Dogs and Memoirs
Today I walked past one of my neighborhood characters - an older lady who pushes a shopping cart in which she has placed her dachshund, on that small flip down seat usually used for toddlers. The cart has been fitted out for this dear old dog, going white about the muzzle, with cushions and blankets and padding. The dog itself wears a woollen hat knitted in rasta colors, a tartan coat, and a red blanket. It looks colorful and very cozy, even in the heat. The dog doesn’t move much, although I check each time to see if it’s alive. This is the way she takes her dog for a walk.
I don’t know much else about this lady and her dog. I’m reluctant to ask.
Today it struck me that writing a memoir (something I send a lot of time on with my students) is a bit like this dog. If we try to over-plan any piece of writing we risk squeezing the life out of it. We force it to be something it isn’t, like this dog. Writing, you see, is always linear. It is always sequential. Life isn’t sequential. It’s always a gestalt. So writing about life is always going to be to commit violence upon it, as we try to constrain it into managable dimensions. In fact Memoir, which is the way we recall our lives, has all the life and unpredictability of an unruly dog who wants to sniff lamp posts and chase cats and bark at mailmen. And that’s what dogs are.
Rendering the truth of living experience doesn’t depend upon taming the life out of it. It depends upon letting it be itself; messy, unruly, alive. We don’t have to include every detail, or have processed all the emotions. And somewhere in all that movement and fuss we’ll smile and say, yup, that’s what life is. Good dog.
on August 22nd, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Trains of thought…
Good Morning Allan:
At last I’ve found my way to this blog.
On the subject of writing and life, that writing is sequential and life is not, I agree other than in the respect that we all take the same journey from first breath to last.
In pursuit of a good sample to send you in advance of the upcoming 9MM, I’ve spent days and days in search of an excerpt sufficiently worthy.
Following trains of thought and real trains, (The house where I’ve lived for 40 years backs on to the the tracks of the train from North Station to Fitchburg) one train led to another.
Book III opens on the Red Line train on Longfellow Bridge. Toward the end of the book, I’m in an yoga class at the Belmont Lions club. I chose the yoga class as a penultimate scene to have a philosophical destination.
The Lions Club is housed in the former train station which was built from 365 tons of field stone hauled down from Belmont Hill in 1903 by farmer, David Thomas. I liked that I could tie in a littel morte about stone and rock.
In the class on our matts as night fell that evening, I heard the familar clang of the bell announcing the commuter train. As it rumbled through, the building trembled. My teacher instructed us to “vibrate with the vibrations.”
In that moment, I realized that this train pulling into Belmont had rumbled past my house in Porter Square only momnents earlier and that my house always vibrates as it passes. In thirty years of writing, I’ve never written a word about a train whose comings and goings are as familiar to me as the ins and outs of my breathing.
Is this a blog?
And is it sequential or linear?
Your faithful student
Mary Lou
on August 24th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Dear Mary Lou,
Fascinating thoughts - and I agree that we do live moment to moment, which seems to be linear. Yet I’d contend that after a very short time we live with memories and recalled impressions swirling around us, and memory is always associative, isn’t it? So we’re simultaneously here and several other places…. Perhaps a train is an excellent metaphor? the train moves, seems to have integrity and direction, and yet it moves through thousands of other realities - those that surround it.
I do love your comments. they get me thinking….
Peace, Allan