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Copyright © Carmel Bird
2004.
All rights reserved. |
This is a story of friendship and the power of the written word.
Margaret is a neighbour; we walk the dogs together in the very
early morning. Every morning a kookaburra gurgles from somewhere
behind the tower of a school. One day we found a tawny frog-mouth
flattended on the school crossing, its brown feathers flecked with
white fanning out wider each day as the traffic pressed the body
into the macadam. We watch the seasons change – in drought the
starved bark falls in distressed sheets from the eucalypts,
leaving red and apricot patches on trunks and branches, glowing
wounds – the roses celebrate the lack of water with an
astonishing crop of huge spluttering shaggy blooms, lilac, pink,
peach, dark dark red and a glowing Van Gogh gold. Perfume. We see
the generous old houses disappear – one morning a house is
there, and the next morning it is gone, leaving a flat paddock
that seems to be much much larger than you would expect. And then
there are months when the pavement is gritty with gravel, when
there are bins full of timber and bricks on the nature strip, when
glassy modern curiosities or strange replicas of Victorian
mansions emerge from beneath vast flapping sheets of sky blue
plastic. A pair of new houses is born on the flat paddock, and in
the early morning their pure dustless chandeliers glitter through
clear new windows. There is something quite eerie about a house
where nobody has ever lived beaming out in the dawn as if a party
of women in moth-like gowns with antique jewels and men in penguin
suits had just that moment left in limousines, worn out with
dancing and champagne and laughter, returning home to roost. We
walk through the park with the dogs, round the chill misty
darkened streets as the sky begins to streak with daylight, and we
too go home to get on with the day. That’s the friendship part.
But lives are never static, and one day Margaret told me that she
and her husband were going to separate. And they did. Then she
started to see a counsellor, trying to heal the rift in her
spirit, the break or whatever it was, in her heart. We didn’t
talk about the details – the kookaburra laughed on and a
squashed possum on the nature strip gradually decomposed until it
resembled a piece of twisted grey twine with fingenails and a
skull. Then one day Margaret suddenly came out with a revelation.
She said: ‘I don’t really know who I am. I told the counsellor
I don’t know who I am. And she told me to talk about my
childhood, and I couldn’t, because the thing is, I don’t
actually remember it.’
Once upon a time, before the existence of counsellors, I imagine
that the people you talked to in times of trouble were possibly
your family, and then sometimes the friends you had learned to
trust. Some people still have such friends. But it seems that many
people don’t. Modern life is very complex, with many many
experts and specialists who can be called in for every different
sort of illness of the body mind and soul. People have had
physicians and priests for ages and ages, but since – since when
I wonder – therapy of every kind has become a commonplace of
life. You find an expert and you pay them for their time and skill
– there is probably generally nothing wrong (and much that is
right) with this transaction. My point is that in that once upon a
time I mentioned there were people who could listen for free, for
the price of friendship (not cheap, but beyond price).
I thought about what Margaret had said for a few days, and then I
asked her whether she had remembered anything, and she said no.
She said she thought her early life in
England
in the fifties must have been so regular and so boring that it was
perhaps not worth remembering. Unmemorable.
Now one of the ways I occupy my own time occasionally is in
tutoring people who would like to write fiction in some of the
ways that fiction is written. And one of the clear entries, as far
as I am concerned, into the writing of fiction is the written recollection of the events of early life. Memory. I believe
that the memories of the experiences and perceptions of of
childhood are the source, the wellspring of the storytelling being
in everyone. If you can reach into those memories, those images,
those feelings and find the words for them, and write
the words down you are engaged in the establishment of your
own reflective, storytelling, self-affirming being. You are you
– and these memories are the fabric of who you are, and if you
can find the words to describe that you, and can write those words
down so that they look back up at you, you will begin to shape the
narrative of your own life. Of course it is possible to do this to
a certain extent orally, on tape, on video, but it seems to me,
from my experience with students, that the act of writing the
memories down is a key part of the fullness of the exercise.
Perhaps the swiftness of the writing, the lack of censorship, the
feeling of creating with the pen – perhaps all this is a key to
the power and significance of this kind of writing. It feels like
something that is happening between the writer and the self, it is
not going beyond the page, even though by emerging on the page the
writing becomes permanent and to a certain extent public.
Sometimes students wish to read this writing aloud, and very often
the act of speaking the personal events they have written, events
which have sometimes been locked beyond memory until the moment of
writing – the act of speaking releases deep emotions, and the
reader will weep. I am not necessarily talking about amazing and
shameful revelations – just the simple access to the past self
in writing seems to have the power to unlock the heart and the
inhibitions. Quite often, I have noticed the the first piece of
writing a student does in this memory exercise is the best writing
they ever do for a very long time, sometimes forever.
If you have ever had the experience of suddenly finding an old
photograph of your child self, a photograph you maybe never knew
existed, and have been confronted by that image, that little self
who stares back at you, then you have known some of the emotional
electricity that jolts people as they examine in writing their
early memories. There is a sense of loss, of tender self-love, of
recaptured possibility, of re-entry into the world’s beauty you
know you used to touch with careless confidence.
How the students then move on to develop as writers of fiction is
anothor matter which does not concern me here. I must return to
Margaret and her blank childhood. I remembered that consellors and
psychatirists sometimes send their patients to my classes in
fiction writing in the hope that the writing will help the
therapy. And so I told Margaret this, and I said that if she would
like to she could do a little writing with me, and perhaps she
would begin to remember her life as a child, and perhaps this
would help her to come to some resolution of the puzzle of who she
is. If she wanted to. I said there was no structured aim in this,
there was nothing to it except that I believed in the power of
writing memories down. And I said I saw some value in the
discipline of her writing being part of a little program run by
me. Margaret has never had any ambition to write fiction. She
wasn’t going to aim to produce a work of art; the aim would
simply be to write in order to
remember, and to remember in order to establish who she is.
Not the sort of project you expect to come across when you go
walking the dog with the neighbour early in the morning mist. But
life is full of surprises, good and bad.
There is a difference I see between going to writing classes
(fiction or life-writing) and going to an analyst. As I understand
it, the patient who goes to the analyst might cover much of the
same material as the student of writing, that is, their early
life. They, in an ideal (again as I understand it) situation,
finish up working through the problems and arriving at a happier
existence. They have, as a product, themselves, their life.
Harmony, strength. No mean thing. But the student of writing ends
up with a separate product, ideally some kind of story, which they
can offer to readers. Like a painting or a sculpture or a piece of
music. A story. Their story. Them.
So Margaret bought a special book, and the plan was that I would
set her a topic each day, and when she had written on it, with
reference to her childhood, she would give me the book to read,
and I would comment a bit on her story, and set another topic. She
could write as much or as little as she wished. So this became a
daily ritual, and gradually her stories began to be illustrated
with drawings and photographs and maps, and the journal took on,
as beloved journals
will, a vigorous life of its own. Margaret told me she couldn’t
wait to get home in the evening and sit at the table and find out
what the new topic was and get to work. When she went away on
holiday she asked me to set topics in advance. Writing is of
course a well-known drug, but unlike packaged pharmaceuticals it
offers its own product as a reward for the high.
The writing is honest, simple, spare, energetic – the best kind
of writing. It is illuminated with bright detail of rooms and
clothes and cats and flowers and church and brownies and the
mysterious
midnight
nose-bleed during sleep. Did you really forget about the
nose-bleed? I said. And she said yes, she had forgotten all about
it.
She can’t wait to write it – and I can’t wait to read it.
The full names of the people are a delight and an astonishment,
and they have in the manner of real life, a crazy rightness that
fiction can seldom invent. The mad woman called Miss Rich and
Tristan Wiggins and the vicar’s wife who selected for herself
the best things from the stuff donated for the jumble sale. Early
life is full of wickedness and wisdom and comedy.
She dares to say she was frightened, she was thrilled, she hated
someone, she loved someone, she admired someone, avoided someone.
She has begun to reflect on the writing itself – why can’t I
name this person, why can’t I remember that thing? She is
scrupulous and diligent in keeping to the topic, even though
sometimes when she first sees what I have said to write on she
thinks – what?? My responses to the stories are expressed in the
written equivalent of conversational cries of joy or astonishment
or horror. I ask questions that are just the ordinary questions of
a listener. Sometimes the topic I set comes out of the story
Margaret has just written.
Well, you can see that it is friendship, you can see that we are
both having a certain kind of fun. It isn’t going anywhere in
particular, and she may never find out who she is, but at least
she will end up with a journal of her past that is alive and
honest and a kind of record of the times we have spent together.
And I suppose that as she writes she forgets some of the pain of
the present in the joy of creating a new thing.
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