I feel years, if not decades, behind where I could have been as a writer had I only been paying attention. I feel as though thirty or forty years have gone by and, somehow, I missed them.
For most of us, creating any type of art (writing, painting, music) requires being present in the world. It requires slowing down and observing things – engaging with the world through our senses and our mind. It requires making connections between big history and personal history – seeing the forest and the trees (and the sunlight and the clouds and the ants marching in a line across a fallen and rotting tree). And when those observations are non-existent, it requires gathering enough fodder from the outside world (a lifetime of experience and observations) that can be used as a believable fiction in the spaces where history and memory fail.
I was reading a poem in which the author builds an almost mythic past for a specific time in the speaker’s personal history. He references “the country tilting right” and “the winter winter never came / to South Jersey” and later, “Forest fires moved through the Barrens. / We needed rain and got wind.” I don’t know if these things actually happened, if there’s a historical sequence that played out, but as I searched my mind wanting to recreate the aura of a season or time period, I found emptiness. My mind was blank. I had no details about any particular winter or summer or year or event.
Perhaps because the poem mentioned a fire in the Pine Barrens, from my childhood, I could remember a large fire in an apartment complex not far from where I lived. I remember it was the apartment complex where we lived before we moved into our house – but I couldn’t tell you what the weather was like on that day or if it was summer or fall or those invitingly pleasant days and weeks between the two. I know it happened in the early evening and lasted into the night. Smoke could be seen and smelled for miles.
From adulthood, I struggle to name any significant regional history or national event other than 9/11 and even then, I struggle to piece together the details of my life on that day or the days after. It was sunny, mostly cloudless blue – but everything else is a blur.
And the harder I search and reach, the more blank my memory seems to be. It’s as if I haven’t been alive.
Sometimes, I wonder if this (building connections and memories) is a matter of training. I could tell you what the weather was like yesterday. I could tell you that I watched a man jump from the top of a city trash can onto the base of a street lamp and then hop down to the sidewalk raising his arms triumphantly as though he just finished his routine on the balance beam. I could tell you another man was dancing wildly on the shady side of the Embarcadero across the street from the Ferry Building where I sat in the late-day sun drinking a beer. I could tell you that the fog in the morning was heavy and created a barely visible rainbow around the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge as the tower emerged like a beacon above the world. But my mind doesn’t connect those things to events outside of my scope of vision. Those details would take on a different vibe or significance were they to follow a dramatic world event, “the day airstrikes killed over 400 people half way around the world, the south tower of the bridge rose like a sentinel above the morning fog.”
Looking for excuses, I partially blame capitalism for keeping me preoccupied with staying alive and getting by for much of my life, and I partially blame my years of writing instruction in college for teaching mechanics over soulfulness and connectivity. And maybe blame is the wrong word. Maybe I just needed time to learn how to be more present in the world, how to slow down, how to properly place epochs and seasons, and how to vacillate between the details of light and movement and the larger, historical world. I also need to get better at letting go… letting go of the fact and truth in favor of something a little more squishy. I have the same problem when I try to paint – this adherence to getting it accurate as opposed to getting some proximal representation. And even now, I’m not sure I’ve gotten this observation and history right or gotten any closer to letting go and letting loose. But I’m still trying.