How does the light get in?

Since I'm between projects ... i.e. I'm not writing ... I'm able to read and, by blogging, think. There is a nice patch of grass between Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and Teresita Fernández's commencement address (curated by Maria Popova for Brain Pickings). The sun is out there. The bugs are under control. I have something chilled in the cooler beside where I lie and look up at the sky.

The kanji for Tsukuru could be one of two words: create or make. Tsukuru's father chooses the make or build word. It takes Tsukuru the whole book to find out that whether he is colorless or not isn't really the point, the point is he needs to build a place (like a train station) that will attract others to visit--perhaps his girlfriend Sara will come and decide to stay forever.

Tsukuru's epiphany:

One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

(A lot of echoes in Naomi Shihab Nye's Kindness.) "Feel the future dissolve in a moment."

Eri is talking to Tsukuru:

"We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty.Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect."

Tsukuru:

Because I have no sense of self. I have no personality, no brilliant color. I have nothing to offer. That’s always been my problem. I feel like an empty vessel. I have a shape. I guess. As a container, but there's nothing inside. I just can't see myself as the right person for her. I think that the more time passes, and the more she knows about me, the more disappointed Sara will be, and the more she'll choose to distance herself from me.

Eri shook her head slowly. "It's no different from building stations. If something is important enough, a little mistake isn't going to ruin it all, or make it vanish. It might not be perfect, but the first step is actually building the station. Right? Otherwise trains won't stop there.

Build "the kind of station where trains want to stop, even if they have no reason to do so."

Tsukuru:

Yet it was this pain, this sense of being choked, that he needed. It was exactly what he had to acknowledge, what he had to confront. From now on he had to make that cold core melt, bit by bit. It might take a long time, but it was what he had to do. But his own body heat wasn't enough to melt that frozen soil. He needed someone else's warmth.

A reply from Teresita Fernández:

A broken bowl would be valued precisely because of the exquisite nature of how it was repaired, a distinctly Japanese tradition of kintsugi, meaning to “to patch with gold”. Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the repair and make it “good as new.” But the tea masters understood that by repairing the broken bowl with the distinct beauty of radiant gold, they could create an alternative to “good as new” and instead employ a “better than new” aesthetic. They understood that a conspicuous, artful repair actually adds value. Because after mending, the bowl’s unique fault lines were transformed into little rivers of gold that post repair were even more special because the bowl could then resemble nothing but itself.

Patching with gold ... isn't that like Richard Ford's "alloyed with loss" metaphor?

"The specific is harder to name than the general." (Fernandez is driving at the specific, the unique, the individual.)

"Artists always start from nothing."

"Make your unknown known." (borrowed from Georgia O'Keefe)

"There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in." (borrowed from Leonoard Cohen)

A tea pot has a lid and a spout. A train station has entrances ... for the trains and for the people ascending or descending stairs, escalators, elevators. If the station is Paddington or Gare d'Orsay, it has lots of windows.

Finished Subtle Bodies

I heard Norman Rush read the early airplane scene from Subtle Bodies … mostly Nina’s voice … at Princeton a couple of years back. I’d been a fan since Rush’s Mating. Who doesn’t love a love story set in the Kalahari savannah with lions?

I picked it up--the smoked turkey between two slices of Murakami. I’d finished the three 1Q84 books and had Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki waiting. So I was viewing Subtle Bodies through the prism of Murakami’s kindness, empathy, generosity to his characters. SB leads with edge. Warmth and empathy is missing in my writing and I was on the lookout for more.

It is a very funny drawing room drama. (And it turns out to be kind as well.)

For example, at the end of chapter 39:

She said, “Sitting here in the gloaming. It’s nice.”
“It isn’t gloaming yet,” Ned said.

Expiating the title:

Ned was having a particularly strong reaction to the idea of Joris leaving.  Partly it was selfish because he hadn’t finished the task of putting together what they had all been, with what they were now. And the question was still there of whether their true interior selves—the subtle bodies inside—were still there and functioning despite what age and accident and force of circumstance may have done to hurt them. He meant something like that … that when they had become friends it had been a friendship established between subtle bodies, by which he meant the ingredients of what they were to be …

This is about what you loved in a friend as a friend…. Maybe there was a window in life and then it closed. … there was that window, before anybody had accomplished anything to speak of, when the ingredients, by which he meant the subtle bodies, shown their light.

Rush (through Ned) is saying friendship is between subtle bodies before walls built by experiences, disappointments, achievements shut the blinds and isolate our interior selves from the world.

Then at the climax, the funeral, when Ned finds his eulogy at page 847 of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, and reads out loud to the deceased and to the deceased's mourners about cultivating happiness:

One moment's being uneasy or not, seems of no consequence; yet this may be thought of the next, and the next, and so on, til there is a large port of misery. In the same way one must think of happiness, of learning, of friendship.  We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed.

Looking Like Yourself as Seen by Others

To get started, here's a poem from John Burnside:

II Self Portrait

The one thing you want to portray
is the one thing it lacks.

Awareness, perhaps, the sense of an outside world:
a holly tree, starlings, the neighbour who plays piano,

or somebody out on the staircase, pausing to listen
for longer than you had expected.

You do this again and again, as if your life
depended on nothing,

light filtered up from the alley, the homeward sound
of shoppers and that constant sense you have

of some place less than half a mile from here,
a favourite bar, a pool hall, someone's bed,

the place you could be right now, with snow coming down
through neon, or that baize light on your hands

that makes you think of summers long ago,
the 'water's edge', the 'faint breeze in the pines',

those girls you really loved, before this patient
look-alike paid forfeit to the dark.

Burnside reads this poem towards the end of this Start the Week podcast. Burns explains that the "look-alike" is the poet looking like himself as seen by others.

From near the end of Dear Denise:

Saturday, June 30

This afternoon I visit the Frick Collection off Central Park East. Another destination to pull me into the city and out of my neighborhood. The promise of a nice dinner. Maybe I meet someone. Better chance at a restaurant than in my house watching Tivo’d reruns of House.

I’m sitting on a bench in the West Gallery staring at the Rembrandt self-portrait. A girl sits beside me. I’m writing my memoir , I want to say.

“I need to work on the backstory. The main part, the flow from the big tragedy until now, until the legal resolution and ultimate divorce, is pretty natural. Any reader will have no problem staying with that narrative.”

The girl might ask what happened? What was the tragedy? But if she didn’t, I’d just continue. “There’s a natural suspense. What happens to Denise? Is Libby going to be ok? Someone close to me is saying I have to flesh out the backstory. I have to make my life before clear. Early days with Denise. The first kiss. The wedding. Then our family. Our perfect life together. Even up to the last night: Jack shoulder to shoulder with me on his bed. We each read our own book.”

The Frick has many portraits, El Greco, Vermeer, van Dyck. Portraits of women by Lawrence and Gainsborough. I sit with the Rembrandt in front of me. “I lived in Holland. Many, many times I’ve been to the Rijksmuseum, to the Van Gogh. I have history with the Dutch masters.” I take another tack. “Self-portrait is memoir. At first glance Rembrandt seems fatigued. You can see his eyes, his life has known sorrow.” He is not showing a reflection of the past; he is showing his present. He had known fatigue but he is not tired in portrait. He is calm, resolute. “Like the painter, who looks for himself on the canvas, I write this memoir.” His oriental robe, red sash, is ostentatious. Is the portrait true to his self? Is it a purely private truth or did he try to make it visible to his audience?

“When Jack was just a baby,” I continue, “he was ugly. His face was all scrunched up. Big head. Looked just like a pug, or like Winston Churchill. Big head, big brain, we said. And at about eight months, the ugly duckling turned. He became Adonis. We loved him ugly. We loved him handsome and beautiful.”

“But love,” I would ask the woman, tacking upwind. “What do you think about love?” My voice would challenge. “You think love is always wonderful, always benign, always a good thing?” She’d be silent in the force of my questions. “Denise loved him too much .”

I wouldn’t be saying this. I wouldn’t be talking about Jack that way. Not to someone I didn’t know. Not to someone I just met.

₪

In Burnside's poem the problem with self portrait (introspection) is that it isolates the Self from the Others.To address this, Burnside layers in the outside world (observed and remembered): snow falling, the sound of shoppers or a piano.... We are social creatures. Without the outside world we are only partially ourselves, even as we strive to emulate the Self seen by others.

If our Self is defined by others, mine started with my parents, my sisters. Over time my others switch to Denise (behind Denise my colleagues at Lucent) and to Libby and Jack. In the memoir, I've lost Jack. I am breaking free of Denise and a yearning for new Others. In this scene I discuss Rembrandt and my memoir with an imagined woman.

In my memoir, I include letters to Denise. She is one reader, one Other. I hope you will be another. Even at the time, I knew those letters would make the backbone of my memoir. I knew they would stand watch against all the portraying and enacting in the narrative that surround them.

Book Fatigue

I'm in the last 30 days of the book and I'm tired.  If the "art" of my book is depicting my grief, then I've read one too many fragmented emails to my daughter or to friends.  I don't know whether my fatigue matches the Reader's, and I should pay editorial attention to it.  Or is it just that I've been at these two rewrites for a year?

Since the clear conventional wisdom says I have too many words, when in doubt, cut.

I'll try the incremental approach--much like I do everything else. First I'll prune the bush. As close as I can to the trunk. What dies will eventually fall to the ground.  A strategy.  One that keeps me in it until The End.

In my session today, my therapist John, said he'd read my memoir as if it was a novel. Rick Rofihe, one my fiction workshop teachers, said I used "novelistic" techniques to tell my story. I guess my new agent query letter should reflect something of this. In one of the many ways this memoir is unconventional, the narrator (I) tells a story, with a protagonist and an antagonist, a beginning, middle and end covering a specific period of time, the year after Jack was killed.

Book Length

My word count is ~150,000. A quick survey of blog posts recommends 110,000 as the top end that I should shoot for. That seems consistent with guidelines from a couple of book contests I'm looking at--a maximum 400 pages. Check out Blue's indefeasible blog for example word counts, for example, on PEN/Faulkner Award winners.  Coincidentally, this 2008 post from Blue seems like her final post.

If I cut the epilogue, my word count is 148,292.

If I were to do some book-wide deletions, among areas to consider are:

• all email (Libby/lawyers ...)
• fugue ... no I think the sensual/physical companionship is important
• all excerpts from books (Damasio ...)
• dramatic cuts redundancy and chit chat from letters
• Sadoff visit
• long letters on the Dad's and on anger
• Lucent stuff ... Craig said interesting
• rework the "long" stuff ... when I read it it feels like a slog even to me
• Houston Law Review article
• bail argument
• Munchhausen

Here is one argument for self-publishing.  I can make a Director's cut.  I can rage war on my manuscript to submit it to contests, and then add content back in.  It won't be a complete waste of time. I'm sure that forcing myself to 70 pages would yield some very good ideas.

Distracted

Last Wednesday the Seattle Public Library and Smashwords offered a workshop on self-publishing: I Typed "The End." Now What? How to Turn Your Manuscript Into a Book. This was as disruptive to my revision process as Tony Hoagland's workshop where he insisted our journal writing should be in complete sentences.  Tony is not someone one can ignore.

One of the first things I had to do was go through my manuscript and delete the double spaces at the ends of sentences. And learn to compose new sentences without them.

This morning I've been trying to decide what size book I should publish: 5 1/4 x 8, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, or 6 x 9.

Yesterday I activated the Kindle app on my phone and laptop. I downloaded calibre.

I can't stop pouring over the Joel Friedlander's The Book Designer blog.

I've barely noticed the S&P 500's decline (not true). Why am I doing these things instead of writing? I'm returning to Beth Jusino's self-publishing workshop Wednesday night in Ballard for Selling Your Self-Published Book: Getting Your E-Book in Front of Readers.  Will I see you there?

Finished the (this) rewrite

About two weeks ago I finished the rewrite.  Since then I've been going through the draft mostly to catch up to the way I handle tenses ... the present of 2006 & 2007.  The past in moments of reflection.  I've also cleaned up some formatting.

Now I'll read through it again and hopefully tidy up some stuff.  I have left lots of comments and highlighted sections in the manuscript that I know I have to return to.  I don't know how other writers do it.  Do they force themselves to stay on a page, in a paragraph until that get the revision perfect?  Or do they plow ahead and hope a light bulb will go on sometime and the revision will be obvious when they return?  That's my method.  But it may lead to endless rewrites.

I think it is also time to resume sending off query letters to agents.

I gone through all my comments, deleted about 100 which were taken care of in the last couple of revisions.  I have ~200 left to consider.

More of the Richard Ford branch I pruned

Thursday, June 21

In Ford’s book now, Frank is sitting at a bar browsing the pages of a free advertising rag, “The Buyer’s Guide,” and comes across a framed box entitled “Profiles in Real Estate Courage.”  The story celebrates Frank Frantal getting back in the saddle selling real estate, a year after his son had been killed by a drunken snowmobiler in eastern PA.

In this strange state I for this moment find myself, and for reasons both trivial and circumstantial (the bar, the booze, the day, even Frank Frantal), my son Ralph Bascombe, age twenty-nine (or for accuracy’s sake, age nine) comes seeking an audience.[1]

It may go without saying, but when you have a child die—as I did nineteen years ago—you carry him with you forever and ever after.

I was with Ford here.

Though what has happened is that my life’s become alloyed with loss.  Ralph, and then Ralph being dead, long ago embedded in all my doings and behaviors.  And not like a disease you carry, that never gets better, but more the way being left-handed is ever your companion, or that you don’t like parsnips and never eat them, or that once there was a girl you loved for the very first time and you can’t help thinking of her—nonspecifically—every single day.  And while this may seem profane or untrue to say, the life it’s made has been and goes on being a much more than merely livable life.  It’s made a good life, this loss, one I don’t at all regret.  (The Frantals could not be expected to believe this, but maybe can in time.)

I was with the Frantals here, furious at the presumptuous words.

---

[1] Ibid., pg 344.

I had these excerpts in my memoir draft, because they were in my journal from 2007.  It was part of my unfolding life.  I was reading psychology and neurology books, that year, looking for an explanation.  I also read poems and novels.  Richard Ford wrote about losing a son; it resonated.  Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, resonated--a loved one gone crazy.

So why delete it?  This part is in June, towards the end of the book, and while it may depict my grief to the reader, I've already done quite a bit of that by now.  The reader will be looking for climax and denouement.  And I didn't have one ... Frank, his dead son Ralph, the Frantals didn't lead me to one ... and the reader might feel a bit jerked around if this late in my story I include these excerpts and then don't come back to them for any resolution whatsoever.

Now years later, I might write that alloyed with loss is an excellent way to describe my life after Jack was killed.  And perhaps after a full nineteen years I could echo Frank and say it's made a good life.

Deleted one stranded branch of my tree

Excerpts, now deleted, from my memoir.  (I do agree with Ford that some times simple words like surprised are the best we have.)

Sunday, June 11

After 200 pages I’m starting to relax into Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land.  I’m gradually lowering my guard.  I have a ton of respect for Ford.  I’ve read all his books.  He was the first author whose hardcover first editions I bought—at list price—wanting him to have the just proceeds of his work.  But I’m not willing yet to trust his judgment on the death of your child.

There are similarities between Frank’s life, Ford’s narrator, and my own.  Frank has lost a child.  Frank has had a marriage dissolve.  Frank has a daughter.  Frank lives in New Jersey.

Frank rejects the “ethical-cultural-response that catastrophe’s ‘a good thing for everybody,’ because “it dramatizes life’s great mystery and reveals how much all is artifice-connected response to things is just made-up stuff anyway.[1]”

I couldn’t agree with Frank more.

The catastrophe in this case is that Frank’s second wife Sally has just come home from a weekend at her former in-laws, where she faced the surprising reappearance of her ex-husband, lost and presumed dead for thirty five years.  When Sally sat Frank down on the couch and gave him this news, Frank was as surprised as Sally that her long-lost first husband had appeared in her in-laws foyer.  “Sometimes simple words,” Franks reflects, like surprised, “are the best.”

In Sally’s behalf, Frank narrates, she was dazed.  She’d gone to Illinois and seen a ghost.  It’s the kind of shock that make you realize that life only happens to you, and to you alone, and that any concept of togetherness, intimacy, and union, abiding this and abiding that is a hoot and a holler into darkness.[2]

I was willing to trust Ford enough to see what happened next.

---

[1] Ford, Richard, The Lay of the Land, pg 222.

[2] Ibid., pg 227.

Finished May rewrite

It took me a long time to finish revising the month of April.  May went faster.  Now I start June.  The book will end in the middle of July with my "culminating" letter to Denise and a visit with Dr. Sadoff.

Certain things are wrapping up now (in May).

• The court case.
• The unsent letters--the conversation with the memory of Denise--the present, thankfully, crowding out the past.
• Libby's school year.
• My dreams seem to be building to a climax
• Reclaiming my complete self

Is that enough denouement to satisfy The Reader?

Certain things are taking over.

• Alcatel Lucent -- implicitly.  My job too boring to be too explicit.
• loneliness
• what I label it my fugue life--indulging in a fantasy search for a new woman/ mate/ partner/ companion

Does my loneliness and fugue state give the lie to "reclaiming my complete self?"  Particularly that word "complete?"  Or does it make it true?

Other things will start soon--the divorce and ultimately selling the house and moving.  These won't be in the book.

Each day when I approach the draft I have to nourish my mood.  My mood (motivation, energy) can collapse various ways:

• I start believing all my writing is shitty
• The content (anger at Denise, grieving Jack)
• And my own sense accomplishment, contribution.  Like Maria Popova writes of Flannery O'Connor, I am afflicted with time.
• And then the just utter bullshit things like:  is the stock market up or down?  how is USA or Holland or CONCACAF doing in the World Cup?

Hoagland on Glück

Glück's early poems are characterized by "imperial tone, and plain, relentless language. Glück issues forth her truth-statements with prosecutorial logic."  The Reader feels the "thrill of absolutism."

Hoagland quotes "Moonless Night:"

Such a mistake to want
clarity above all things.

In later work (Ararat) Glück explores the "paradox of certainty achieved at the cost of estrangement."

Hoagland on Hass

"Hass would like to avoid the regrettable crudity of being explicit; he would rather endlessly infer."  That sounds something like what I'm worried about in writing past truth.

"Hass would rather be a scribe than an oracle."

"Hass perceives the world as so stuck together, it can't be unstuck: out of the adhesion comes the poetry."  Hoagland can appreciate the "rippling resonance" of Hass's writing in a way most readers cannot. The Reader, like myself, who just meets the poem on the page and is not versed in Hass's personal biography will still recognize the extraordinary writing.

My memoir has coded language that someone who knows me will find more resonant.  While that must be true of any memoir, since "Dear Denise" is full of verbatim letters and email from 2006, private meanings particularly weigh down my book.

In my memoir I'm at April 16, 2007.  I'm fumbling through metaphors, on the page, for how I parent Jack.  Does blood transfusion work?  Is Jack a bank and I'm depositing money?  Pruning a tree? Training a long distance runner or swimmer?

I'm not sure there is a day of writing that passes that I don't recall Alice Truax's advice: intentionality.  I have to intend every word, image, feeling.  The Reader has to know I'm in control.

Since I'm revising from the calm distance of 2014, I should present the single best fully formed metaphor to The Reader.  Then there can be other writing, like the verbatim letters or cryptic notes from therapy sessions, that are fragmented and impressionistic, that will infer and not be explicit.  And the art, as Hoagland writes about Hass, is in "the arrangement of scale and variety."

Hoagland on Pinsky

I picked up Hoagland's Real Sofistikashun; I don't know why I ever put it down.  In Chapter 3 Hoagland gives Pinsky, Hass, Gluck as examples of how poets (great poets) develop over time.  He writes "the loss of innocence is inevitable, but one that has its compensations: skill, perspective and choice."

Pinsky develops from "explicator to gnostic namer ... one who ushers us toward Mystery."  Pinsky wants to render the kaleidoscope of experience, "to praise it, to invoke it and to provoke us to wonder."  He doesn't "strive toward intimacy with the reader."  The poem is a "dramatic performance" that offers "spectacle and sensation."

In an age that mistrusts language as never before, in which many poets take the inadequacy of speech as a central preoccupation, Pinsky is a rarity, the contemporary poet who has found language adequate, fruitful, and enlivening.

In "Ode to Meaning" Pinsky declares "You are the wound. You | be the medicine."

For my memoir I need to keep these words close: offer spectacle, be the namer, render sensation, provoke wonder and challenge Meaning to be the medicine.

letters want to be read

I was reading this month's Harper's, the LeBlanc article on Doug Stanhope, and LeBlanc' points out that the place to perfect a stand-up act is in front of the audience.  What is the equivalent proving ground for a memoir?  If I had subscribers, I would publish like a Hardy serial and get feedback from readers.  Isn't that the way Wool developed into a book?

The book is epistolary ... letters want to be read.

If I'm having a conversation with someone don't I often go out of my way to be understood?

I'm starting in on March now ...

writing past truth

My rewrite has slowed considerably in the last couple of weeks due, in part, to a lot of anxiety about money.  But also I suspect that I'm not really in a hurry to finish.

A writer, Sol, I met at the Ballard Starbucks recommended Constance Hale's Sin and Syntax.  Yes, we should rewrite until our thoughts are clear and vividly expressed.  But what do you do when you distrust the clarity?  What if I write past truth to clarity?  In my memoir, now, I'm rewriting mid-February and I'm revisiting how I fell in love with Denise despite the beige jeans she snagged on the chain-link fence protecting Waveland golf course from late night escapades.  I can be clear about the setting, and I be clear about what the beige jeans reveal about me, but how I can be clear about love?

How I Save the Past?

I’m thinking about memory right now.  Different types of memory … maybe I rank the types from most vivid to least.  (I’m trying to depict in my memoir why there are some memories of Jack, I don’t want to recall, because I don’t want to lose them.)

1. A flashback.  Whatever the trigger, a smell, reading an email from 2006 for the first time, a photograph ... I’m transported straight back into the scene.  Almost like a waking dream, or perhaps, psychologically, a delusion.   Feels real.  I have the same emotions in the present that I had in the past.  No discontinuity.  They start where they left off.  Or maybe even new emotions now … that I was unwilling or unable to let myself experience in the past.  As if they were locked up waiting for a trigger to unlock them.
2. I’m walking down street on my way to coffee on Phinney Ridge and see a fence with slats.  I recall my dog Prince from my childhood.  I come home from school and find Prince smiling at me--his head stuck between horizontal slats in the fence.  He's dying of thirst, he tongue droops from his mouth, and he's happy to see me.  That memory is emotional, but I know I’m experiencing a memory.  I’m here, 53, in Seattle, revisiting a pleasant scene from my childhood.  I almost feel that hot, Gulf Coast sun on my face.  And the humidity.  Almost, but not really.  (It is also a social memory.  A boy and his dog.)
3. Type 3 is a kind of rehearsed memory.  It is familiar.  I return to it often and it has lost some of its emotional significance.  Diluted.  Maybe from my childhood, again, sitting on pink, ratty sprung couch watching Hogan’s Heroes with my dad in the den.  There were years of evenings like that … so my memory may not be a specific evening but a blend of many.  It feels indicative--a second or third layer removed from the actual event.
4. Unemotional memories … like my phone number.  Or maybe directions to the house I grew up in.  I could describe to you precisely how to get from the airport to my house in Nassau Bay.  But if I’m down there in Houston, and actually in a rental care driving the route, the memories become more vivid /emotional … a song comes on the radio from my high school days.  Then it is like memory 2 above. 

Memories types 1 & 2 surprise me, catch me off guard.  (Much coaching on vivid writing is about making the words surprise The Reader, and giving the words emotional weight.  I don't want to resort to tricks or gimmicks to surprise, but when I can find a way in the memoir to surprise, w/o the gimmick, then the memoir is better.)

So how do I save the past?  How do I preserve the freshness/immediacy of memories of Jack?  If each time I replay a memory, it loses significance.  I guess that’s a gift or skill actors have.  If they have to cry in a scene, there’s a memory they can draw on, and they can put themselves back in that emotional state.  Maybe they have the ability to infinitely re-imagine, recreate the scene … vs. remembering it.  How do I develop that ability?

Memory 1, the flashback, ironically I guess, is a symptom of PTSD, and those flashbacks are really really hard to get rid of.  Often they are violent.  So that durability makes me hopeful that I won't lose the flashback no matter how frequently it is triggered. I yearn for any flashback to Jack.  Even a traumatic one.

I worry, though, about fading and changing the memory and losing the connection to the past.  I believe that science posits that each time you recall a memory, you corrupt it a little with something from the present when it is returned to the memory banks.  (The present can be from your narrative self--other parts of the story you are telling yourself now about your past.)

But I might be conflating two things.  The trigger and the memory.  The object, for example the photograph that triggers the memory.  Maybe the photograph loses its impact as a trigger if you keep going back to it.  Maybe the memory is still there but you have to stumble upon a different, fresher object (memento, totem, talisman … ) to trigger it.

A rhetorical question.

And another, what past do I save?

the author fires the arrow prepared for him

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.” 
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

My friend and I have been talking recently about the connection between reader and author, between artist and viewer, calling attention to something already known or felt.  Or, perhaps misapplying a Kafka: "the wound fits perfectly the arrow."  The author fires the arrow, maybe an author long dead, and it fits the reader's wound.

(PS. I went to Goodreads to find the Kafka quote, and its version was: “all that matters is that the wound fit the arrow.”) Really quite a different meaning.  Now I'll have to search out the original.

(PPS. Mark Slouka's article in 2003 Harper's gave me the Kafka quote.)

(PPPS. I'm getting close to finishing chapter four, November, in my rewrite.)

terrific action of unfathomed nature

From my reading couple of weeks ago:

[Boldwood] had no light and careless touches in his constitution, either for good or for evil. Stern in the outlines of action, mild in the details, he was serious throughout all. He saw no absurd sides to the follies of life, and thus, though not quite companionable in the eyes of merry men and scoffers, and those to whom all things show life as a jest, he was not intolerable to the earnest and those acquainted with grief. Being a man who read all the dramas of life seriously, if he failed to please when they were comedies, there was no frivolous treatment to reproach him for when they chanced to end tragically.

Nobody knew entirely; for though it was possible to form guesses concerning his wild capabilities from old floodmarks faintly visible, he had never been seen at the high tides which caused them.

I finished Far From the Madding Crowd Sunday. Spoiler alert: Mr. Boldwood's "wild capabilities" surface.  He murders Sgt. Troy at the book's climax, and uses the insanity defense to win a life sentence.  Wasn't expecting the insanity defense.

The book ends, rapidly, just pages later, with our long-suffering, dutiful hero, Gabriel Oak, and Bathsheba Everdene marrying.

In the afterword, James Wright paraphrases Yvor Winters that "the language of Hardy's novels is often most beautiful when it is most like the language of his poems."

Then Wright quotes D.H.Lawrence: the "quality which Hardy shares with the great writers, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Tolstoi, this setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature; setting a smaller system of morality, the one grasped and formulated by the human consciousness within the vast, uncomprehended and incomprehensible morality of nature or of life itself..."  Through Oak's "wise passiveness, the sorrows of Bathsheba are given their shape."

Like Oak, I want my protagonist to be both part of the "small action" as well as the "terrific action of unfathomed nature," and like Gabriel and Bathsheba, act morally in the face of the uncomprehended and incomprehensible.

Hardy's characters don't develop so much as mature, age in the face of new circumstances.  They stay true to their personality.  In my memoir I don't think any characters change.  I'd been viewing this as a failure of the narrative--its dramatic arc.  I'm more at peace with the revision process now.  I've finished the rewrites of Aug/Sept/October--at least this pass.

World of Fire. World of Original Experience.

“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.” 
― Joseph Campbell

"Enter the forest at the darkest point."

"You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations."

Today I'm re-writing October 5th and my mood is sinking.  Because of technical problems and self-doubt about my craft and the story (replaying conversations with my old boss, my new boss and Grace in narration--should I break the scene apart?) but also the hero's path.  October 5th is a dark entry point, but is my memoir the right forest?  Using Campbell's word "bliss," which strikes me as ridiculous, if I finish this rewrite will I find bliss?  Or does this path lead to misery.  After I spend and hour or two on it, I'm reliably depressed.

I guess the analogy is false.  The book is the dark path.  The forest is life.  I can choose another path but not another life.

3 of 23 Pound Poetry Don'ts

Read Ezra Pound’s List of 23 “Don’ts” For Writing Poetry (1913)

in Poetry | January 30th, 2014

4. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.

13. When Shakespeare talks of the ‘Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

18. A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure...

Curated by: Open Culture

I've had a short holiday from my book.  Resumed yesterday.  The break makes it clear, that in addition to the standard writerly insecurities, the subject matter brings me down.

Hamlet or Macbeth

Butcher's Chapter 9:  Plot and Character.

The emotions must harden into will and the will express itself in deed.

Hamlet: Events are then brought about, not by the free energy of will, but by acts of arrested volition, by forces such as operate in the world of dreamland.

Macbeth: strong, dominant, militant frame of mind.  Nothing is more wonderful than the resistless impulse, the magnificent energy of will with which a Macbeth or Richard III goes to meet his doom.

The fate that overtakes the hero is no alien thing, but his own self recoiling upon him for good or evil.

I'm pro reality, because lack of reality killed Jack.  That puts me clearly on the side of Reason.  My Reason failed to protect Jack, but that is secondary.  Primary, her irrationality, killed Jack.

The test of a man's sanity is the relation in which his mind stands to the universal.  Denise's action defied the universal.

Do I sound like Hamlet?

the end is the thing

Karr's art of Memoir

I don’t try to reconstruct empty spots. I’ve been vigorously encouraged by various editors to fictionalize. They would say, It must have been a very dramatic scene, saying goodbye to your mother. And I remember reading that Vivian Gornick said to her students, “Just make it up and see if it’s true.” Bullshit. In fiction, you manufacture events to fit a concept or an idea. With memoir, you have the events and manufacture or hopefully deduce the concept. You don’t remember something? Write fiction.

It pissed me off when I saw James Frey on Larry King saying, You know, there’s a lot of argument about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. You know what? There isn’t. If it didn’t happen, it’s fiction. If it did happen, it’s nonfiction. If you see the memoir as constructing a false self to sell to some chump audience, then you’ll never know the truth, because the truth is derived from what actually happened. Using novelistic devices, like reconstructed dialogue or telescoping time, isn’t the same as ginning up fake episodes.

Today I just couldn't get going.  I was in a muddle about verb tenses: my book goes in and out of past and present, even inside a paragraph.  It felt lazy to me.  One model novel, Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene, is most mostly present, but has past in there.  But always in a discrete paragraph or fragment.

My friends David & Christine bumped into me in the Ballard library.  I confessed my struggle on tenses.  Since David had mentioned Karr and Liar's Club, I went to the shelves, picked up Lit, and skimmed a lot of tense changes by Karr.  Mostly past.  Like mine.  But present came flooding in for whole chapters.  So use the verb tense the story demands.

Autobiography is mostly contingent on voice. If the voice is strong enough, the reader will go anywhere with you. And who’s better at syntax and diction than a poet?

So back home, google, and this Paris Review interview of Karr in 2009.

 Prose always seems inadequate to me because every line isn’t a jewel. But it can’t be. Prose favors information; poetry favors music and form.

The memoir’s antagonist has to be some part of the self, and the self has to be different at the end of the book than it was at the beginning. Otherwise you have what I call the sound-bite memoir or the ass-whipping memoir. 

On Neiman Storyboard:

That suggests that you are supposed to give the [Reader] something: an experience – that distilled experience.

Interviewed by Dean Nelson in 2011, around minute 8:20, Karr says she doesn't write for herself--not "what is important to me."  My whole memoir is what is important to me.  Hmmm.  Should I say fuck it, shred the thing?

At minute 9:50, a memoirist has events, and you don't know the truth of those events, so you manufacture meaning from those events.

At minute 15, the truth has to ambush you.  Is this example, the events are Karr leaving for California.  Her own life narrative had been that her dad left her.  She had to scratch at the story, the events, to find the truth--that she left him not that he left her.  So how would that apply to my story?  What myth have I created, that through the writing of this memoir, I'll find the truth behind?  I really resist the pithy answers.  I don't trust "finding the truth."  I think it is just a new narrative--one that replaces another.  But as I do this rewrite, I am trying to open my mind.

She Died of the Fifth Act

I added more content today; about Brown and my daughter.  I hope soon I can start pruning, so the story won't be too vast to be grasped by the mind.

Butcher, in Chapter 7, says Unity for Aristotle is the principle of limits.  Without Unity, my action would be undefined, indeterminate, accidental to The Reader.  Uh huh.

Amusing quote regarding the history of the stage:  "What did she die of?" was asked concerning one of the characters of a bad tragedy.  "Of what? of the fifth act!"

I think my entire book is Falling Action.  I don't have a denouement where all minor effects are subordinated to the sense of an ever-growing unity.

The epic is a story of the past; a drama, the present.

In Greek tragedy, the tragic hero often fights against destiny; in my book, I fight against something equally rational: psychosis.  Temporary psychosis.

The hero:  character is destiny.

full circle today

I wrote myself full circle.  Around 11 I panicked.  I found new content that was evocative, and that I had to find a way to add that to the draft.  The material was heavy (which already brings me down), but the idea that my draft was expanding was disheartening.  It's already too long.  Each thing I add makes the final edit harder.  And there was the fear of more landmines out there to trip over.

I took a break.  Showered.  Ate lunch.  I found a way to constructively attack the new content.

And then, about 3/4 of the way through the new content, I realized that what I was working on was from November 2007--not November 2006.

Yes I wasted some time, but the good news is that today's wild goose chase validates not just my composition process but also how I'm approaching this revision.

Grave and Great

Still Butcher on Aristotle: Chapter 6 "The Function of Tragedy"

The action in a tragedy should be grave and great, and at the climax, at Recognition, produce catharsis in the audience.  Involuntary.  A purge of feeling.

Plato:

• 'the natural hunger after sorrow and weeping' is kept under control in our own calamities, but is satisfied and delighted by the poets.  (My emotions were kept under control for the time-frame of my book.  I had convulsions of grief during the early years, but I it wasn't until the day my divorce was finalized that the fatigue, the relief from a long, long fight with Denise, and the exhaustion from anger was mixed in with sobbing.  So when I think of catharsis, and what that convulsion can physically feel like, I think of that day.  How I can set the table for that in The Reader?)
• it makes anarchy of the soul by dethroning Reason in favor of feeling
• through drama man becomes many instead of one

Aristotle:

• the pleasurable calm that follows when passion is spent--"a harmless joy"
• pity turns into fear where the object is so nearly related to us that the suffering seems to be our own

Butcher

• tragedy provides not merely an outlet for pity and fear, but a distinctively aesthetic satisfaction to purify and clarify the feelings.  (I get lost here.  That somehow seeing the events dramatized, the characters and actions, grave and great, universal, and I guess the audience, in concert, reacting to the spectacle--all that is necessary to purify and clarify.  If it is only to provide The Reader perspective, I can imagine accomplishing that in telling my story.  But there isn't the Universal.  My story is the Particular.  It is very grave but not great, and the Reader will miss the collective response of fellow audience members.  And I don't have climax! I'm doubtful about what purify and clarify means.  I don't see how I can provoke it.  How can I excite the Reader to catharsis?)
• the audience is at an ideal distance from the hero.  "the pressure of immediate reality (which raises our defenses and coping mechanisms?) is removed."  (I'm getting closer here to understanding.  Distance. Plus now I can accept the need for "universal," otherwise the Reader won't be able to identify enough with the hero to be empathetic.)
• each thing that happened could not have been otherwise.  (Lots of randomness in my story.  That Aristotle would want refined out.)
• the pain is expelled when the taint of egoism is removed?? (This is too glib.)
• This is my central disagreement. "The private life of an individual (me), tragic it may be in its inner quality (yes), has never been made the subject of the highest tragedy.  It's consequences are not of far-reaching importance; it does not move the imagination with sufficient power."  (And Oedipus does?  Why?  Wouldn't the Reader have more fear if the hero was just an every day individual?  One thing about Greek drama is that (Oedipus, for example) the story is already well known by the audience.  So being great in that sense, famous, provides the audience the opportunity to be constantly comparing Sophocles version with the story they learned growing up.  A side-effect, then, of Oedipus being great, but not the central point.)
• the divine plan of the world. (Butcher reveals some of his baggage.)
• the more exclusive and self-absorbed a passion is, the more does it resist kathartic treatment.  (And Butcher knows this to be true how?)

I am choragus:

There is a Denise in your life.  Don't presume Reason will save you from his or her irrational act.  Either by warning you or by giving you the know-how to stop it.  There is no antecedent to her act.  If I, if you, have the knowledge, you would have acted to prevent it.

I don't have a climax.

• the NGRI verdict was an anti-climax.
• Denise's move back to Trenton Psychiatric was an anti-climax.
• filing for divorce was an anti-climax.
• getting laid, if i had, would have been an anti-climax.

Getting Jack back, now that would been a climax.

And the only moment I get close to that, is when I break down weeping, and as I have written, those moments I cherish.

I want to give that to you Dear Reader.

There is a Denise in your life.  Either you have suffered a tragedy like I, and this story can break through your defenses and quotidian coping mechanisms, and you can weep for your Jack; or you haven't met your tragedy yet. Then the death of my Jack, I hope, can help you see, for a second, what your Denise could do.

Catharsis:

• involuntary
• convulsive
• transport The Reader out of his hubris, his complacency, just for a second
• relief, it's over

The End of Fine Art

I finished Chapter 4 of S. H. Butcher's essay on Aristotle's Poetics.  I'm pausing from my rewrite to collect my thoughts.  I wasn't making much headway today anyway.

BTW, Chapter 4 is nicely entitled "The End of Fine Art."

Why have I been reading Poetics and Butcher's criticism?  It's interesting.  It's a nice counterweight to writing time.  When I write I eventually hit a wall.  My mood darkens, thoughts become heavy, foggy.  Reading Poetics is half-time.  Like the coach  putting correctives up on the board, and then telling the team we're not committed, not working hard enough.  Then kicking our ass out of locker room onto the field for the afternoon writing shift.

So what are some of my questions or conclusions:

1. Will The Reader react with pity and fear?  That is my intent.  I want recognition that there, but for the grace of god, go I.  To get past the headline--soccer mom kills 12 year old son--to--it could happen to you.  And here's what it would feel like if it did.
2. Plot: I don't stick to the probable impossibilities.  I include the improbable incidents that happened. Thus sacrificing coherence. Why? Because they happened.  In order for The Reader to imagine what it feels like.
3. The deux ex machina is Denise's psychotic action.  Outside the plot.  If it wasn't an irrational act it would be the fitting climax of a tragedy.  Aristotle writes "when the tragic incident occurs between those who are near or dear to one another--if, for example ... a mother kills her son--these are the situations to be looked for by the poet."  The story turns into memoir when the author is the father.  Poetry (or tragic drama) if the poet was a third party.
4. Where nature fails art steps in.  Aristotle's view that art perfects nature--imitating the particular in a way to reveal the universal ideal to the [cultivated] audience.  In one regard I do NOT want to do this.  I want to show nature fails.  No amount of Reason can stop it.  It is hubris to think you can.  And I don't want to allow The Reader an escape by believing that Reason could have triumphed.  However, I do need to be artistic or poetic.  I am selecting, editing, shaping incidents.  I am writing.  I want what I write to breathe life into my grief (confused thoughts, chaotic emotions, shock ... ) on the page in a way The Reader can personally imagine.
5. The poet imitates nature.  She creates a picture or "phantasy" on "the border-line of sense and thought." This is where the book operates--on that border-line.  The phantasy is an after-image that stays (or can be recalled) in the mind after the object that first excited it has been withdrawn.  Produces, in Aristotle's view, the spontaneous and necessary union of intellect and sense.  (Sense, here is sensory perception.)
6. The book is history not poetry in that it relates what happened, not what may happen.  Poetry exhibits a more rigorous connection of events than history does.
7. Oh yes, lest I forget, my memoir depicts meaner mortals, average people, not heroes like Hamlet.  The Reader does not "think of measuring the intrinsic probability of what they say or do."  Heroes are allowed to be or do the implausible.
8. Length: if it is too small, the whole is perceived but not the parts.  If too large, the parts are perceived but not the whole.  (The story is currently at risk of being too large.)
9. Side-effect: expose the fiction in the word psychosis.  That everyone is seduced by.  When it happened.  By real actors in the story.  And by The Reader.
10. Quoting Coleridge, Butcher says poetry steals access through our senses to our minds.  I do want to do this.  Particularly if "mind" includes the subconscious, the visceral, can I say, our emotional understanding as well.
11. Goethe, not Aristotle writes: "I had, as a poet, nothing more to do than artistically round them off and elaborate such views and impressions, and by means of a lively representation so to bring them forward that others might receive the same impression in hearing or reading my representation of them."
12. Ok back to Aristotle. I agree, aesthetic enjoyment proceeds from an emotional rather than from an intellectual source.  The main appeal of poetry is not to the reason but to the feelings.  (This reminds me that the whole reason I started writing poetry was because I was confronted at points in this memoir, with trying to say something that prose couldn't express.)
13. The pleasure of art is not for the artist but for those who enjoy what she creates.  (This reminds me of what Nick Flynn said during audience Q&A about catharsis.  He doesn't achieve catharsis writing poetry; he does sometimes achieve it reading it.)  Venue: http://www.poetshouse.org/programs-and-events/readings-and-conversations/art-losing-nick-flynn-marie-howe-kevin-young
14. tragedy reveals the true nature of a thing.  Yes, I agree with that.  I would like my book to achieve that.
15. the end then, is a state of feeling, it is a feeling that is proper to a normally constituted humanity
16. a poet charms the mind not instructs it

Examples of Aristotle's hubris:

1. poetry turns facts into truths
2. what has never anywhere come to pass, that alone does never grow old
3. no one can be a good poet who is not first a good man
4. philosophy is higher than poetry.  if poetry serves emotion (and sense) and philosophy serves reason, that philosophy is only higher than poetry, if reason is higher than emotion.
   Reason that only works in the ideal world, and fails when it confronts reality (i.e. my story), places philosophy lower than poetry.

Now Plato's turn.  Hubris?

1. art reveals to sense the world of ideas.  I know a conceptual artist that surely subscribes to this view.