Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. Amy Tan

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СКАЧАТЬ at 6:00 P.M. My mind was clear. There was no hesitation, no puzzling over plot points. I wrote in a state of elation, not knowing how much time was passing. When I finished, I opened the door and gasped to find the sun rising at dawn. Twelve hours had gone by. That day I gave the completed manuscript to Faith. The words I wrote that night were the ones that were published.

      Looking back, those fifty pages seem like a miracle to me. I have never been in a similar fugue state since, neither in length nor intensity. In writing about this now, I realize what can free the mind of self-consciousness: uncertainty and urgency, and in the case of my third novel, the urgency was the combination of terror and love. Uncertainty and urgency moved the story forward in other novels. These days, those uninterrupted passages last for only a few paragraphs or at most, a few pages. They almost always arrive as the ending of a chapter or the novel—when the narrator and I reach a point where we recognize what this confluence of thought, emotion, and events has led to. As I continue to write, I don’t know what will happen, and yet I do. It is inevitable, like déjà vu moments, experienced as familiar as soon as I write them, the revelation of my spiritual twin—the intuitive part of me made conscious.

      That was what I sensed while writing The Joy Luck Club. When the metaphoric understanding came, I felt astonishment similar to what I experienced when I emerged from my spell in a lightless room to find the sun rising at dawn. In the story “Scar,” I had not anticipated that imagery that was both violent and painful would also be emotionally freeing.

      Even though I was young. I could see the pain of the flesh and the worth of the pain.

      This is how a daughter honors her mother. It is shou so deep it is in your bones. The pain of the flesh is nothing. The pain you must forget. Because sometimes that is the only way to remember what is in your bones. You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.

      This was unexpected understanding from a place in the brain where metaphoric imagery is not governed by logic but exists as a sensation of truth steeped in memory, the twin to intuition.

      Spontaneous epiphanies always leave me convinced once again that there is no greater meaning to my life than what happens when I write. It gives me awareness so sharp it punctures old layers of thought so that I can ascend—that’s what it feels like, a weightless rising to a view high enough to survey the moments of the past that led to this one. Too soon, that feeling dissipates, and I am hanging on to contrails as I come back down to a normal state of mind—the one that requires me to write in the more laborious, conscious, preplanned way, all the while hoping I will soon have another intuitive run in which the pieces join, lose their seams, and become whole.

      Has my imagination worked this way since birth? What enables me to draw a bird that looks like a bird? When did I start noticing that one thing is emotionally like another? When did emotion and imagery start colluding with velvety sharks?

      Whatever imagination is, I am grateful for its elasticity and willingness to accommodate whatever comes along, for giving me flotillas of imagery circumnavigating a brain that finds emotional resonance in almost anything. I just have to let go of self-consciousness for it to spill out freely, as if all I am doing is listening to music.

       CHAPTER TWO

       MUSIC AS MUSE

      I’ve never played any of Rachmaninoff’s music on the piano. Had I tried, any one of his pieces would have killed me with its demands for polar-opposite dynamics, acrobatic articulation, and cool concentration while evoking the extremes of human emotions at inhuman speed. While I have always liked music that takes me into dark thoughts, Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique was about as gloomy and as difficult a song as I was able to manage. In comparison, I thought Rachmaninoff’s music was over the top on a psychopathology scale. It sounded like the voice of a hysteric who warbles between pledges of undying love and threats of suicide. Minor struggles become catastrophes, hopes bubble into delusions, and blame turns to vengeance, ending with someone’s ancestral home being burned to the ground. This music would have been ideal for accompanying the moods of my mother.

      And then, about fifteen years ago, I fell in love with Rachmaninoff’s music. I found it hard to believe I had ever found fault with it. Age probably had much to do with my changing musical tastes. Over the years, I’ve accumulated plenty to reflect on: chest-ripping joy, strange fortune, disembowelment by betrayal, and love cratered deeper by the loss of far too many, including my mother. Rachmaninoff’s music has become a wonderfully sympathetic companion. My fingers remain still. I am the listener, ready to take the emotional path into a story.

      I used to think that everyone saw stories in music. But when I learned this was not true, it was like discovering that people don’t see a story when they read words, that it is only mental understanding. I’m not saying that music should contain story narratives. It’s more that I can’t stop them from emerging freely, which, sad to say, is not what normally happens when I write novels. Writing requires conscious crafting, and the more conscious I am of how I write, the clumsier my sentences come out. The more effort I expend, the less imagination is available. In contrast, when I experience stories in music, it’s effortless—and that’s because I am not composing. I’m simply the listener, and through my imagination I can wander far into a field of sound. The experience is fun, even exhilarating, but I could never use either the process or the output for a novel. My imagination is oblivious to craftsmanship and focus. The story may have holes and inconsistencies. The character may morph several times. The storyline may be chaotic, predictable, or even maudlin. But I can’t improve this spontaneous story any more than I could adjust the weirdness of dreams during sleep. They are simply what my mind went to in the moment—the freely formed melodic reveries guided by the emotions I feel in music.

      In recent years, I’ve noticed an increasing need for reverie for some portion of the day. I feel this most acutely when I am on book tour and must talk, answer questions, and be a scintillating conversationalist from morning to night. I reach a point when my mind no longer wants to hear myself talk nor monitor the intelligence or truth of what I’m saying. It wants to take leave of orderly thoughts and the common sense to not mention sex and drugs in front of a general audience with young children. If I ignore the need to silence myself, I eventually feel mentally claustrophobic, as if I’m on a crowded elevator that stops at no floor.

      I find reverie in drawing, or sitting in the garden on a sunny day when birds are hopping about. I find reverie in watching fish in an aquarium. And there are also melodic reveries, which are slightly different from other forms. The stories I see in music allow my mind to stretch—much in the same way one might stretch a muscle that is cramped. By allowing my imagination to run with the music, it acts as a purgative in clearing my mind of cluttered thoughts. No matter where I am in the world, music is the bringer of reverie. It is not simply pleasure. It is essential.

      I don’t see full stories with every piece of music. If the song is only a page or two, a scene and mood may appear, but when the music stops, the scene will, too. That’s the case with Schumann’s songs in Scenes from Childhood, which I played when I was eleven or so. Now, just as then, the songs evoke a scene, a child, and her moods. “Pleading Child” was a girl pouting and tugging at her mother’s skirt to buy her a doll. “Perfectly Contented” was the same child, dancing with her new doll. I liked the songs well enough, mostly because they were easy to learn, but I did not identify with the conniving child. Only one song from that album felt true to the way I felt: “Traumerei,” which simply means “dreaming” in German. I grew up thinking it meant “trauma,” or “tragedy,” and that the song expressed perpetual heartache. That is still the way I hear “Traumerei.” If “Pleading СКАЧАТЬ