1. In one of the books on memoir writing I was reading in the fall (I don't recall which and I don't want to take the time to hunt right now), the author said that if you go deeply into such writing you will inevitably start reliving powerful emotions. And I think she even said that it was good to be working with a therapist while you are writing memoir, because of that. Writing that down, it seems fairly obvious -- but I have an odd, at times tenuous relation with my own emotions. I am the person who hasn't managed to cry about my parents' deaths. But, wow. Holy crap. I was not prepared for some of the intense emotional experiences that are hitting me. Not while I am writing, not necessarily immediately after, but soon/sometime after. Certain feelings and states of the past have come back to me incredibly strongly, and not as remembered emotion, but as relived emotion. And even "relived" would not have conveyed enough to me as a word prior to this; it's that the person who had those emotions perhaps thirty years ago is the exact same person I am now -- the time collapses and I am back there, still that me, or that earlier me is here again. Many of the feelings involved are painful, and yet it is, strangely or not, wonderful to feel those (any) feelings so strongly again, to encounter the deepest love I have ever felt 100% alive in me, to be 25 (again? still?) now, even if my physical body is older.
So I have been going back and forth -- at times barely even seeing the present, the past is so strong; then the present catches my interest or requires my focused energies again, and I am back in it, the past receding to something like its normal place. And yes, I am seeing a therapist, if you're wondering.
But when the past retreats -- there is a sense of loss. Except I now trust it will come back soon enough, is with me. That past place is almost unbearably painful, but so beautiful.
2. I've been reading some newer (though not so new anymore) theoretical work related to queer affect theory, queer melancholia, the queering of temporality. The queerness of looking backwards, of refusal to get over the lost object, the sense (to a degree, at times) of failure and shame involved in that. No "moving on," the past and the present still one, as I described above. This stuff is pretty abstruse in its language, but (because of the emotional experiences I described above) I am realizing vividly, uncannily, that the things the theorists are talking about are literally the core of my emotional life. I am the poster child for queer melancholia, and it even infuses how I read Mary Dyer. I know this won't mean much to anyone reading this, as I'm not telling you the specifics. They will be in the book, but are too personal and sacred to explain in a blog post. They relate to a same-sex attachment, yes, but it's actually queerer and harder to talk about than simply that. A safe space is required. Or, you know, art. (So I guess I am succumbing to abstraction, in my way.)
But I find that here, too, I reexperience a vivid emotion from my early adult life: dizziness at the absolute disconnect between reading abstract theoretical writing about human experience, and what subjective experience feels like, what emotion feels like. During my years in graduate school, I was reading all this abstract writing, and at the same time going through the deepest, most wrenching, most sacred experience of my life (see above). And there seemed absolutely no connection between them. And now theory has come around to pretty directly talking about the things most central to me (so, alas, I'm struggling to catch up and start to master it even a little). I do think I would have been able to find myself in it if I were that person reading long ago -- the connections are hard to miss. But the gap between abstracted language and the pulsing sacredness of what I know is still disorienting and almost obscene to me. Even more so, since the discourse is directly about lived emotions.
It was only a year after graduate school, when I read a new colleague's narrative writing about loss, that I finally saw myself in it, began to gain a way to think about who I am. One personal essay conveyed understandings to me that years of encounters with feminist and queer theory (at least of that era) never had.
I am in a strange position because of course I am still a PhD in English, I want to understand theory (at times at least), or feel I should, or think those who understand and write it are much better and smarter than me. Especially since one of my PhD advisors is a famous leader in this field. But at the same time, I am questioning very much as I work on my project whether I will ever want to write anything academic again. The flaring up of rage in me now against language that does not arise from and reflect the substance of personal, lived experience -- does not reveal secrets, tell stories -- is very clarifying.
This is, too, very connected to Quaker theology and ministry -- to commit to speak only what is known from experience. Everything I have cared about is of a piece.
3. The last paragraph triggers this observation, which is also a bit amusing to me: twice now, in the grip of past emotions that I lived for the first time while I was in graduate school, I have had a dream where it turns out I need to go back and finish or (in the second dream) write all of my PhD dissertation. That must be about unfinished business, or simply going back, or the dissertation as the thing you write to define your voice and who you are in the world of words. So this project now is like my dissertation again. In the most recent dream, I was still casting around for my topic, and I asked my advisor if I could do an "author study." What that term literally meant in the dream and upon waking wasn't that clear -- I know it didn't mean just a study focused on a single author, it was something more daring, like biographical criticism. (In the dream I proposed doing it on Shakespeare, of all things!) But of course my project is precisely an "author study" -- that is, a book about something else (Mary Dyer in this case), refracted through a study of myself, the author. So yes, I guess that's exactly what I want permission to do. (I don't know what Shakespeare is about, unless it indicates my desire to commit myself to a great and worthy subject.)
4. This entry got longer than I intended, but I wanted to add this, and will perhaps come back to it another time. The other day I got around to rereading a piece I've been meaning to as preparation for a section of the book I want to work on in Mexico -- Audre Lorde's "The Uses of the Erotic" (1978). I knew Lorde located the power of the erotic (not the sexual, something wider and deeper) flowing through all areas of life, but I hadn't actually read the essay in many years. Oh my goodness, what a powerful and relevant piece. And in simple, personal language that conveys rather than obscures experience. It tells me so deeply about how I want to write and why working on this project is such a different experience from academic writing for me, and points me in an important direction for thinking about how I want to live in the years ahead. Written forty years ago at the height of second-wave feminism, but I was amazed at how little dated it seems in its core points.
Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.Or you can listen to Lorde read it here: https://youtu.be/xFHwg6aNKy0
I think everybody needs to read or re-read this piece now. How do we want to live in the present, how do we want to resist? It is so urgent. And without it we are losing our lives day by day in fear, and anger, and responding to the latest provocation, and in not knowing what to do. Here is a different way, to find a resistance grounded in feeling and energy and love.
Thank you for sharing. I liked this one very much. Shakespeare! ;)
ReplyDeleteHave you ever thought about keeping a dream journal as you work through some of the emotions that are surfacing? I used to keep one, and not that it was super profound or anything but it did help me express more of what I was feeling in relation to what I was dreaming. It could be somewhat useful to you as you work on this project, maybe?
It's not a bad idea! I remember the important dreams pretty well. Years ago I was actually in a women's dream interpretation group, and I've done so much therapy. I'm good at interpreting my dreams and pretty hard core about learning from them.
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