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| Laurence |
My friend and colleague, Laurence Peters, writes about the self-exploration process of memoir-writing:
Agee is where memoir writing starts for me. It begins with those classic words from A Death in the Family, “We are talking
now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so
successfully disguised to myself as a child.” How can you resist the beat of
that sentence, so perfectly balanced, the voice so intimate and inviting? Agee seems to have a preternatural
understanding about our shifting concepts of self. Look how masterfully the
tense shifts from present historic to simple past and the use of that perfect
phrase “disguised to myself as a child.” There is part of ourselves that
remains behind that is distilled in the next self that comes along and part of
us that is forever lost in the process. Agee writes:
How far we all come. How
far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go
home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all
the way home again in your life. And what's it all for? All I tried to be, all
I ever wanted and went away for, what's it all for?
Few other passages in literature seem to capture so perfectly
the mourning for our lost selves that becomes so inextricably mixed into the
search for meaning in our lives.
Few other writers are able to use their skills with language
and storytelling to tell us not just something about the experience of being a
child, but the pain and beauty of remembering the childhood experience, through
the lens of loss. Here he captures in Keatsian fashion both the sadness and the beauty of memory:
By some chance, here
they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on
this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the
sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my
good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour
of their taking away.
Agee lulls us into experiencing the scene through his eyes
only so far and then pulls up with a startling question that clearly haunted
him then and haunts him now. The question’s sharp almost metaphysical urgency
is so very poignant, coming when you least expect it to emerge:
After a little I am
taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those
receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that
home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me
who I am.
The first time I read that passage it sent a shiver down my
back. I had never read something so beautiful and true about what it was like
not just being a child, but being a person in the world. The question the
writer leaves us with can sound rhetorical, but the memoir writer whether they
want to or not has to find the mettle to grapple with it in one form or
another-”who can tell me who I am?” It
is the key question for any memoir
writer, for no one is going to tell us who we are and it is our task and ours
alone to make those answers as real to ourselves as well as to our readers as
possible. It is also a question for the self alone to discover—it is built into
our life journey.
As writers we have the privilege of using our full intellect,
our conscious and unconscious self our imaginative abilities to probe back into
the details of our lives and go beyond the usual
idle brooding we all, from time to time, engage in. We have a
responsibility to ourselves to probe inside the family dramas that play out
over and over in our heads and explore what happened when we felt forced to make
a choice that may have upset others, either our parents, or those moments when
we first felt the power of that change rattling around in our pockets and
decided that we needed to hop onto that bus and sneak into the downtown cinema,
or when we ran as fast as we could down a hillside rolling over and over into
long summer grass. But these moments,
however beautiful, arresting, heartbreaking or dramatic should not be confused
with our essential selves and our story. They are just interesting fragments. Pull
them together in a row and make a story out of them if you will but they need a
voice, a sensibility, and a perspective if they are going to add up to be more
than just fragments of our past and of interest to other readers.
In other words, where do you search for these lost selves that
can give these stories the resonance they deserve? My best answer is that it
all comes from a commitment to wanting to find a self in the story. Not the
self—just a self, and it is a long complicated process we can best analogize to
beginning a walk down a long country road at night using a flashlight. We may
start with only a rough map, half recalling a few landmarks and some remembered
bends in the river, but once we are committed to the journey we must be
prepared for surprise detours along the way.
We live in such a world of distraction that some of us are not used to
using our minds in such an open and imaginative way, let alone be prepared to
suffer the psychic toll that such openness can bring. But we must not short
change the process—and allow our conscious minds to try to tidy up some of the
narrative structures. In this business of self exploration the unconscious mind
has a big role to play; just think back to any one of those passages from Agee
just quoted—it is the dialogue between the half-formed child and the fully-formed
adult that is so fascinating; such a conversation is only possible if the
subconscious mind is allowed full room to express itself.
In my own memoir writing I found the temptation to connect
various “me’s” together into a coherent narrative was best resisted. In the end
it produced such flat prose that revealed very little about who I was—I was
still representing t a version of myself to a would-be dinner party guest. I
found the real writing excitement was to be found moving away from conventional
storytelling and allowing my unconscious mind to guide me to reveal aspects of
me that I had almost forgotten that would never appear as part of any social
conversation. They remained private, and as yet unexplored parts of me could be
recalled only when I really relaxed and allowed my mind to wander. The scenes
were often random, not particularly important—like the time I copied a painting
by Manet and stayed up half the night to complete it and discovering in the
experience an imaginative energy that kept me going for days during an
otherwise dull winter. Another challenge was to explore how early my
fascination with the America had started. As a small boy I remembered reading
and re-reading a stash of letters my mother had kept hidden in the bottom
drawer of her dresser from a GI who had been smitten by her before my dad came
along. Before writing these scenes I had only a hazy recollection of the
correspondence, but the more I started writing about it the more I remembered,
including the details about the technicolor photographs the GI’s mother had
sent of great iconic places in the US such as the Empire State Building,
Niagara Falls, Yellowstone National Park, and some American university campuses.
How were these images connected to me? Before I could get to that question I
had to answer the question of how my mother related to them—why she had kept
them all these years carefully hidden in the back of a drawer for me to find
one summer day bored out of my mind and looking to find out who I was.
About Laurence:
Dr. Laurence Peters is a global educator—he passionately
believes that we need to help our students achieve a “global perspective” in
their studies. His latest book, Global Education: Using Technology to Bring
the World to Your Students, ISTE, 2009, points to the ways teachers and
their students can use the web to connect with their counterparts globally to
enhance global understanding. Laurence grew up in London England, and
having attended the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, and working for Congress
and the US Department of Education, now lives and works in Washington DC. He
has just completed a book on the Intellectual Origins of the United Nations (to
be published this fall by Palgrave Macmillan) and is currently interested in
the topic of lifelong learning. He encourages everyone to check out his
website, changingtimespress.com
and by completing the survey http://www.changingtimespress.com/blog-2/
which will enable you to win several e-books he, together with his brother, recently
published.
