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

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СКАЧАТЬ she sees beauty in the landscape, in the slope of a small hill, in an enormous tree whose canopy is lit so brightly by the sun it looks like a veil of gold. This tree has always been there, and she now recognizes it as a place where she once sought refuge in a thunderstorm. She runs to the tree and climbs up to its crook. The leaves brush her skin. She sees the bright blue sky through the branches. There are so many ways to see sky. She spots a fat blue bird that sings to her. There are so many ways to see blue. Loveliness is unexpected. It comes without being asked for. How had she not known this? She looks out and sees the spire of the church of the village, the dark clouds moving toward it. And then the spire punctures the clouds and dark rain pours.

      15:50 The simple diatonic melody returns. Anna is walking along the road again. Her pace is steady. She is confident. She will see him, her delusion of desire. For so many years, she had seen herself transformed in his lustful gaze. She had believed that the passion in his eyes had emanated from him, when in reality it had simply been her own reflection and longing. Without her desire, he will be empty. Without her passion, he does not exist. Without her shame, the scowling women become myth. They were all part of her delusion to make desire appear more important than it was. And with that realization, the road before her vanishes.

      That is the end of the first movement. There are two more movements. And that is good, because the story of this woman does continue beyond a vanished road.

      For the last thirty years, I’ve harbored a secret desire to compose music. I’ve had dreams that I already have. I hear it, my music, and am composing simultaneously with it being played by a full orchestra. The music is romantic in form. The song is lyrical. The strings play, the reed instruments come in, then the piano solo. The emotions are deep and wide. I know the themes of revelation. I see the partially written score before me, pages three feet wide and four feet tall. I am writing the score for all the instruments, in bars stacked atop each other. I sweep my hand over the paper and the notes appear. But then I wake and realize there is no score and that I lack the skills to transcribe even a note of what I heard. Yet I still feel a residual sense of wonder that the music came to me so easily. I’m frustrated that I can do nothing to retain it. And perhaps that is because there was nothing to retain.

      The dreams of music are like the recurring dreams of a secret ballroom—an enormous unused room always found at the back of a house, past the dining room, or through a door in the laundry room. In the dream, I always wonder why I never noticed the room before. It could have solved my need for additional space for books or for a larger study or a painting studio. In one version of the dream, the ballroom is at the back of a third-floor Victorian apartment where I lived in the 1970s. In another, it is accessed via a cave in the yard of a ramshackle cottage where I lived when I was a student at UC Berkeley. There are three more dream houses, all different, but the ballroom is the same. It was once grand but now has plaster debris on the floor and chipped French blue paint on the walls, all easily fixed. Sometimes there is a smaller room beyond the ballroom. It is a mess, filled with construction materials, mops, buckets, saws, hammers, and a big concrete washbasin holding half-filled cans of paint. These are the materials I have to use to repair the ballroom. It is an enormous task. In some dreams, I am able to clean up the mess in a day and hold a dinner party at night. In other dreams, I decide to put off fixing up the room. I sweep the floor, then leave the house and discover I actually live in another house and the place I just left is a house I lived in twenty years ago and forgot I still owned. I’m flabbergasted. How could I have forgotten I own a house? I wonder how much it would fetch on the real estate market today.

      These are the words I can use when I wake up to retain memory of the ballroom. I cannot use words to retain the music once I wake up. I don’t have the musical ability to take it with me. It lives in its own language—all except one tendril of music, which I managed to capture. As soon as I woke, I used my cell phone to record myself humming part of the dream melody before it disappeared. I played it back. It was a somber tune, almost baroque in quality. When I listened to it a month later, it did not seem like anything I would have devised. I concluded that the tune I hummed was vaguely familiar because it was a song from my past, a hymn from childhood, or any of the thousands of songs I’ve heard at symphonies or on the radio. It could be a passage from a soundtrack. Or perhaps it was a fugitive melody from someone else’s dream.

      I have not given up on the idea that the music I hear in dreams can come alive in the waking world. I have had other things come to me in dreams. Cats that dip their tails in inkwells and write as instructed until one kitten has an accident. That became the children’s book Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat. I dreamed of a full moon party on a boat, during which a little girl falls into the water and becomes lost. When she is found, she is a different person. That became the children’s book The Moon Lady. I dreamed the idea for making the narrator of a novel the ghost of my mother, who had just died. She suggested in the dream that she could serve as the omniscient guide to tourists on holiday in Myanmar, and per her wish, she became the voice in the novel Saving Fish from Drowning. All sorts of solutions to small plot problems have come through somnolent delivery. The best dream arrived two years ago: it was an entire novel—the setting, the narrator, other characters, the situation that leads to the narrative, accidents and bad timing, the other characters and their roles, a backstory in China, a family tree, the complications, even small scenes. When I woke, I wondered if it was the gibberish that is understandable only in dream logic. While it was still in my head, I wrote it down, as much as I could remember. Ten pages. Then I read what I had written and it all made sense.

      The actual writing will still be daunting. It gets harder with each novel. I will have to relearn my craft, overcome the same doubts, untangle the narrative from long detours, or take whichever detour is the story I should tell. I will also find the right music to accompany the scenes as I write them. I am thinking it might even be some of the music that I have yet to dream. It doesn’t have to be a full orchestral piece—let us not be delusional. A simple motif would be enough, just four measures of it spun out into a melody that I could play on the piano in the clear voice of the right hand. It would require only a modest dream to deliver a motif barely hanging by a thread of intuition. I will hum it and capture it with a recorder, then transcribe the notes I hear onto a sheet of music. I will play freely with the motif, trying out variations, then transcribing five, the most emotionally resonant—onto sheet music. I will play that melodic motif a hundred times until it is engrained as emotional memory, as part of me. I will play that motif a thousand times for the novel that I have already dreamed I would write.

       [ QUIRK ]

       Souvenir from a Dream

      SAN FRANCISCO, JANUARY 8, 2002. In my dream about a former era, I was writing lyrics to a song, and when I woke, the lyrics were still in my mind. So I wrote them down. It was as if I had stepped out of a dream that took place in the 1920s and came back with a souvenir. Do these lyrics actually exist? Or did I truly dream them up? Maybe next: a flapper dress.

       Two can can-can

       —Toucan can’t.

       Two can can-can

       —Toucan can’t.

       If I can can-can

       You can can-can

       Then two can can-can.

       Shall we dance?

       Two lips will kiss.

       Tulips wilt СКАЧАТЬ