A Few Thoughts in a Free Write

Your signature, your handwriting is a sign of identity: It authenticates you.  What does it mean to not teach cursive to youth today? It means to ignore a history of research on mind and hand, as if the pen or pencil you hold and which you move, is not connected to the mind and central nervous system.

I think of those who had to sign with an X, who were kept from being taught to read.  Ishmael asks in Moby Dick, “Who ain’t a slave?”  And the famous Russian physician & writer I so love, claimed it takes a lifetime to squeeze the slave out of oneself. Both Melville and Chekhov ask us a real question.

I know from personal experience that the personal essay requires reverie and asks a writer to “live in the layers, not the litter,” as poet, Stanley Kunitz wrote. Or as Virginia Woolf wrote, “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”  They won’t come your way if you’re not there to receive them. Make writing a habit.  Simon and Garfunkel sang, “Slow down, you move too fast, you’ve got to make the non-stop last.” They sang “morning,” but the same is true for free writing!  Just move that pen or pencil in your hand.  Give the rudder over to the current, allow yourself to drift in open ocean or a wide bay. And remember that “memories are by their nature, fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary, as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.” I wish I had written this and apologize to the person who penned this sentence… for not noting his or her name.

I disliked essays in both high school and college. Blue books, timed tests. As a literature major, I was supposed to know (before reading the question) what I was going to say, then write as quickly and clearly as possible, sans re-vision unless I wanted to make a mess of the blue book. I never heard of writing as a process until the Bay Area Writing Project at U.C. Berkeley in the late 1970s. I remember the forbidden use of “I” while in high school and writing five paragraph essays with a thesis statement, pretending to know something I did not understand. Now I know and honor words from a medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart, who died in 1326 in France. Please note I have taken liberty with Eckhart’s use of men and substituted, humans.

“That I am, this I share with other humans. That I see and hear and that I eat and drink is what all animals do likewise. But that I am I is only mine and belongs to me and to no one else; to no other human, not an angel, not to God, except in as much as I am one with God.”

Last week the noiseless spider. 

Next week a tiny flower (Impatiens) between a rock and a hard place.

American poet Walt Whitman in 1891

wrote Song of Myself, V… one year before his death. The following words from this poem are,

“I believe in you my soul/ the other I am… must not abase itself to you.”

What timely words for today, when a man who personifies abasement has wedged himself into our heads for what has the feel (at least in mine) of an endless decade. In no way is this man abashed by who he is and what he has done throughout life. Not ashamed, remorseful, conscience-stricken, mortified, humiliated, humbled or discomfited. He is, however, red-faced; but that is cosmetic like the orange-hair, and not from being shamefaced.

I am led to poetry when the world is too much with me; and this dispirited feeling led me to Whitman by happenchance. I thought of Walt when I stared out the kitchen window last Wednesday afternoon. Looking through the glass and, in light perfectly cast outside in the garden, I saw a spider web. It was suspended out many feet from a tall Pampas grass, a plant whose many fronds reach skyward, ready to wave in any wind. ”Not the best location for a web, Charlotte,” I said.

E.B. White

(The famous essayist & author E.B. White was on my mind for Thursday’s second class on the Personal Essay.)  

Although I could see the web and its nearby spider, any filament did not seem to be connected to anything other than the large Pampas. I went outside for a closer look. There I saw a filament attached to a knock-out rose bush. Yet outside in different light, I could not see the web. I only knew it was there because of one trapped insect of unidentified means.

One thing and another led me to “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” a Walt Whitman poem in the public domain.

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on the little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the sphere to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Next week:  The mystery of creativity as our connective web

What Resonates Through Time?

On Thursday October 3, my course, The Personal Essay, began; and students read a short piece, “Asthma,” by Seneca. Imagine this Stoic philosopher’s voice resonating from Rome, more than twenty-one centuries later.

In class the other day, Seneca’s piece and another by the late Russell Baker, made me recall the first “personal” essay I ever wrote. (I’m not talking about essays in high school and papers in college.)  The essay I wrote was for a class at U.C. Berkeley in the late 1970s during the decade I lived in the Napa Valley.

A requirement in Overcoming the Fear of Writing was to mail an essay to the professor weeks earlier. I assumed the class would be small if the teacher wanted an essay from everyone. But what to write? When to write it? My life was the “full catastrophe”: High school English teacher, lesson plans, papers to grade, two children under five, house & garden, my mate a U.S.A.F. pilot. Yet when I saw this class in the U.C. Extension catalogue, a voice said, “Write for your Life, Gail.” 

That Saturday in Cal Berkeley’s Sproul Hall were 100 students, if not more. Had the professor read an essay from each of us?  She arrived a bit late, wiry, wild-haired, and ready to get our pens moving. And move they did until she said we would have an hour for lunch to recharge our batteries. Before dismissal, she asked to see two students. My first thought when I heard my name, “What did I do wrong?”  The other student was a dapper looking older man. I had typed my essay on erasable bond paper, which the professor held in her hands. I could see that print had begun to disappear. I must have thought I would be told to use different paper. She talked to the gentleman first. He turned out to be a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. The teacher had wanted to meet him. He had taken the class because he was “blocked” writing a book under contract, one on Emperor Norton of San Francisco fame. Then she turned to me and said my essay should be published. What’s more she was willing to help me. I looked again at “Yellow Shoes.” Above the title in huge letters, she had written, RESONANCE.  I recognized the word but did not understand what it meant related to my essay. (I had to wait until I returned home that day and checked an unabridged dictionary.)  That day in Sproul Hall the journalist kidded me about being special and said he would buy my lunch.  I did not return home and say to Mike, babysitter for the day, that I ate lunch with a journalist from The Chronicle.  But because of that day, I became a writer.

What was my first personal essay about?  An extended metaphor about shoes and what they revealed about the direction my life had taken. Humorous, heart-felt, and resonant. “Yellow Shoes” was not published.  But two years later, Redbook Magazine selected my “Young Mother’s Story” from hundreds of submissions.  All because of that one day in Sproul Hall in the 1970s.

What resonates through time?

Your voice, my voice, the written voice, the human voice.