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| The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali |
Remember
me? *
There
is a lot written about living in the moment, why it’s good for you and how to do it. It’s all about paying attention, which is especially important advice
for writers because paying attention is critical to building and honing the
kind of deep insight we need to create meaningful characters and stories.
One
uniquely modern dilemma is learning how to balance being in the moment with the
urge to record it. There are so many nifty ways to record every moment of our
lives, and so many cool devices that we carry around in our pockets to collect
all these memories. There’s a kind of emotional logic to the idea that capturing
these memories and uploading them to external memory containers like our
computer’s hard drive, the cloud, or various social networks will be more
stable then just trusting them to our own fickle wetware.
Our
modern understanding of the brain in general, and memory in particular, is a
vast and fascinating field. Currently, memory is understood to be largely a reconstruction of events built from
experiences that are often melded with other
information we’ve encountered. Check out "How Our Brains Make Memories" over at the
Smithsonian.
Daniel
Kahneman, the Nobel Laurate who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, talks here about
how experience, memory and happiness are connected and how they are not.
Toni Morrison supports this idea of reconstructed memory in her excellent essay “Memory, Creation, and Writing” (PDF), when she talks about deliberately using her memories’ fungible nature when writing.
“Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was – that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.”
~ Toni Morrison
“Memory, Creation, and Writing” Thought Vol. 59, No. 235 (December 1984)
How
hard is it to reconstruct some event if you didn’t fully experience it? How can
you draw from it emotionally if you were reigning in your full emotional
experience so that you could hold your device steady? When you take a picture
or video of an event you have a different kind of record, a completely
legitimate one – I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m writing this post
from some moral high ground. I love my electronic devices and enjoy hanging
around Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. I too am guilty of “curating” my life.
But,
as a writer, what I draw on when I create is my bank of experiential memories.
On the times when I was entirely there in the moment. We don’t need to throw
our devices into the bonfire, or cancel all our social accounts, just remember
to balance your time with them. Remember that while our human memories may not be
good at collecting the kind of photographic, factual data that a camera can,
they are the best at collecting a different kind of truth. You are the most
complex and mysterious recording device. The truth you tell from your
remembered experiences is the truth of you, and it’s what readers want.
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.”
~ Henry David Thoreau
*
I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions. If I were to make one this year, it
would be to have a couple blog posts in the can for busy family times like the
holidays. For the past two weeks, I kept trying to get in front of a screen to
write a post, but with Christmas gifts like Pandemic and Star Trek Catan as
well as a family trip, it obviously didn’t happen. Fun was had by all and the
break, I think, was a good thing. Now, back to work.
A spar can be the mast of a ship (also what two people do when they go through the motions of hand to hand combat – similar to the kind of motions she and the alien are relentlessly going through as well).
Johnson includes a couple lines of poetry, which I recognized as Shakespeare. At first I thought they might be taken from The Tempest. Thanks to the Internets it was easy to track down. They're from
Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
It's clear that the entire poem informs Johnson's story on many levels (more than I'm glossing here).
Looking at the sonnet, the only concrete images in it have to do with seafaring:
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark (i.e. lighthouse)
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
And,
It is the star to every wandering bark (i.e. a small boat – something like a lifeboat…)
Here love is described as constant but also distant, untouchable. Like dead Gary or the idea of him or her last image of his body frozen in space.
The sonnet backs into its topic with a negative:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
And Johnson, begins by describing what the alien is not:
“The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal.”
The middle of the sonnet describes what love is (the pole star, a light house, unmoving and distant)
The final couplet is a strange negative statement, which is a little harder to parse. (Does it proclaim his love since the poem stands as proof that he did indeed write/love? Is it an admission that his feelings have changed and therefore are not constant and he is no longer in love? Is this a poem of illicit love to his male lover and the last couplet serves as a kind of plausible deniability?)
Regardless of how you read it, it’s the same negative positive negative binary pattern that’s all over Spar."
Check out Anaea's reading of this one here.
If you're trying to become a better writer consider "critiquing" the very best stories you can find. Come on over to the Craft Crucible and join the conversation!