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.