path, particularly a new path like a journey, they are alert to surprise, their senses heightened, never sure what they will encounter next. 

Later, they might grow fond of another human being.  They feel things in their bodies.  They are exhilarated.  They encounter obstacles.  They feel good when they work around or remove those obstacles.  They feel relieved.  They become open to surprise, never quite sure what may happen next.  So, later, human beings universally may formulate a metaphor such as “Love is a journey.” 

(Linguist Guy Deutcher follows a similar strain of language's embodied origins in his new book The Unfolding of Language: an Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention, Owl Books, 2006; and David Abrams similarly traces English's physical origins in Hebrew: The Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage Books).

The very word idea stems from the Greek idein, to see.  Perception--sensory input--precedes conception--the abstraction of ideas. 

 So, I’ve suggested in previous raps that you begin with the details.  Tend to images as precisely as you can render them.   From writing into the details--the events that happen, the facts and details, and from the sensory images that you lay out on the page--memory unfolds.  Images prod memory.  But I have a few suggestions for moving from image to idea.

First, be patient with memory’s unfolding.  Memory often requires a little coaxing, a little dwelling in the details for the significant intimacy of an event to come forth.  Stay in one memory’s time and place for a while.  Hover for thirty minutes or more of writing time in a memory that may have taken all of five minutes in clock time. 

So as you write into the details, close your eyes, breathe, and try to return not to the sweeping surfaces of your memory, but to a particular memory’s nooks and crannies.  A specific tone of voice when your father said for the first time when you were thirty-three that he loved you.  The particular tint of light in the air when you discovered someone had died.  The precise way the floorboards creaked as you walked toward your mother’s room.  Being patient with your drafting may allow you to anchor complex unstated emotions--a complex of emotions, a combination of simultaneous emotions perhaps not yet named in the English tongue--and complex ideas in precise imagery and detail.

Second, you might tend to those images that keep haunting you, that keep returning like fragments of your life song’s refrain.  Three sea turtles hover over my bed.  I’m three, maybe four years old.  I smile, I think, I imagine.  Light on the ceiling and in the air seems dim and yellow as if a flashlight were cast under water--maybe the faint traces of a nightlight in my bedroom’s corner.  It’s my first memory, I think, the first memory I retrieved at nine years old when walking in a field down the road I wondered what was my first memory.  It is perhaps the oldest recurring image in my imagination, one I have replayed and recast a thousand different ways, so many different ways I will never know what was actually there at three or four years old, but the image remains as alive for me as the painted turtle I spotted the other day near the pond of an old farmhouse I wish to buy, a home I wish to own.  If you don’t know what images haunt you, pay attention to the margins of your awareness.  Heed dream images where your unconscious, where your awareness of wonder most readily surfaces.  Or better heed those images that surface just as you’re about to fall asleep or just as you awake, that ethereal space of wonder between dream and wake.  Record them. Write into them.  Describe them as precisely as possible.  An image may lead to a memory, and the memory may lead to a story. 

But let's build upon something introduced in the first rap. A memory and a story, for our purposes, are not necessarily the same thing.   A memory may reconstruct what happened.  In minute detail.  In startling imagery.  But a nonfiction story does more.  The difference between a memory and a story resides in part between the what happened and the so-what, between your reconstruction of events and your narrator’s reflective, inquisitive, engaging, stimulating, musing VOICE.  Between the images and the ideas. 

Part of the so-what--to reiterate something I’ve said earlier--is change.  The main character changes in some way, some subtle, believable way.  Her persona changes from skeptic to believer.  Or her outlook changes.  Or he finds, gradually, through his experiences some small, palm-sized answers to some of his questions.

 And again, the quest of your story relies upon some deep questioning--either stated explicitly or implied in your story.  So, again, at some point, I suggest you step back and wonder.  To wonder is in part to ask questions.  Questions about yourself.  About the experience or memory and why it was important to your character, your persona of that time.  But also to question in the realm of ideas.  What ideas do your memories birth?  Is this story a story about love?  Redemption?  Forgiveness?  Truth?  Deception?  Memory? 

 In Joan Didion's recent memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (Knopf 2005), Didion tells us what happened: Her husband and daily life partner of several decades falls over unexpectedly one evening and dies.  A few weeks earlier, her daughter and only child had been rushed into a hospital emergency room for a possible brain tumor.

Those circumstances are horrific, near unfathomable, the sort of circumstances that leave me reeling, and from them alone she merits my pity.  But from those circumstances alone, she as a writer does not necessarily deserve our rapt attention and time for reading 200-plus pages. Several things save the book from being self-absorbed pity-mongering or from a tedious recounting of "what happened."  Her style, at times crisp and formal, "icy" as she's called in the emergency room, give the book a subtle elegance and at times peculiar detachment.

But her intelligent narrator's voice most keeps me reading. Didion lets her narrator muse and wonder and at times ultimately say something worth saying about some facet of the human condition.  In this case, grief:

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death.  We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks.  We might expect if death is sudden to feel shock.  We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.  We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss.  we do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.  In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing."  A certain forward movement will prevail.  The worst days will be the earliest days.  We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place.  When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death.  We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day?  We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue.  We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion.  Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

That passage leaves me aching and dizzy.  Every time I read it. Throughout the memoir, Didion allows her mind and imagination and heart to move from a scene's images to a muse's ideas.

So, dare to reflect.  To muse. To analyze and synthesize.  To wonder. Dare to say something.  To say something.  About grief.  About marriage.  About idealism.  About striving for perfection.  About daydreaming. 

 You not only have a memory and an imagination and the facility to write.  You also have a voice.   Let that voice vocalize whatever small truths you imagine, whatever small truths bud from your images. 

And where does your voice come from?

In India's Himalayas, an old man told me the story of Vac (mentioned in the Vedas). This goddess, it seems, possessed sacred speech, that capacity to render words with utmost clarity and truth. She yearned to share this gift with human beings, but the other deities wouldn't have it.  "They won't know what to do with it," one of them argued. "You're asking for trouble and disappointment," another one said.  Still, the rebellious goddess persisted, and she dashed away from the divine mountains in protest. 

The deities grew outraged and tried to retrieve her and bring her to justice (in a godly courtroom, I imagine).  Vac, though, sought refuge among the tall trees. "Give her back," the gods insisted. "No," the trees said. "Unless you grant her her wish to share sacred speech with humans."  At last, the gods and goddesses gave in to the trees, and Vac gave us this gift of sacred words.

Many musicians in India, it is said, who play drums and reeds made of wood remember the trees' role in giving them their authentic voice.  I would add, too, that writers whose early instruments were wooden pencils and papyrus also remember this extraordinary gift. 

And to keep what you say authentic and real and free from preconceptions and free from cultural clichés, well, that’s another rap.

Why we even bother--and must bother--to remember these stories is the next rap's subject: Rap #4: THE DRIVE TO RE-MEMBER & TO TELL STORIES.

RAPS ON THE SOUL OF CRAFT

RAP#1: THE DRAFT AS QUEST: FINDING YOUR REAL STORY & SUBJECT

RAP #2: BEING HONEST, BEING AUTHENTIC

RAP #3: THE SACRED VOICE'S MOVEMENT: FROM WHAT HAPPENED TO SO WHAT

RAP #4: THE DRIVE TO RE-MEMBER & TO TELL STORIES

RAP #5: TENDING THE GARDEN: THE FIRE TO PERSEVERE

Copyright 2006  Jeff Davis 

No part of this piece may be reproduced without the express consent of the author.