Finding Me, by Dr. Laurence Peters

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.