Memoir writing is
dreaming backwards.
Eleven years ago,
my father became one hundred years old. When
Dad turned one hundred, my wife and I had no grandchildren yet. We hoped we might have grandchildren someday—after
all, we had produced four children, so the prospect of grandchildren was bright. However, whenever our grandchildren did come along,
they would not be able to sit with this man, my father, the poet, who was one
hundred years old. Dad would be gone by then. Our grandchildren could read his poetry, they
could view him in pictures, but they would not be able to know him as I knew
him.
So I sat down at
my desk, and I began writing stories about my dad, and about my mom, and about how
it all was. In order to write these
stories, I discovered, also I needed to write stories about Dad’s and Mom’s own
parents, and about how it all was for them, too. The more stories I wrote down, the more stories
I remembered, and the more stories I remembered, the more dangerous this process
became. I was dreaming backwards, with
emphasis on the word dreaming.
You see, I am a
writing sort of a fellow. In order to
understand my life as I live it, I objectify it. This is not a choice of mine; it’s the way I’m
wired. My psyche places me outside my life, while I live my life fully. From outside, I observe the themes of my life,
upon which I mull. And as I mull the
themes, I order my memories so that they illustrate and they dramatize my themes. It’s a circle—it’s what I mean by dreaming backwards. When we dream, we
are both receiving something from our outside and creating something from our inside
at the same time. That’s why dreams fascinate,
though they are not real.
As I wrote my
stories down about my parents and about their parents, I was dreaming backwards. My father, the poet, was called “Dreamy Dick”
when he was a boy, and the apple does not fall far from the tree. Dreaming backwards is dangerous because it may
fool the dreamer. It may make the
dreamer believe that the created story of the past is the past. However, that
is not so. The past is ungraspable—it is
past.
If you are writing a memoir, the people of the past are unable to tell
you, now, if you are wrong in your memory. The people of the past are unable to chide you
when you order your memories for the purpose of dramatizing your themes…at their
expense.
To the casual
observer, writing a memoir probably seems easy enough. After all, you know the stories—just write
them down. But memoir writing is a
razor-edged endeavor. The writer of a
memoir has a responsibility which is weighty.
If the writer fails to balance precisely
between self-enhancement and self-abnegation there is a danger of falling and
of being cut. A memoir—this is what I
have concluded—a memoir should be a kind of prayer by which the writer expresses,
highest among all things, humility.
As an example of
my desire to live in a past which I did not possess myself, here’s a
memory. I loved my father partly because
of the past he had lived in before me. I
could dream my way into his experiences when something of his experience touched
mine; I was ten-years-old and a warrior.
Dad had been a
naval officer during World War II. His principle
responsibility was training young gunners on navy bombers the necessary marksmanship,
with their .50-caliber double-barrel machine guns, to survive strafing attacks by
Japanese Zeros, and to shoot the Zeros down instead. After the war was won, Dad kept his target
kites.
Choose any summer
day, when I was ten. Maybe on that day we’d
take Dad’s elegant old cruiser out onto the ocean in Maine, and we’d go to Pond
Island, along with a swarm of smaller craft, some fifty of our closest friends
and us. We’d have a boatload of clams, lobsters, cod fish, corn, potatoes,
salads, pies. (I’d be especially proud
if I’d caught the cod while drop-lining near Saddleback Ledge.) The hour would be early, still cool, with a
light air from the south, no fog. I’d
handle the anchor, following Dad’s directions.
Several trips would be needed in the launch to ferry all our equipment
to the shore.
Then, on the south
side of the island, we’d dig a deep clambake pit in the sand, line it with
stones, fill it with drift wood, and set a bonfire ablaze to heat the
rocks. We kids would fill a dingy with
fresh rockweed, torn from its roots below tide line. When the fire burned down to glowing coals,
we’d layer the pit with the seaweed—instantly bright green on the seething
rocks, and popping—and we’d toss on the food, layering it with seaweed and topping
the whole bake with a thicker layer. Finally,
we’d cover everything with an old sail and bank the sand up around the sail’s edges
to hold in the heat. Then, finally,
there’d be nothing to do but to wait while the bake baked, to stroll, to run,
to explore, to lie in the strengthening sun, to philosophize vigorously—or meanderingly,
as the mood suited. Perry and Craig would
lead us all in singing The Sinking of the Titanic, and we would all take
a delicious, ghoulish pleasure in the line “husbands and wives, little children
lost their lives….” Beer and wine for
the grown-ups; orange Nehi for us kids.
Then it would be
early afternoon, and the breeze would be up.
It would be a good, strong, summer southwester—good sailing weather, for
kite sailing.
Dad and I would
rig a kite. It was an act of shared and
minute technical specificity that I adored since it was so uncharacteristic of
my father; Dad was not a tool guy. But
kites, I realized, were really poems, and therefore they deserved his intensity
of attention to their every nuance.
Sometimes Dad would agree to fly the huge 10-foot-high kite, but usually
it would be one of the 6s or the 8s, which are plenty big enough when you are
yourself about four-and-a-half feet high.
Dad and I would work
for half an hour, threading the lines, re-screwing a thimble, guying the rudder
straighter. Then it would be time, and
I’d carry the kite sixty or seventy feet downwind along the beach, carefully
playing out the four lines it took to control these monsters, while Dad made
final adjustments to his reels and his control arms and his harness. He’d attach the controls to his chest, a
“front pack” of great drums of line controlled by hurdy-gurdy handles, with
arms that stuck out two-and-a-half feet from each shoulder, through which the
lines ran before heading for the kite.
Distance was controlled by grinding the drums with the handles; yaw and
lift and plane were controlled by the rudder, which in turn was controlled by
shifting one’s shoulders backwards and forwards, thus pulling the rudder one
way or the other.
It was my job to
hold the kite upright, buffeted by its weightiness in the wind, and to await
Dad’s command to thrust it into the sky.
Before I thrust the kite into the air, knowing the fun we were about to
have, I would stare at the silhouette of a Zero that was painted on the kite with
the big red target circles over the gas tanks in its wings. So that
was where to hit ‘em! And especially I
would stare at the carefully stitched .50-caliber bullet holes in the kite that
riddled those very wings. How close I
was then, dreaming backwards, in that numinous moment, to the howl of the
bullets themselves!
“Go!”
As hard as I could,
I’d launch the kite up into the wind. In
a second the kite would catch the wind and zoom high. In my mind, the stream of
bullets would follow it, and the thudding of the guns would buffet me, and the
hot brass would rain all around.
In a steady wind,
Dad could fly the kite up to three hundred feet, make it hover there for the
longest time, and then make it dive straight down into the sea—straight down into the sea!—only to pull back on his
controls at the very last instant so that the kite tore through the top
of a wave and rose again, streaming shining droplets from its wings and from its
lines, like some raptor on a string!
This was jam at a
clambake.
The past was
mythic. My father was mythic. I was mythic—and ten.
I dreamed backwards
to the Golden Time—when lived the Old Ones, who fleeted among the ancient
trees, and knew.
Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015
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