On Photography – Researching My Sequel

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amwriting, books, creative process, Novel, photography, writing, writing process

I’m working on a sequel to my novel From the Far Ends of the Earth, mostly research and note-taking at this time. The sequel will be following the “missing” mother’s journey of self-discovery and re-invention through the lens of her camera as she travels through Mexico to the tip of South America.

The mother’s photography plays a key part in the first novel. It becomes an obsession for one of the main characters, the son, a struggling drug addict. He receives packets of his mother’s photos, black and white glossies, with no notes or explanations of why she’s sending these to him. They are stark, often disturbing images, wildlife mostly: a horny-head lizard, mean face, wicked eye, flash of tongue; a nasty looking rooster perched on top a fence post, its wings in a flurry, beak open, eyes wild and furious.  Another of a dead tree, all bare limbs, like outstretched arms, like someone shaking its fists at the sky, or trying to tear it to pieces.

He doesn’t know what to make of these and pins them on a wall to study. In his drugged haze, he comes to see the photos as pieces of his mother she’s cut from her own body and sent to him to put back together. If he does, she’s saved, and he’s saved, and she come home. If he doesn’t they’re both doomed.

I love photography but have never studied it professionally, so I have a lot to learn before writing this. I began my research by  foraging through all my bookcases, large and small, tucked in various corners of the house to discover any books I might already have on the subject. I was delighted to find a few gems:

On Photography, by Susan Sontag. A collection of essays about the art and its cultural significance and influence.

The Joy of Photography, by the editors of the Eastman Kodak Company. A 1979 guide to the tools and techniques of good photography.

Ansel Adams’ Examples -The Making of Forty Photographs. He describes equipment, techniques as well as the inspiration and vision that guided his art in making these. Fantastic photos too!

The Family of Children  A 1977 collection of photographs about childhood around the world  from the greatest photographers of the time. This is a sequel to the iconic The Family of Man collection curated by Edward Steichen and Carl Sandburg published in 1955.

Photography and the Art of Seeing by Freeman Patterson. A visual perception workshop for film and digital photography.

In addition, I’m reading the The Age of Light, a novel by Whitney Sharer based on the life of Lee Miller, a fashion model who becomes a photographer, studying with the famous surrealist painter and photographer Man Ray. Eventually she becomes his muse and lover. She goes on to establish herself as a noted photographer as well as the first female war correspondent embedded with the Americans. She was there when they freed the concentration camps and took photos of herself bathing in Hitler’s bathtub, after his suicide.

I’ve also ordered a book by the photographer Sally Mann, Holding Still: A Memoir with Photographs. She caused quite a stir in 1992 when her book of photographs Immediate Family was published. Although highly acclaimed as one of the greatest and most influential photography books of the time, it was also criticized for the extremely intimate and personal photographs of her children, some unclothed.

My character begins her journey in the year 2000, before digital photography was popular.

What kind of camera would she have had? Could she create a dark room and develop her own film in the back of her camper?

How would she earn a living as a traveling photographer?

How would she advance enough over the course of two years to earn a cover story in the National Geographic, which she has done by the end of my first novel?

These are just a few of the questions I have. If any of you know the answers or can suggest other reading or research material that might help, I’d be most appreciative.

Doing research for a book is one of the easiest, most rewarding and inspiring stages in the process of writing a novel. I’m a little bit in heaven.

 

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Endings & Beginnings, A Writer’s Life

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Deborah J. Brasket, Publishing, revision, writing, writing life, writing process

Like Two Lovers in Conversation, by Deborah J. Brasket

Well, I just finished rewriting the ending of my novel as requested by a publisher. We will see what they think.

Either way, I believe this new ending is stronger–still hopeful, but less certain. More in keeping with the way things are for most of us when things we love go missing, or when struggling with our own demons and addictions.

I’ve decided something else too. Quite a few publishers have wanted to see more of the missing mother in my story, yet I wasn’t willing to do that. It would have unraveled the very premise of my novel, which was, how do we cope when the center holding everything together falls apart? When that upon which we most depend disappears?

I wanted the mother to be part of the puzzle, not a presence herself, but that “absent” presence we feel, even yearn for, but cannot quite pin down, and never really know for certain.

Do any of us ever, really, know our mothers? Don’t we only know them through our own often faulty and incomplete perceptions of them? What they’ve allowed us to see, or what we choose to believe? All knowledge is partial and open to revision. We may know the facts that lay before us. But do facts a person make?

Yet even while I’ve resisted the call to add the mother’s perspective to this novel, I can understand how a reader might want more of her, to hear about her journey as she travels away from her family and through South America. What does she learn as she discovers the world through the new lens of her photography? Does it lend insight into her past? Into herself as a mother and wife and now an artist? How does it shape her anew?  Where does it take her?

So I’m beginning a “sequel” to From the Far Ends of the Earth, if we can call it that, since it will cover the same time-space as the first novel.

I think it might be fun to give the mother her own voice and space, to see what shaped her past and how her journey shapes her future.

It’s the thing I love most about writing, discovering what I never knew I knew before I began to write it, as if the words themselves are drawn from some inner well of insight or vision I never knew I had.

“We create ourselves out of our innermost intuitions,” so writes a sage.

I believe that. And I also believe our characters are created in much of the same way. I wonder if we all contain multiple characters within us that make themselves known to us through our writing? Or are we just writing our larger selves?

Perhaps all the selves of all the people we’ve come to know, to experience, in this wider world, once known, become part of us, at least partially?

I believe there is a collective consciousness that we tap into from time to time, and writers, perhaps, most of all.

Sometimes I don’t know where I end and another begins.

My son says I have boundary issues. No doubt he’s right.

A Happy Ending for My Novel? For My Son?

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Addiction, amwriting, happy endings, heroin addiction, Novel, novel writing, Publishing, revision, writing process

Florence Harrison, 1887 – 1937

One of the publishers we sent my novel to wants a rewrite of the ending. While their readers said they loved the first 2/3 of the novel (the novel is divided into 3 parts), they felt I tried a little too hard to tie up all the loose threads into what they called an “uber happy” ending for my characters.

I can’t say I’m surprised by this reaction. I too worried that I might have tied up the novel in too pretty a bow. Perhaps I should have left at least one or two threads dangling for the reader to play with. But I believed, despite that, the transformations of the characters, their coming to grips with their past, their fears, their demons, their very real struggles and eventual triumphs are what we all hope to find at the end of our stories, both the real and the imagined.

Happy does happen, after all.

But, of course, in reality, our stories and struggles do not end as they do in a novel. Our lives keep on going after that final page, whether it ends on a high note or a low. We all know that. So what’s the harm of ending the novel on an upbeat tick?

I wanted that for them, for these deeply flawed characters who I had come to love. Weren’t their flaws and failings, their addictions and anxieties, their grief and doubts and fears enough grit to ground the story? Couldn’t we soar a bit too, near the end?

Happy happens too, right?

But does it last?

Probably the most improbable part of my ending is the struggling son’s recovery from heroin addiction. Not an easy thing to do. The statistics are all against it. Few survive, and those who do never feel completely free. It’s always there, slippery beneath their feet, breathing hard down their necks, a giant question mark dangling on the horizon like a sharp, deadly hook.

Some parts of this novel are based loosely on my son’s struggle with heroin addiction. For all I tried, I never could completely wean him of his addiction. I could help him: Pull him off the street, put him into rehab, pick him up from jail, search for the medication and counseling he needed; call an ambulance when he overdosed.

Sometimes it worked. Woven through his battles with addiction are the times he won, the year, or two, or three he was free and happy and thriving. But it never lasted much more than that. Four, tops.

I always thought: If only he would listen to me, take my advice, do what I say; if I could lock him in a closet and keep him safe; if I could trade places with him, get into his skin and live his life for him, beat down the addiction once and for all and then give him his life back again, I would. But I couldn’t. I never could control him any more than he could control his addiction.

But I could control my characters. I could manage their recovery. I could give them a happy ending. It does happen, doesn’t it?

Rarely.

So I’m rewriting the end of my novel with that sharp, thorny question mark dangling in the air. As it always does, for each of us, whether we struggle with addiction or not.

Paradise burns to the ground. Mudslides swallow homes. Daughters lose babies. Sons relapse. Again, and again, and again.

But strangely, miraculously, hope never dies. Not completely. Homes are rebuilt. Lives turned around. Marriages mended.

Families come together at Thanksgiving and look across the table at each other with all their flaws and fears, their unhealed hurts and scars, and they love what they see. Through it all, despite it all, they just love.

That’s what my novel is all about. That “despite it all” kind of love, happy ending or not.

Following the Yellow Brick Road to Publishing

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books, Novel, Publishing, writing

So far I’ve heard from nine publishing houses, all complimentary, all passing on my novel.

Highlight the word “complimentary.” I do. We writers are like that, or so I’ve heard and found to be true in practice. A particularly complimentary rejection letter can keep us smiling for weeks.

It’s all part of the publishing process, those mounting rejections while waiting for that miracle, or what feels like a miracle in the waiting, the hand of god reaching out of the sky to bliss our work, to name us, oh holy of holies–a published novelist.

In the meantime I print out the rejection letters and mark with yellow highlighter all the praise large and small. A sunny bulwark against disappointment, I suppose.

“It only takes one to fall in love,” says my agent. “The right one, for the long haul.”

Finding the right publisher is like finding the right marriage partner. We can fall in love with someone, or some book,  and yet still not be ready to commit. To slip a ring on a finger or offer the ultimate pledge, to death do us part.

So I’m still waiting for “the right one” to come along, to be so swept away by my novel they cannot bear to pass on it.

In the meantime, I gather Toto in my arms and happily follow that yellow brick road of sunny highlights on my way to see the wizard and find a home for my novel.

Keep your fingers crossed.

 

 

 

Within the White Hot Flow of Writing

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books, Deborah J. Brasket, fiction, Flow, Novel, revolution, Romance, This Sea Within, writing, writing process

That’s where I am. Where I love to be.

I began a new novel almost as soon as I finished the last. An idea I had entertained years ago kept coming back to me. You may remember a blog post I wrote a while ago about wishing I could find a really good steamy novel that was also a novel of ideas, that had substance and depth. Some of you encouraged me to write one if I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and that stuck with me. You should write the novel you want to read. I’ve always believed this.

I also love long novels set in exotic places that reveal the political unrest of the times. And having spent so much time in the tropics when we were sailing, I’m drawn to that kind of locale.

It all fit perfectly with an idea I had played with some years ago about a young naive girl from California who travels to Central America to find her missing mother (I must get the bottom of all these stories I write about missing mothers!) and gets swept up in a political struggle and the revolutionaries fighting to free their country.

As I began preparing to write, I noticed how similar the process of writing this novel is to the one I wrote last time.

First there’s a germ of an idea, and then the need to anchor it in reality. The need to immerse myself in some aspect of the history, the setting, the geography, the larger ideas that underpin what I’m aiming to write: Research.

I went of a shopping spree and bought Salman Rushdie’s memoir of traveling in Nicaragua during the Contra wars, Smile of the Jaguar. I also bought Blood of Brothers, Life and War in Nicaragua by Stephen Kinzer, a journalist for the New York Times during and after the revolution; The County Under My Skin, A Memoir of Love and War by the poet, Gioconda Belli, who fought in the revolution; and The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems. I already had Tom Hayden’s The Long Sixties, a signed copy I got at a fundraiser I organized years ago. Although my novel will be set in a mythical country along the isthmus, studying the war in Nicaragua would help me get a better understanding of what was going on in the region during those turbulent times.

Next in the process comes the need to discover the names and voices of my main characters. I cannot write a word without that.  This  almost happens simultaneously. The voices must have names to embody them, the names must have voices to bring the alive. The names evoke the voices, the voices evoke the names: Lena and Raoul.

Once I have these, there’s not stopping them. They take over my life. They start telling me their stories and I run and grab a pen. I keep on writing, pages after pages in my notebook and on my computer. I look up and morning has turned to nightfall. It doesn’t matter. They follow me to bed. I sleep with them. I dream them. I wake up writing love poems in their voices.

Then I need at least a vague sense of how the novel will open, how it will close. It may change along the way, but I need this parenthesis to contain my writing and to show me where it’s moving. They tell me.

When I have the beginning and the ending, keys scenes in between emerge. I write them down quickly before they disappear. They may change over time, but at least I have key points upon which to hang my novel.

By then my characters have become real to me. They have flesh and bone, names, voices, histories. They have deep, deep urges, conflicting desires, inner and outer struggles, a sense of transformation.

It’s like watching a miracle unfold. How they seem to come from nowhere, out of thin air, then suddenly they are breathing bodies, passionate, possessed.

This miracle of the white, hot flow of words.

Next comes the need, for me at least, to discover the title for this novel, something that embodies both of their stories and what happens to them.

I need a hook, like I did with From the Far Ends of the Earth. Whenever I felt I was becoming lost, a bit overwhelmed, unsure about where the story was going, how to proceed, if this fit or that should be cut, I went back to the title, which embodied my main theme. Then I knew.

The title was a thematic blueprint for what I wanted the book to be. The impact I was after. A book about gathering up and bringing home all the lost parts of ourselves and our families.

So I searched for something like that, some touchstone that would lead me back to that germ of an idea I began with. The point around which all else revolves. And I found it: This Sea Within.

Lena, a California girl, a surfer in love with the sea, restless, passionate, caught up in the turmoil of her times, the Sixties, travels to a mythical country in Central America where her mother was born, searching for the woman who abandoned her, but finding instead a people and culture and land that feels like home, like a part of her lost self. And there she meets Raoul, the leader of a band of revolutionaries whose base camp is on a remote stretch of the sea. And well, you can imagine the rest.

But this is also meant to be a story of ideas, of the tension between a life of contemplation and the life of an activist, the urge to save and savor the world at the same time. It’s about the tensions between a huge, powerful county and what it sees as its smaller vassal states below its border. It’s about the need to find purpose and place in one’s life, to serve a cause greater than one’s self. And it’s about how poetry and art can keep the spirit alive when the world we live in is bathed in blood, figuratively for some, and literally for others.

It’s also about the cycle of time, this never-ending (r)evolution that creates the ever-changing world we live in. It’s about the slow march of history, whose arc is indeed long, but hopefully, must, must, bend toward justice.

This Sea Within. The restless times from which great movements and revolutions are born, and two lovers caught up in that turmoil. That pretty much sums up what this book is meant to be. For now.

It’s all subject to revision.

Pinch Me! Writers House Accepts My Novel

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From the Far Ends of the Earth, literary agent, Novel, Robin Rue, Writers House, writing, writing process

Writers House, New York City

I’m so excited. Robin Rue, a senior agent at Writers House, one of the top 20 literary agencies in the nation and the largest in the world, will be helping me find a publisher for my novel, From the Far Ends of the Earth.

I never expected it to happen this fast. I’d planned on giving myself six months to a year to find an agent and/or publisher for my book. If it didn’t happen by then I would turn to self-publishing. I really didn’t want to go that route. All the work involved sounded exhausting, but it was important to get the book out there, one way or another.

I had been working on it, on and off, over the last several years. It went through dozens of revisions, two sets of readers, a period where I absolutely hated  it and was tempted to quit, and a long 18 month period where I didn’t work on it at all when going through some major life changes.

It was time to put this baby to bed.

So I created a list of about 20 agents who I thought would be a good fit, and created a list of about 20 publishers who would accept manuscripts without an agent. I worked and reworked my query letter a dozen times. And then the first person I sent it to, Robin Rue, asked to read it. A week later she wrote to say she loved my novel and would be proud to represent me. Yesterday she sent the novel out to a dozen top-tier publishers.

But I had help, and a foot-up in the process. A writer friend who had read and loved my novel offered to refer me to her agent. So that’s where I sent it first. And that’s where my search ended. I am so grateful to her and humbled that I lucked out in such a wonderful way. I’m still pinching myself.

For you writers out there, and those who want to know what my novel is about, here’s the body of the query letter I sent to Robin:

From the Far Ends of the Earth is a 100,000 word literary novel with strong upmarket and book club potential. It tells the story of three family members left behind when the mother at the center of their lives mysteriously disappears. How they cope with her disappearance, learn to reconnect with each other, and forge new relationships in her absence create the heart of this novel.

One day Fran heads toward the grocery store and keeps on going till she reaches the tip of South America. Meanwhile she leaves behind an empty hole in the lives of her family: Kay, a cranky grad student studying archaeology who adores her mother but distrusts men in general, her father and brother in particular; Cal, a heroin addict living in his parents’ home when his mother disappears, left with a father he fears and no other means of support; and Walter, a dedicated  husband but distant father whose random bursts of temper have always set the family on edge.

Adding to the mystery of the mother’s disappearance are the “gifts” she sends her family: The breathlessly elated messages she leaves on her daughter’s answering machine, but never when she is there to pick up. The strangely distorted photographs she mails her son, who studies them like hieroglyphs he must decipher to save her, and save himself. The credit card bills she leaves for her husband to pay, allowing him to continue caring for her as he always has, while he uses them to track her journey across the continent with push-pins on a map.

Except for the beginning and ending when we hear the mother’s voice, the story is told from the perspectives of the three family members left behind. The mother remains an absent presence that permeates the novel without inhabiting it. She is seen only through the filters of her family’s memories and perceptions of her.

Ultimately the novel is about the journeys of self-discovery each protagonist takes to piece back together their fragmented lives and make themselves, and their family, whole again.

Writing this novel was certainly a journey of self-discovery for me as a writer. After some time to celebrate, and a long-awaited trip to Europe, I’ll be starting a new novel.

 

 

Loss & Desire, and the Search for Something More, in Life & Literature

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amwriting, desire, life, literature, loss, Novel, poetry, writing, writing process

These are the themes that run through so much of what I’m compelled to write about. No doubt because they are the great themes running through all the arts, through myth, religion, psychology–through life itself.

The poem below captures that so eloquently.

Meditation at Lagunitas

By Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

So much here resonates with me:

• how “each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea,”
• how each particular presence is “some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light,”
• how “a word is elegy to what it signifies,”
• how “desire is full of endless distances,”
• including “the moments when body is as numinous as words.”

I wrote a series of blog posts several years ago about how these themes are developed in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Lacan’s Mirror State, starting with Some Tragic Falling Off into Difference and Desire.

I wrote in Our Quest for Wholeness:

Writers of fiction know that to create a compelling story that keeps readers turning pages we must:

• Create a protagonist with an overarching need or desire (derived from some sense of loss, of being wounded, or incomplete)
• beset by constant conflict that intensifies and delays achievement of that desire (to gain what was lost, find healing or wholeness)
• until that need or desire is eventually realized (or not), but either way,
  leaving the protagonist in a better place (happier, wiser, more whole) than where she had been before the story began,
• having learned something important or significant about herself, the world she lives in, or what it means to be human.

What drives the story and develops the character is a quest to return to wholeness, to regain what was lost. But what is regained is never simply what was lost, but “something more.” Some new realization– wisdom chiseled from the hard knocks and setbacks of a difficult journey, insights into human nature that will light her path moving forward.

Perhaps we find these stories so compelling because they parallel our own psychic development from the womb to maturity and beyond.

I should not have been surprised when rereading and editing my novel to find these themes repeated in each character’s journey from loss and desire to the search for “something more.”

But I was surprised. Perhaps even as we all are surprised to find it running through our own personal history and journeys. We are so close to it that even while we know it is there, we miss it in the particularity of the moment, in the ordinary humdrum of each day. We have to step back, way back, to see it, the path behind and before us. Even then, which fork will we take next? Which way will our lives unfold? It’s all part of the mystery of being, even being ourselves.

I’ll be exploring this more in future blog posts.

Walking Each Other Home – Why We Write

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amwriting, creative writing, Deborah J. Brasket, Novel, writing, writing process

I’ve reread my novel after being away from it for well over a year.

I did so with some trepidation. Much earlier in the writing process, after I had completed and revised the first draft, I put it away for several months. Then read it with a fresh and very critical eye. The result was terrifying: I hated it.

Eventually I came to realize that if you approach any piece of writing with too critical an eye, from a disdaining or resisting distance, you fail to grasp the thing that connects reader/writer. There must be, at the very least, a willingness to allow the story to lead you forward.

I was pleased that my reading of the novel this time did grab hold and keep me reading, keep me involved. I’m going over it again for a final edit but finding little that wants or needs work. The place I’m spending the most time now are the those crucial opening pages, and these too I now feel are ready to go.

I plan to write more about this novel on these pages in the coming months. For I find that I enjoy writing about writing, as so many writers do. And the topics the novel touches upon and themes it explores are important to me, painful as they sometimes are: addiction, homelessness, poverty, life on the street, father-son-mother-daughter relationships, the inability of ever truly knowing anyone, loss and grief, art as self-discovery and redemption, love and romance, spiritual transformation.

In some ways, all I care about, all I am, why I write, why I care, are contained in these pages.

Recently I came across an essay on writing that captures so clearly why I write, and perhaps, why I read. The passages excerpted below reflect my own writing experience.

From Why Writers Write about Writing by Brianna Wiest

 Writing is speaking to yourself, but letting other people overhear the conversation.

The people who are compelled to write down what they feel are the ones who feel it hardest. They make up truths where they didn’t exist before. They put to words what would otherwise go muddled in their minds. Every single writer who can be honest can stand and ratify the fact that wedged between their words, laid subconsciously before them, were great loves and greater losses and deeper insecurities and projected fears. Nothing gets written without the intrinsic motivation to make something confusing and painful clear and beautiful.

I recently saw a quote that went like this: “we’re all just walking each other home.” And sometimes our maps and hands are offered in words. Sometimes we are lighthouses and sometimes we are lost sailors. Writers know you are best crafted out of being both.

And ultimately, the thing about writing is that it forces you to surrender yourself to uncertainty and vulnerability, which, if you ask me, is the most important task to master. My favorite writer . . . Cheryl Strayed once said something along those lines: that the place of unknowing is where the real work gets done — the vulnerable, uncertain place.

Because the best things are written out of the dark parts of us. Because things are always scary when they matter. Because things are inherently neutral and we assign value to them, and looking deeply into the words that touch us may be the greatest way — or the only way — of understanding those parts of us.

“To make something confusing and painful clear and beautiful.”

To help “walk each other home.”

That’s why I wrote this novel.

 

Touching & Being Touched, Why We Blog

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art, Blogging, blogs, Creative Nonfiction, creativity, humanity, inspiration, life, sharing, touching, writing

 

“The function of language is not to inform but to evoke . . . responses.”  So writes Jacques Lacan, the French philosopher and linguist.

But perhaps the same could be said of art, or music, or dance. Any creative endeavor. Certainly it’s true of blogging. We create what we do with the explicit purpose of evoking responses from some largely unknown Other. It a very human thing. The desire to touch and to be touched. To share what we love, what evokes responses in us, with the hope of evoking similar responses from them.

I wrote about this some time ago in Blogging and the Accident of Touching.  But I wanted to revisit it, to reassess why I put so much time into blogging. What is its value, to me, to others? Why do I persist?

What I love about blogging is being able to share the things that are meaningful to me with others–art, music, poetry, literature, nature. But also discovering from others new art, new music, new ways of looking at and being in the world. That reciprocity. That sense of connection. What do they love that I may love too? How will it deepen and broaden and enrich my own experience of life? Every day is a new discovery, a new love, a new insight into what it means to be.

In that original post I likened blogging to “those conversations we have in the wee hours of the morning . . . ”

“. . . when the party is over and all have left except for those few lingering souls who find themselves opening up to each other in ways they could never do when meeting on the street or over dinner. Those 3 AM conversations, you know.

That’s how blogging often is done too, late at night when we can’t sleep, or after we’ve put our novel to bed, or when we wake early and are seeking the company of other early risers, or those living half-way round the world from us.

We can share our thoughts and evoke responses in our own time, and others can respond in the same way, with a quick “like” or a longer comment. And we can respond in return.

It’s a way of reaching out to others that for some feels more comfortable than the spoken word. I feel I may be getting “the best” of them in those wee hour revelations, as they are getting the best I have to offer, a side of myself I seldom share apart from the written page.

There’s another part to all this, why we write, why we blog, which a woman who would not be forgotten wrote about a thousand years ago:

“Again and again something in one’s own life, or in the life around one, will seem so important that one cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. There must never come a time, the writer feels, when people do not know about this.” —Shikibu Murasaki, Tale of Genji (978 – 1014 AD)

Touching and being touched, yes. That’s part of why we blog. But also passing along to a larger world something of ourselves that seems too vital to pass into oblivion. In some small way, perhaps, this blogging about our lives, our loves, our insights, our art, is a way of passing on through the minds of others a part of our larger self. Letting it echo out there in the universe for a wider while.

 

The Pieta & the Writer’s Palette, Redux

Tags

art, creativity, painting, short story, the unconscious, visual art, writing, writing process

It’s been said that for writers the blank page is our canvas and words our paint.

But I don’t think so.

Images and ideas are the paint, words the loaded brush, and sentences our brushstrokes. The mind and imagination of both writer and reader is the blank canvas.

Nothing is there on the page—mere white space, black ink strokes. Yet in the act of reading the mind becomes awash in colors, images, ideas, emotions. Like magic. What the reader draws upon is not only the writer’s words and images, but the reader’s as well, his memories and associations. Our reader co-creates with us.

What both the writer and reader draw upon, as do all visual artists, are all the images and associations from our own lives as well as all those who came before us and left their imprints upon our imaginations, through books and artwork and film and advertising. Scraps of overheard conversation, images of bloodshed and atrocities on nightly broadcasts. Scenes drifting by a train window, songs played upon the radio, sounds of playground laughter. Faraway land and cultures and wilderness areas glimpsed in our travels or from magazines or TV documentaries.

We draw upon myths and legends, iconic images and personal histories passed on from one generation to the next, spanning back to the beginning of life, perhaps, if we do indeed carry within our genes memories of primeval birthing. All these images and association stored in our personal or collective unconscious.

What interests me in all this is the creative process. How we dip our brushes into this swirling palette, and bring out more on our loaded brushes than what we had intended or even realized at first glance. And yet our work is the richer for it.

Here’s an example of a scene I created without being fully aware of its implications until in the midst of the writing, and moments afterwards. This is from “Tamara in Her Garden.”

I was eleven years old when the house burned down one night. Burned clean to the ground. Nothing left but heaps of ashes and twisted metal folded among the stone foundation. Sifting through the silt and rubble, firemen found the charred remains of my father, who had died in bed, and the broken bones of fifteen young men, boys really, buried beneath the house.

They found me crouched in the garden, dress torn and singed, eyes so wide, they said, it was as if the fire had burned off my eyelids and I would never sleep again.

What I remember most about that night now is the way my Aunt Rose held me afterward, drew me to her lap and rocked me. I was tall for my age, taller than Aunt Rose by then, but she held me nonetheless. Gathered me up, all the odd and bony parts of me, the long thin back and stooped shoulders, the heavy head. Folding herself over, stroking and holding, rocking me like a baby, like I was part of her lost self. And I, spilling over her yet holding too–tightly, tight. And thinking with open eyes: She knew. She knew, too.

Now when I remember, and remember how she held me, I am reminded of ancient Italy. Of towering cypress pressed against an Aegean sky. Of sun-drenched doorways and crumbling stoops. Of Michelangelo’s Pieta, cool and smooth in a cool, dark hall, the Son’s body spilling half naked across the Mother’s lap as she held him. Holding and spilling. Holding and spilling. Remembering places I’ve never yet always been.

As I was creating the image of the child being held by the Aunt, I began to realize I’d seen this before—it was a deeply familiar, iconic image, steeped in religious, artistic, and maternal associations. The Pieta was already part of my palette.

I didn’t realize until after I had written the words that drawing upon this iconic image was thus imbuing the scene with a sense of suffering and sacrifice, of sin and redemption, of death and the hope of resurrection.

Realizing this, it became part of the story. The protagonist herself realizes the implication and draws upon images of beauty and decay, life and death, art and darkness, all washing together but impossible to hold without spilling. She draws upon places we’ve all been, or know, figuratively, without perhaps having been there ourselves.

The phrase “remembering places I’ve been and never been” is particularly potent because it captures for me some deep truth—that humans, particularly with our exposure to film and art and news, are exposed to places, scenes, people, cultures, that become part of our world view, our memories and associations, without ever actually having “been” there.

Which brings us back to the original point of this post: The paint we dip our brushes into is so much more deep and vast than any of the creators who came before us had. Along with our individual experiences come experiences filtered through the minds and imaginations of others, framed by their cameras, their perceptions, their agendas, their images—but it all becomes part of our consciousness, gets missed in with the personal, and recreated into our works.

Art that inspires us becomes part of our subconscious, our memories and association, part of that “paint” swirling around in our minds upon which we draw when we “paint” with words. The Pieta was already there, already steeped in associations, already all-ready for me to draw upon when seeking the perfect image for this particular scene of a wounded child being drawn to the lap of her maternal aunt to be comforted, the child herself being “too big”, her wound too devastating, for the Aunt to hold, so spilling past her, unable to hold it all, to even grasp it all, all that her niece had suffered, and so spilling beyond the aunt’s ability to comfort, hold, heal.

And yet the act of attempting to do just that—that despite the enormity of the task, its impossibility, its futility, the attempt in itself becomes a kind of absolution, a love beyond love, a sacramental act, that touches the child more tenderly than anything else might have.

I think in writing this, I have touched upon, unawares, a realization, that this is something I seek again and again in my writing to capture, articulate. The impossibility of healing, comforting, redeeming, forgiving, witnessing, the sorrow and hurt of this world as it unfolds in each of our lives, and yet the absolute necessity to attempt to do so, for just the attempt itself—the whole-hearted, deep-throated, full-bent attempt—is enough. The attempt despite no hope of succeeding, is precisely what’s needed, and will suffice.

If we live a million years, we can do no more, nor less, than that.

We are so much deeper and wider and richer than we will ever know, so much more than our personal histories can account for, and we might never know it but from these percolations bubbling up from the deep Unconscious, or those deliberate dippings below the surface.

Lending our pens to that which writes us.

[I wrote this post several years ago before I began painting myself. Now I find it more true than ever. Even for painting, my “brush” is dipped into the deep unconscious before I ever put a stroke on paper or canvas]