Lily Iona MacKenzie's Blog, page 58

Perseverance Furthers

In “Spirit of the Law,” a short story I’ve written, I wanted to explore life after death and something else���how the dead go on living or not living, if only in our memory, in the physical places where we’ve known them.

Of course, I���m not really capturing what life is like after death. It���s my imaginative portrayal of one woman���s experience, and it���s a way of articulating metaphorically how the dead live on in our minds.

It helped to read that Bernard Malamud would write eighteen drafts of a story, working until he got it right.�� It takes that kind dedication to find a story���s heart. To reach her readers, a writer needs the same kind of persistence as a religious person does in her determination to reach god. It’s quite a love affair, an unrequited one at that.

I’ve also been reading about creativity and commitment in Erica Helm Meade’s book Tell It by Heart.�� She talks about Eurynome, the Pelasgian creator, using that myth as a model for the cycles that artists move through.�� Meade describes Eurynome’s “grasping for form in Chaos, experimenting with raw materials, birthing creation, suffering betrayal, followed by her re-imagining creation, reworking it, offering it as a gift, and at last, taking time to rest….Eurynome means wide-wandering, and creativity requires us to cover a lot of ground” (55).

The most important element in this process, though, is commitment, “the ingredient required to brave the others” (55).�� The “others” Meade refers to are the nine major ‘regions’ of her [Eurynome’s] creation:

Rest
Chaos, Disorder, and Confusion
Improvisation; Experimentation and Play
Ecstasy, Birth and Grandeur
Betrayal, Exile, and Failure
Contemplation and Reflection
Revising and Reworking
Presentation:�� Contributing to Culture
Commitment

I’ve assumed that I have made a commitment to writing, but I realize it unravels regularly, daily even, just as happens in any relationship.�� I have to constantly recommit myself.�� I like what Meade says about commitment:

I recalled the good things which had come to me as a result of my commitment to tend the garden [i.e., life as a garden bursting with possibility], and I realized what Goethe meant in saying that when one commits oneself, providence moves too, and help arrives from inexplicable sources….I realized all the riches in my life���the love and creativity���had blossomed from commitment���from my ability to hang in and persist, even when I couldn’t remember why.�� The vow to the muse was like marriage:��When the passion wanes, commitment sustains us until the juice comes flooding back.��(58)

Or as the I Ching says:�� “Persistence furthers.”

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Links Tagged: Bernard Malamud, Eurynome, Goethe, i ching, pelagasian, Tell if by Heart

IS AUTOBIOGRAPHY THE ONLY FORM IN ALL THE ARTS?

I���ve just read a review by Elaine Blair of Rachel Cusk���s novel Outline in the January 2015 New Yorker. Blair says, Cusk has written admiringly about Knausgaard, and her proposed cure for the trouble with fiction sounds like a gloss of his. ���Autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts,��� she told the Guardian.��� Blair goes on to say that some writers are hewing closer to the author���s subjective experiences, of effacing the difference between fiction and their own personal lives.

But Blair also points out that ���Cusk���s shorthand doesn���t begin to account for the variety of literary experiments we���ve been seeing from novelists like Knausgaard, ���. and W. G. Sebald��� (70). As a writer, I���m all for any kind of improvisation on the novel or any other kind of narrative. I haven���t read Knausgaard, but I have devoured all of W. G. Sebald���s ���fictions,��� novels that are truly novel in that he has invented a hybrid form. He incorporates travelogue, biography, memoir, speculation, and literary criticism into the narrator���s perspective: often a wandering and thoughtful observer of his surroundings.

Vertigo was the first of Sebald���s books that I read. In order to enter his world, I had to disregard most of my preconceptions about what a novel should be. Initially, I was attracted by his playfulness and the tongue-in-cheek tone, as well as by the sly humor and wit. I also felt there was something else lurking there. Just as the narrator has a paranoid fear of being watched or followed, I felt followed by something in the book that I couldn���t quite identify, some truth or knowledge, as often happens with good poetry where meaning emerges from around the poem���s borders. Sebald���s approach explodes for me the myths I���ve created about novels needing to incorporate dramatic scenes, etc., all of the various workshop admonitions about narrative arc and development.

Though I haven���t read Cusk���s work, and only have this review to go on, I am concerned with the idea that some writers may rely more on their personal experiences to create ���fictions��� than employ their imaginations. Contemporary life is already too one-dimensional and focused on surfaces. Most people aren���t aware of their dreams and the unconscious. Or they deny that anything other than the day���s residue is being circulated in these nighty dramas. What a loss!

As Carl Jung pointed out in Man and His Symbols, ���Imagination and intuition are vital to our understanding��� (82). He goes on to say that it isn���t just poets or other artists who employ these ways of perceiving, but they are also essential to scientists. He emphasizes that the rational intellect isn���t the only way of knowing or understanding ourselves and the world (inner or outer) and claims that ���the surface of our world seems to be cleansed of all superstitious and irrational elements��� (86). This observation is even truer today than when Jung wrote this piece in 1961 near the end of his life.

If our novels are limited to portraying our everyday experiences, the chitchat that goes on in our living rooms and other social settings, then we are missing a whole level of vitality and knowledge. It���s the imagination in conjunction with the unconscious that produces myths, symbols, and alternate views of reality. Not that our personal experiences can���t be imbued with these elements, but if they are the sole basis for our fictions, then we are deprived of something much richer and more worthwhile.

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Links Tagged: autobiography, Carl Jung, Elaine Blair, imagination, Knausgaard, Man and his symbols, myth, novels, Rachel Cusk, symbols, W.G. Sebald

Venice: La Serenissima

My husband and I are planning a month-long trip to Italy in June 2015, so an article about Venice in Border Crossings interested me. It has helped me to better understand why that city moved me so much.

In its description of St. Mark���s church, it says,”‘You are going to be shocked when you go inside,’ the guide said solemnly. It is very oriental.’ Pause. ‘You see, the mosaics were made by Greeks. You’re going to see Greek words on the mosaics. A surprise in a Christian Church’.”

My father was born in Central Greece, the village of Karditsa. Some years ago, I stopped in Venice before flying to Greece for ten days to explore that part of my heritage. Immediately, I felt at home there. Before that trip, I hadn’t realized how much the East had influenced Venice in architecture and design, a mix of ornate decoration and classical elements. It gives a unique feeling, a magical quality. The city is not exactly Italian or European but Venetian. Its own world. The bride of the sea.

The city has great symbolic value to me, the bridge between east and west, between my Scottish heritage on my mother���s side and my father���s.

Venice, a mix of cultures and peoples, is the opposite of more dignified Florence. There���s a dreamy quality to life in Venice. Slow moving���you can’t go that fast on the water, so the pace of life is easier. Seeing water everywhere also makes one feel reflective, suspended. It’s truly miraculous that men were able to build the town in water, in mud.

It was incredible to sit in St. Mark’s square, drinking a beer, watching the tourists amble by, some dancing to the elegant pop music, violins, accordions, sweet sounds. Not the clashing ones of rock. Venetian feeling. From where I sat in a restaurant, I could see a pigeon making a nest in the fold of a canvas curtain. The activity was touching in the midst of all that commotion.

The boat rides after dark also were lovely, spots of light illuminating the night and reflecting in the water, gondoliers snaking through the canal, paddles soundlessly cutting into the depths, passengers reclining and enjoying the ride. So many of the buildings seemed only partially inhabited, many windows dark. Of course, the shutters may have been closed against mosquitoes and noise from the canal. But it was dramatic to view the places that were illuminated, glimpses into elegant parlors, walls and ceilings ornately decorated. A woman stepping out on her balcony was silhouetted against the light. It was like being on a giant stage.

The day I visited St. Mark’s, I realized why this city is so important to me. I was looking at things saved from Constantinople, items Venetians had ransacked during that great city’s demise. I understood its impact then emotionally, not just intellectually: Venice is the gateway into Greece, into that part of my heritage. It has a strong Greek influence (the Greek cross is used in the sanctuary, the Greek Orthodox church putting more emphasis on resurrection than the crucifixion, on completeness).

Nearly everything about Venice pleases me���the ambiance, the beauty, the color, the art, the architecture. The mix of so many periods and styles. I like that kind of blending. There is also an assortment of races not found so much in other Italian communities.

The Border Crossing���s article also pointed out that “Venice herself is understood to be female, either La Serenissima or, to use Apollinaire’s nasty phrase, the ‘sexe femelle de l’Europe’ (the she-animal of Europe).” No wonder I felt at home there.

(Here are more wonderful images of Venice:��http://shootingveniceandberlin.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/stillness/)

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Filed under: Links Tagged: border crossings, constantinople, florence, greece, greek, karditsa, st. mark's church, st. mark's square, the academia, venetian, venice, venice lagoon

Writing To Experience Life’s Strangeness

Writing is such a major part of my day that if I don���t get to it, I���m constantly distracted, as if I have a lover I���m thinking about. It���s like a siren���s call, pulling me away. My husband notices it. He comments on me seeming drifty. He���s right. I���m not fully there. But the discipline of writing an hour or more a day pulls me into myself, gives me the contemplative part I need. Balance.

I realize that the kind of stories I often write keeps me in touch with life���s strangeness, its unfathomable mysteries. Realistic stories I enjoy, but they focus more on the everyday, on what���s visible from the ego���s view. My stories sometimes take another perspective, as if I���m looking at the world from the underside, showing what���s there but not normally perceived.

In this new year, I want to get more strangeness into my work (fiction and poetry), and it���s why writing can be so much fun. There���s also a psychological component for me. At the same time as I���m creating something others can read and enjoy, I���m also figuring out an aspect of myself.

In my ���Spirit of the Law��� story, it shows a character refusing to be locked into this masculine-dominated world of business. Now dead, she may be doomed to haunt the halls of Johnson et al (her former employer) as a ghost, but it���s not a done deal. The character can take charge and get what she wants. To the degree that this character refers to some traits in me, this obsessive side to my personality can let loose of the restraints she���s put on herself by living in such a restrained way.

 

Filed under: Links Tagged: strangeness, writing, writing and personality

Dreaming into 2015

On this first day of a new year, I recorded my dreams as usual, wondering if they would preview what I’d be dealing with during 2015. Now dead family members—my uncle Jack, Grandpa, Mum—paid me visits, so I’m left thinking about how they’ll influence me in the coming days.

Each morning I walk into my dreams, an invisible membrane I wear throughout the day.  The characters and moods and colors of the dreams interact with the world, enlivening and deepening it, as I discover parallels with inner dramas. Gradually, some of the meaning from these nightly narratives seems into daytime consciousness.

The authority in a dream that is trying to intimidate me matches a similar instance in my current life. Or I’m left pondering the image of adding something to a milk bottle that curdled the top layer, though the rest was okay after I poured out the curdled part. I think of the milk bottle top being similar to our head and how things we take in can sour because they aren’t accurate or relevant, so we need to get rid of them.

Dreams function much as the large mirror does in my study, giving depth, creating another dimension. They’re the water that recirculates through me constantly, renewing and refreshing.

 

Filed under: Links Tagged: dreams, night dreams

Recreating Ourselves Through Memoir

I opened the I Ching at random this morning and came up with #38, K’uei / Opposition. The commentary says it is common for two opposites to exist together, needing to find relationship. I realize an opposition is being set up just in the act of writing a memoir, which I’m currently working on. My inner writer will be observing everything I do closely and recording what she finds valuable. I’m reminded of a review of Journey into the Dark: The Tunnel by William Gass that appeared in The New York Times Book Review:

Writers double themselves all the time in their fictions, of course. That’s one of the reasons for writing them: to clone yourself and set yourself out on a different path, or to reconfigure yourself as a marginal observer of your own childhood, as Lawrence does with Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, and as Woolf does with Lily Briscoe in To The Lighthouse; or to split yourself in two and reimagine one side of yourself through the eyes of the other, as Joyce does in Ulysses, and as Nabokov does in Pale Fire…..The reason for this is that making copies of ourselves and setting them in motion in imaginary space is built in to the way minds work. We do it all the time—when we plan for a future event, when we relive the past, when we daydream. (July 13, 1995)

I like the idea that I’m daydreaming myself into existence, that day and night dreams, which can be in opposition, work together to make a creative entity. I’m actually making a fiction in my memoir, just as we all are fictions, walking around. I can’t possibly capture my whole life in these pages, so in making the choices I do and recording them, I’m altering my experience, describing a fictional “I,” transforming my life and my experiences. They are both mine and not mine.

In fact, the act of writing these things and reflecting back on them alters that period, transforms it, just as the moon’s reflection changes what it touches, causing us to see a landscape differently at night than in the day time, under the sun’s glare. The moon softens surfaces, embraces them. The sun brings out an object’s hard edges and distances us from it. It makes an object seem farther away than the moon’s light does.

In a way, I’m creating a character named Lily, just as other writers recreate themselves when writing memoir. By organizing our pasts as we do, we eliminate a good deal, including only what fits the page limitation and what we’re willing to reveal. Of course, this is how we give shape to a self anyway, by uncovering/discovering it, bit by bit. All of our personality doesn’t show at any one time. Over a long period, the different parts of ourselves come forward and are exposed. But we are always selecting, choosing.

It’s similar to what happens when we photograph someone. So much is left out, and we end up with an idealized (or sometimes extremely revealing) image. If we took a dozen photographs of the person, while there would be a recognizable self in each picture, what’s captured in celluloid changes. Usually, we only see a posed image, not a full-blown experience of another caught in natural motion. I suppose it’s why many people prefer to choose a photograph of themselves that projects their best features, leaving the viewer with a romanticized picture of someone.

I think Proust was pointing to a similar phenomenon when he claimed that the narrative “I” is much different from the writer’s self/I. The writer is creating another fictional self to speak through, and it isn’t exactly the same as the writer’s self. I believe this happens in all writers. Proust ideas about memory are instructive: we’re so caught up in the moment that it’s difficult to understand our experiences. But by revisiting them in memory, we make sense of our lives. I feel that’s what I’m doing here, trying to sort through inner and outer experiences, to understand them, to uncover their meaning.

Filed under: Links Tagged: i ching, Journey into the dark: the tunnel, memoir, memory, nabokov, pale fire, Proust, william gass

Internal vs External Memories

As a writer, I continue to make discoveries about process. Recently I had a dream where I started writing the words “I am four and …..” The rest I can’t recall, but apparently the language was supposed to take me into an important memory. The words may have come from a prompt someone gave me in the dream, but I forget who, and I now forget most of the prompt, though I tried to rehearse it in my sleep

The next morning, I wrote the following:

I am four, and I’m sitting by the window watching birds and wishing I were a bird—that I could fly. And then I see the snow coming down and there aren’t any birds any longer because the snow buries them and everything looks white and the white blanks out the world and I’m afraid because it appears that the white will stay forever.

And then finally spring comes or a Chinook and the snow melts and I see brown and maybe some gold and black earth but it takes a long time before green appears again and at four I don’t know what spring means and I don’t know that there’ll ever be anything but snow because at four I don’t have much of a past or a future yet. I just have the moment and how long each moment seems to be so that everything gets stretched and time goes farther than the prairies and they go on as far as the eye can see.

I hide inside myself waiting for things to change but not knowing they will change. Just living in hope and hope is such an intangible at four it almost doesn’t exist because hope means there is a future and I don’t think about futures and again I wonder if I’ll get out from under the white.

I am four and the light changes on the distant Rockies. It’s summer and now I can see clouds and they’re white but not like the snow. They’re friendlier and I don’t mind their kind of white because it comes and goes and changes shape and will give me a glimpse and sometimes more of blue. I feel I can lose myself in all that blue. It will wrap around me not like the white that blinds and buries me. The blue picks me up and is like a comforting blanket and I can see many things in the clouds like painting on the blue sky. I don’t want it to stop but I wanted the white snow to stop because it was too cold and it felt like I’d never get warm again.

Following the dream’s instructions and writing “I am four” and letting it take me wherever gave me new insight into how different an internal memory is from an external one. Most of the “memories” I write from are based on external events, whether real or imagined. But they usually don’t capture my internal state of mind, which is what really interests. I’ve lived the other and can remember those experiences, but the internal dimension is much more intangible. It’s difficult for most of us—all of us—to remember exactly what we were thinking/feeling during an earlier time.

What I just wrote about snow and white may be something I wasn’t fully conscious of feeling at four. But following my dream’s suggestion by writing “I am four” and letting it take me to another level in myself gave me insight into how different an internal memory is from an external one.

Most of the “memories” I write from are based on external events, whether real or partially imagined. But they often don’t capture my internal state of mind, which is what really interests me. I’ve lived the outer experience and can remember it, but the internal aspect is much more intangible. In the freewrite, I’m digging under the surface and discovering something I had forgotten feeling at four, or that I buried, because it would have caused too much anxiety.

 

 

Filed under: Links Tagged: external memories, freewrite, imagined, internal memories, memories, writing process

Shedding Time’s Skin

This rainy day in the SF Bay area has allowed me to hunker down and watch the world go by through the bay window in our living room. A few brave souls skitter along the sidewalk, carrying umbrellas. Cars swish up and down the street, spraying pedestrians as they pass. The rain seems relentless, hardly letting up the whole day, the kind of weather that encourages reflection.

Time’s passing is also inexorable, This twelfth month sheds itself as a snake discards its old skin, the days rolling off the calendar and never returning. The year constantly needs new skin because the old would constrict it, preventing it from growing further.

We shed time in a similar fashion, unable to remain for long in one place. The one thing about time’s ephemeral nature is it is constant: we never will experience this moment again that is quickly sliding out of view. Determined to drag us into the future, it refuses to linger, and we’re left trying to keep up.

If we had something visible to mark our changes as a snake does, it might be easier to recognize that just as the year is constantly going through its cycles, so are we, whether we’re aware of it or not. This leaves me feeling a little melancholy because a few months from now I won’t remember this current emotional state. I’ll have shed more skins, and December 19, 2014, will be history.

 

 

Filed under: Links Tagged: holidays, new years, snake shedding skin, time passing

The Buddha Never Leaves the Attic

My reading group has chosen Julie Otsuka’s Buddha in the Attic for its next book, and I approached it enthusiastically. The reviews were ecstatic: “An understated masterpiece…that unfolds with great emotional power…Destined to endure” (SF Chronicle) and “Otsuka’s incantatory style pulls her prose close to poetry” (The New York Times Book Review). I wanted to be a believer.

As a writer, I think I’m more focused on style and structure than some readers might be, so I was curious to see how Otsuka handled these things and more. And I’m always interested in seeing inventions: W. G. Sebald, who has conceived a new hybrid novel—part memoir and part travelogue—remains one of my favorite writers. So is Roberto Bolano, another original writer whose 571 page The Savage Detectives has a four hundred page central core titled “The Savage Detectives” that offers the viewpoints of 38 friends, lovers, acquaintances, and enemies of the main characters, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. This chorus of characters describes encounters with the two poets over a period of 20 years in Mexico City, Barcelona, Tel Aviv, and beyond. Clearly, Bolano isn’t trying to write the traditional novel.

Neither is Otsuka. She seems to be creating more of a sociological study of the Japanese women who immigrated to America in the early 1900s, mail order brides to Japanese men who had preceded them here. But instead of exploring a handful of these females in depth, she uses a collective voice. The first line is “On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall” (3). The collective “we” prevails throughout.

At the beginning, I didn’t mind this group point of view. I was willing to see how the writer narrated the various situations these women found themselves in once they landed. Some worked in the fields with their new husbands. Others lived in cities and found similar menial work to do. But none of these situations is covered individually. We learn that “They admired us for our strong backs and nimble hands” (29). I never experienced one particular character and followed her through the build up to WW II and Japanese internment.

For someone who values original ways of presenting a narrative, I wanted this collective voice to work. Unfortunately, much of the account just lists what happened, and that approach gets boring. It also keeps the reader at a distance from the emotional heart of these lives. Yet it wasn’t until the final third of the book when many were moved to internment camps that this collective voice works. By then it is a collective situation, and it makes sense to approach it as such. The most compelling moments happen after that.

But overall, I don’t believe the novel lives up to its hype, and the Japanese men and women who created new lives on American soil deserve to be represented as individuals, not ciphers.

Filed under: Links Tagged: hybrid novel, Japanese Internment Camps, Julie Otsuka, Roberto Bolano, The Buddha in the Attic, The Savage Detectives, W.G. Sebald

Walking the Labyrinth at Grace Cathedral

Lily Iona MacKenzie on Myth, Ritual, and Psychic Process
Walking the Labyrinth at Grace Cathedral (Published in the most recent issue of Jung Journal.)

 

I’ve removed my shoes before entering Grace Cathedral’s labyrinth, considered in Medieval times the geographical and spiritual center of the world. The canvas surface feels rough against my bare feet, but pleasantly so, awakening them slightly from their usual sleep when encased in shoes.

I begin, keeping my eyes focused ahead of me, on the ground as I’ve done during previous walking meditations, raising them periodically to look at the stained glass windows.

Words fly out at me. Redemption. Savior. Mary. Disciple. Jesus. Love. Peace. Shards of intense colors—red, blue, green, and yellow made more vivid by the setting sun—flash by.

Before starting, I’d read of the three stages to walking the labyrinth: Purgation, Illumination, and Union. I’m in the Purgation stage, trying to shed the details of my everyday life, opening my mind. The idea is to surrender and let the labyrinth give whatever it will, to accept what comes forth.

I hear the sound of feet in nylons swishing on canvas. They sound like waves. I pass bandaged feet, toes with bunions, a woman with a metal crutch. I think of all the feet that have passed before me on this path and all those that will follow. I feel part of a pilgrimage.

Feet suddenly seem very vulnerable to me. They don’t get a day off. No vacations. I’m in awe of feet, my own seeming more precious. I promise to rest them more, give them footbaths, pamper them.

I keep watching for some sign that I’ve passed through Purgation and entered Illumination. Will death be like this? I wonder if I’ve left out the salmon I’m planning to have for dinner. Did I remember to tell my students the reading assignment for the next class?

Then I remember that Illumination is the time spent in the center of the labyrinth, quietly praying and receiving whatever wisdom is forthcoming. I’m anxious to get there now, wanting to see what will happen.

One of several musicians standing at the front of the cathedral lifts his oboe and plays. The music sounds like an animal’s voice probing the interior, an animal let loose in the city, rooting under the pews, sniffing at our feet. The sound is so intense it creates an ache in my chest.

I try to keep my mind on the walk and my breathing, but I think of how the sunshine filters through the stained glass and a shaft of light catches the edge of a pew as I pass. Is that Illumination?

I match the movement of my feet to my heartbeat, one foot, then the other. Why haven’t I ever noticed before that walking matches the heart’s rhythms?

The path is narrow. Someone wants to go by. No room to pass. I have to make myself skinny or step over into the next lane. We don’t look at one another’s faces. I focus on the person’s feet, legs, back. Most eyes are downcast, staring at the canvas. Purple boundaries that mark the path wind around and around.

For a moment I panic and think ‘What if I can’t get out. What if I get lost as I did once in the British Columbia wilderness.’ I almost bolt, but I calm myself. Focus on my breathing.

Remembering that a labyrinth is different from a maze quiets me. Mazes aren’t predictable. They can have many entrances and exits, trick corners, blind alleys, and dead ends. Riddles to be solved.

A labyrinth offers calm certainty—one well-defined path that leads us into the center and back out again. No tricks. No cul-de-sacs. No intersecting paths. The labyrinth directs you, guides you, leads. You follow. Knowing you’ll reach the center without having to think about it helps focus and quiet the mind, one purpose of using the structure.

Mazes sound more interesting. Less orderly and predictable. Like life.

I reach the center and sit on the floor with five strangers, trying not to let my voyeurism spoil the experience. But I can’t help glancing at one woman who is standing, balanced on one foot, a little like an egret. Maybe that’s the way to Illumination.

No big epiphany. I just feel pleased I’ve reached my goal, the kind of feeling I get when I’ve made a particularly steep climb and have finally reached the top.

Things I’ve read say that walking the labyrinth will help me return to some sort of center, assuming I have one or that I’ve lost it. Is this what enlightenment looks like? No lights? No great insight? The ordinary?

The center’s getting crowded now, and I rise slowly, controlling my impulse to rush out, eager to experience Union, the final stage, and reach home before the family does so I can start supper. I rework the path, preparing to reenter the world, taking the labyrinth with me.

 

Filed under: Links Tagged: grace cathedral, labyrinth, myth, psyche, ritual