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

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СКАЧАТЬ I quit my doctoral program in linguistics, I seldom wrote much beyond reports on children I had evaluated for speech and language delays. On occasion, I penned gloomy thoughts, a page or two in loose-leaf binders, some in a journal book. A few years ago, I found some of those outpourings. They had the same kind of glimmerings I had found in my library essay—the metaphors. They were not remarkable; in fact, some were overworked or reaching. But I was excited to see that they contained two common characteristics: dark emotion and a reference to a recent experience. I had used those metaphors at age twenty-five, when I felt I was still young but world-weary. I was impatient to be done with mistakes and bright promises. I wanted to acquire a few wrinkles to show I was not a baby-faced innocent. My worries were too numerous to keep track of on two hands—my fear that I was not suited to the job I had taken, my preoccupation with the recent murder of a friend, the expectations of marriage, my mother’s constant crises, our financial hardship, and much more, which combined with my inability to articulate what I needed emotionally. When I tried, I was hyperbolic. After a trip to the beach, I wrote in my journal that I was like a sea anemone that retracted when poked and was unable to differentiate between what was benign and what intended to do me harm. After taking photos at a party on the anniversary of my friend’s murder, I grew despondent thinking about the flat surface of my existence; nothing stood out as better or more meaningful. I wrote that my life was “like a series of Polaroid snapshots, those stopped-time, one-dimensional images on chemically altered paper that served as the stand-in for tragic and trivial moments alike.” I later wrote that I was wasting my time doing things that were as aimless as shooting silver balls in a Pachinko machine, and for a reward of more silver balls, which I could use to play endlessly in a simulacrum of success. And then I bemoaned my use of metaphor as a bad habit and avoidance problem. Why couldn’t I say what I needed instead of being the martyr of cooperation?

      My emotions today are not as dark as those of a twenty-five-year-old. But the metaphors still consist of a similar mix of moods and recent experience. They do not follow the definition of metaphors learned in school—one thing being similar to another based on traits, like size or movement. They are not like those packaged homilies, e.g., the early bird gets the worm. Instead, they are often linked to personal history, and some of those autobiographic metaphors are ones that only I would understand. They arise spontaneously and contain an arc of experience. In effect, they are always about change between moments, not about a single moment, and often about a state of flux that leads to emotional understanding of something from my past. Those that are clearly linked to personal history could be described as autobiographic metaphor. Here’s an experience taken from my journal, which I have not yet used for its metaphoric imagery, but which is rich enough to produce one.

       I was swimming in open water, eye to eye with a twenty-five-foot-long whale shark on my right, within touching distance, so close I could see the velvety details of the white spots on its taupe body. As I drifted back to admire the pattern, I felt a light tap on my back and thought I might have bumped into Duncan or Lou until I saw a wall of spots loom up on my left, and all at once I found myself cradled in the small wedge between the velvety bodies of two behemoths. I was so euphoric over the magnificence of what the three of us had created—a primordial womb, a secret place—that I never considered I might have been instantly crushed between them until the sharks slowly swam past me and disappeared into the fathomless deep blue of open water, leaving me alone and unprotected.

      In rereading this anecdote, I recognize the emotions as those I have felt with infatuation during my youth. I recall being attuned to every detail of my lover, feeling the euphoria of our specialness, being unmindful of danger, until I was left suspended with uncertainty over the safety of my heart. Of course, the two experiences—infatuation and whale sharks—differ greatly in the actual degree of danger. The chances that you will get hurt are extremely high with infatuation and they are unlikely with sharks, as I discovered after swimming with them for five days. They remained curious and extraordinarily gentle. One was considerate enough to wait for me whenever I tired and could not swim fast enough to keep up.

      The best metaphors appear unexpectedly out of the deep blue by means of intuition and my infatuation with nuance.

      When I wrote my first short story, I used the image of a gardenia. The story concerned a woman who was struggling to understand the sudden death of her husband. It was heavily influenced by my own emotional experiences with the sequential deaths of my older brother, Peter, and my father. When my brother died, flowers arrived at our house, offerings of condolences in the form of carnations, chrysanthemums, roses, asters, lilies, and gardenias. My father had been the guest minister of many churches, and their clergy as well as the church members had all prayed for the needed miracle. Their floral outpouring of sympathy lined our kitchen counter and dining room table. Some were set on our coffee table in the living room. A similar variety of flowers arrived at our house when my father died six months later. I recall the colorful array of flowers and their mingled scent. I remember thinking about the cost of all those flowers. My parents rarely bought flowers. They were an unnecessary extravagance. The condolence flowers wilted within the week, but we kept them until the petals fell off and the stems rotted and smelled like dead flesh. Life is fleeting. You can’t hang on to it. That was the meaning of those flowers.

      I had once thought gardenias were the best flowers. They had a heavy perfume, creamy white petals, and thick glossy leaves. A wristlet of gardenias was the coveted flower of high school proms. But after my brother’s funeral, I no longer liked gardenias. Their beauty and scent belied their purpose as the messenger of grief. When gardenias arrived after my father died, the smell was nauseating.

      In my story “Gardenias,” I used the imagery of a room choked full of gardenias. The dark green leaves were viewed as stiff and sharp enough to cut tender skin. Their heads bowed as they died and the creamy white petals turned brown at the edges and curled like the fingers of corpses. That was indeed the image I had of them, which was why the smell of them had become as repulsive. They were the same odor of the rotted stems, the odor of dead bodies. Those flowers became the imagery of grief I could not express as a teenager hiding in my room. In the end, my metaphor broke under the burden of meaning so much that I had to abandon the story. But the heart of it—the nature of grief—remains mine.

      I read an article today on the findings of a study on visual imagery, which gave me an insight on why I like to both draw and write. MRI imaging was done on the brains of twenty-one art students and twenty-four nonartists as they drew a likeness of an object before them. The findings showed that the artists’ brains were clearly different, the most interesting being a greater density of gray matter in the precuneus of the parietal lobe, where visual mental imagery is processed. The researchers said no conclusions could be drawn as to whether the extra padding of gray matter was present at birth. But, if that was the case, it would suggest that some degree of artistic skills are innate. The scientists affirmed that exposure to art activities most certainly plays a role, as does the “environment”—for example, having an art teacher who says you have a good imagination. So now I wonder: Did my drawing proclivities in childhood increase my aptitude for the visual and emotional imagery I would later use in my writing? If I draw a bird a day, can I increase the gray matter in the precuneus and further enrich my metaphoric brain? With age, the normal brain loses cells at a faster clip, taking with it the names of common gizmos, the items you were supposed to buy the next time you were at the pharmacy, and the best way to get from your house to that place where you’re going to do the you-know and that’s why you can’t be late. I would like to sock away extra stores of gray matter for a rainy day.

      The study made me realize something about the way I write. When I see a visual image in my mind as a scene, I try to capture it in words. The process shares some similarity to drawing a bird. I look at what I imagine, I sketch it out in my story, and I do constant revisions as I try to capture it more clearly. The imagery I see is somewhat like looking through a virtual reality headset, in which I can turn myself 360 degrees to have a complete sense of the visual imagery around me. That imagery may be incomplete at first. The lawn has been planted, but the flowers haven’t bloomed. I need mosquitoes СКАЧАТЬ