‘Rememory’ in Time
I lost my notebook. My book. I'm annoyed. I bought a new one recently and filled only three pages. That's the good news. The bad news is that they were three good pages. I'll just have to recreate it. Not happy. It was hard enough to get going again on the next chapter, the beginning of which is in that notebook.
When I'm blocked, I put my head down. I rub my temples furiously to try to get something to come to me. I close my eyes as tight as I can to maybe get some blood flowing faster. Hoping that some memory somewhere will tell me that it is what I should be writing about next. I've got them all in me. I see them in pictures. Yet to describe them in words, to put them in order the way I see them, is the challenge.
I want to relay things confusedly. Or is it that I want to relay things and they just come out confusedly? I want the back and forth to connect seamlessly. But I lose track. I stop and look at my notebook or my screen. The skin on the side of my head starts to wear down. I see colors and stars screaming behind my eyelids the way they did when I was a kid and squeezed my eyes closed for fun before going to sleep. Seamless. What is that? Life happens in order, so to tell it out of such is setting myself up for disaster. Right? Maybe.
The trick is in looking back with as wide a lens as possible. Piecing life developments together like a puzzle is hard, but there are times, like when I'm on a roll and can see the next 10 pages, when it just falls into place. The benefit of time and space materializes into a rather sweet clarity, even if the memories aren't so sweet.
In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison employed the word "rememory" to signify the process of not only remembering but also knowing what to do with the memories once they surface. That's one thing. It's another to make sense out of it through writing. Because it has to become a narrative of sorts with emotion that is placed back on the memories. How do you do this? Through voice maybe. Pace. And then that lens.
Taking the memories and reaching a suitable conclusion that weaves itself seamlessly into the future. That's what life is: a series of events viewed as one for the purpose of teaching you how to live the next day. It's also the ability, and even willingness, to look back and see how you got to where you are.
An article in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers magazine expresses this sentiment perfectly. Sven Birkerts wrote "Then, Again: Memoir and the Work of Time." I've often thought back to it during my own writing process of recalling my life. And each time, this project I set out on earlier in the year (for which I've been preparing for 32 years) makes more sense. He writes:
Quite suddenly, at least so it seems in retrospect, my relation to my own past changed. How can I describe it? It was as though the past, especially the events and feelings of my younger years, had taken a half-step back, had overnight, with no effort on my part, arranged itself into a perspective. No, "perspective" is not quite right, for that suggests a fixed, even static arrangement. Rather, these materials had, without losing their animation or their savor, become available to me. They were there to be looked at and handled without emotional murkiness, complicating regrets, sadness, and so on....Behind the chronological accumulation of this following that, year after year, I discerned the possibility of hidden patterns, patterns that, if unearthed and understood, would somehow explain me -- my life -- to myself....
A part of this is being able to maintain the kind of distance that lets you keep in touch with the moments that make up that past while understanding their functions. It's about developing a different sort of relationship to them so they can be made sense of. Maybe it's about not being bogged down by them, which some people can definitely be (myself included), but it's about using them for the present and the future. It's about rememory. Birkerts continues:
All I know is that there came a point in my life when memories and feelings were coming in loud and clear. Cause and effect had fallen into new alignment. Things fit, but not so much side by side as associatively, discontinuously. I recognized that events were not as contained as I had once thought, but were, rather, part of a complicated weave, their influence appearing and disappearing over long stretches.
I couldn't do this, recognize patterns, until I met Elizabeth. It's not that I couldn't, I guess, but more so that I didn't know I could. Or how to do it. You live every day: go to bed; wake up; think; act; be. And you do it again the next day. But year after year, you have no choice but to be able to get some space from the past and allow it to take on the role of teacher almost. It becomes this living thing that you can refer to and learn from. Like a movie that has been complete and a book that you've just finished that you think about every so often and say to yourself, "That's what that part was about."
I found that it is the juxtaposition of the now and the then that creates the quasi-spatial illusion most approximating the sensations of lived experience, of recollection merging into the ongoing business of living. Now, then. Present, past. The sine qua non of memoir: the past deepening and giving authority to the present, and the present (by virtue of being invoked) creating the necessary depth of field to see the past.
He talks about remembering the big moments and how those may not provide as much, or even anything maybe, as the in-between moments, the truths of what is already there. For me that is where the work lies. It's not only walking the road I set out to walk on the day I was born, but also engaging in the activity of necessarily pulling truth out of the moments that make up that road.
Understanding what events, or even non-events, meant to me then and how they transformed themselves throughout my subsequent days into wholly different meanings for me today. But to write about them. To put them in a position that allows me to pull the truth from them so that I can write a story that sufficiently relays who I am today as a result of who I was yesterday. And then what it was that put me in this place. I think about it every day. All the time every day. It's not always easy.
Like the act of getting ready to meditate (or how I see the act), it's about working to find the energy to put yourself in the space to look back. To observe. It's first about being in that space and then it's about doing something with what is uncovered. Birkerts identifies a problem with our today that lends credence to why, perhaps, it is hard to look back. Hard to feel the need to look back:
...I found myself making the argument that transformed social circumstances have in many ways made it harder and harder for people to "live a life" in the sense assumed by readers of biographies of outsized individuals. Who can deny it? The rapid-fire digitizing of modern life has blurred and diminished our sense of the freestanding self. Increasingly enslaved by our electronic extensions -- our tools and conveniences -- we have a harder time living the kinds of lives that can be given contour and written about....For one thing, our dealings with others are at every level more complexly mediated; for another, these systems create an environment of easy and constant interaction, with the result that our self-conception is necessarily more fragmented and diluted....
Has reflection been traded for fleeting bits of stimulation in the now? Is it the fear of looking back? What makes some want to and others not? It can't be the computer. Of course it helps in making it so we don't have to. Because looking back takes time. A quick e-mail does not. And looking back also reveals sometimes painful realizations. But not knowing about those realizations gives them license to lie dormant in a deep layer of the subconscious. But because we don't know about them doesn't mean they're not acting on us. They act in our words. They act in our actions. Just look. Pay attention. And ask questions.
So do we turn the computers off? Not necessarily. One thing I started doing outside of my control was putting my penchant for thinking (reflecting?) to different use. I looked at my past as different scenes that hold meaning for who I am today. I sought guidance to help me do this. Elizabeth, through the process of therapy, gave me a hand in stepping outside of myself and looking back with a constantly "in-training" eye to parse my past and present and make connections. It's a constantly in-training process that doesn't always go smoothly. And it is through this process that I have discovered my story. The way to tell my story.
The work of therapy is private, and its goals of understanding and integration are not projected into the public space of literature. They remain particular to the individual. The memoirist, by contrast, deploys many of the same energies of self-interrogation, but does so with the goal of discovering a narrative that will make sense, not just as explanation, but also as dramatization, to a would-be reader. She creates from the braiding of circumstances and reflection a story that needs to pre-understanding, offering up its own explanations and terms of interest.
I've wanted to write a book, a memoir, I guess, since I was twelve years old. I had a lot to tell back then already about race, sexuality, gender, and kidhood depression. But I hadn't the "vantage," to take Birkerts's word. But why did I then, and do I now, want to write? It's not only because I'm a leo and like talking about myself. (That might be a small part of it.) It's not only about telling my story. It's about teaching people something, perhaps, about being me looking at them looking at me.
Between twelve and twenty-nine, I didn't know how I would do it. I was consumed with pressure to tell my story but impeded by having no way to go about it. To me then, it was just a series of stories that I would tell from my standpoint. For me that wasn't enough. So I'd write a few pages and get mad. I'd put my pen down. I'd close the book out of frustration. And that lone paragraph would sit for a few months untouched.
I can pick up any number of my notebooks now and see various attempts at starting the telling of my story and frown at them. The difference now is the fact that I can see a string of connections. A narrative of sorts has emerged for me. As has a voice with which to tell it. We all have lived lives that have universal messages. That in itself warrants a story. And that in itself is why I write. To tell my story. To relate. To discuss.
I may reflect in therapy on an unhappy period of my adolescence, testing memories and looking for insights that will help me understand why I did what I did then. To convert this into memoiristic material, however, I need to give the reader both the unprocessed feeling of the world as I saw it then and a reflective vantage that suggests that these events made a different kind of sense over time. This is the transformation which, if done well, absolves a memoiristic reflection from the charge of self-involved navel-gazing. What makes the difference is not only the fact of reflective self-awareness, but the conversion of private into public by way of a narrative meant to compel the interest of the reader.
Memoirs are for everyone to write. To publish or not. Rememory is for everyone to engage in. I am taking my process further and turning it into a narrative representation of the days I've lived thus far. My future rests on what I do today with yesterday. "Now, then. Present, past." They're separate entities that comprise the me I'm writing about. I want my rememory present for my future. My lens, though muddy at times, is ready for use, and it can never return to the dormant state it was in for so long.
So about those three pages I lost. So be it. Those pages I wrote last week are different than what I will write in replace of them today. They will be better. Time is good for that. Rememory. Mine will be published.
