holding the fragments at the heart’s farthest edge
Writing from life is writing from here, from this moment, this place, this body. In Dear Memory, Victoria Chang quotes Julia Creet saying,
memory is where we have arrived rather than where we have left
It’s a response to what we have experienced, it’s story-telling. We think we can neatly separate life into fact and fiction, but it’s not so easy.
A simple piece of journalling as I wake, a list poem of trees in my life, is an act of shaping myself, even if no-one else sees it:
Brambles in Kirkleatham wood,
the rowan on Haworth moor,
close to Top Withens, that gave me
the name of my first child,
hawthorn on the steep path
up Sutton Bank, the copse
of silver birch by the Silver
River in Huelgoat forest,
tall ash on the island
overlooking the garden,
the beeches at Avebury,
where my children played,
oaks round L’Autre Rive.
Writing it down, whether as memoir or as the matter or essays or poems… is not just standing in one place with a particular perspective and collating the great list of things that happened… As Rilke puts in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge:
And it is not even enough to have memories. When there are many of them you must forget and have the great patience to wait for their return. For the memories themselves aren’t yet it.
Patience. I don’t think of myself as a patient person, but perhaps there’s an exception with my writing. I write fast and edit for a long time. I’m willing to put things away and let them find their right time.
Stale Bread & Miracles was ten years in the making — a prose poetry collection charting my journey into ministry as one of the first women ordained in the Church of England. And my journey out of it after three serious work-place assualts, I wrote a novel. Sprawling and miserable. Reading it was dreary and harsh. So it went in drawer.
But I kept listening to the story until a form came that cracked open the material.
Called you by your name
What we want to discern is summed up in one word: vocation and calling. As I said, one word.
Canon Lynley smiles, breathes deeply and blows, points to a jumble of words, the last one: VOCATION.
In the library, books shed dust like unread words from parchment skins, the Canon nods his white-haired head, asks to its beat, You’re how old, dear?
From the sinking springs of an ancient chair I say I’m twenty-four.
And can you relate to adults, dear? His smile is cherubic. He nods and nods and finally adds, Surely you’d be better off at home—having babies, dear.
The final test, to assess my spiritual growth, is a single question at dusk: Do you have a sense of humour, dear?
I wrote it not in a constantly broken into vicarage on a Birmingham estate, but cwtched* up against a mountain in a quirky slate house in Welsh village. A different space with a different form. Distance and silence around memories inviting me to return to them. Not the sprawling pile of every last event, but the fragments I’d struggled and failed to sift from the rubble years earlier. After years of campaigning for women’s ordination, this newspaper cutting, still in a file:
Ces Femmes Qui Font Pleurer Le Pape, reads the headline in the Paris Match. A two page spread pictures the women who caused the Pope to cry.
We write from life to know where we are, not only personally, but politically, geographically, socially and more. We write from life to know who we are, how we came to be this person, where we fit in the world. We write from life to make ourselves up. By this, I don’t mean that memoir or poetry or essays or other forms of art that use lived experience are fabrication or deliberately self-aggrandising. Some might be, but more interestingly and more poignantly, we make life up as we go along because the self is a fluid and fragile thing. But also a mysterious and fascinating thing. Every self of us.
Nairn, 1976. Against L’s mother’s better judgement, I’d been taken on their family holiday.
I’m huddled with L in the tiny bedroom of a caravan on Nairn beach after a long walk on a sweltering July morning, along white sand that crunched and sang beneath our feet.
The police had left and L was finally asleep, her breath catching as she turned. Did she whisper something? I stroked her face, still wet, leant forward, brushed lips against salt dew, too soft to be a kiss, but her eyes opened and she held out her arms.
I see her on the beach, hurling a stone at the naked man who had me imprisoned in a sticky grasp, hissing, Everything will be all right as long as you don’t struggle. Just take your clothes off, everything will be alright. Hands around my throat, rough breath, white cotton tearing…
The stone hitting.
Our feet on white sand, rub of grains keening above the percussion of waves, both of us running hard before L’s sudden halt, winded, the man catching up, grabbing her, the noise that came from her. And me, turning, shouting as I ran back, sand squealing under my feet. When did I lift the rock?
The story and the facts must match, keep track, you must keep track or it’s the end of the story.
Running again.
How long? How far?
at the heart’s farthest edge is slivers of memory. Each fragment a bit of a story about how I came to be a herbalist in forest in France in my 60s…
home-educating mother
publisher
a village in North Wales
priest
assaults
childhood in Teesside
friendship
married at 18
theology at Cambridge…
Read backwards, fragments can look like a life, but it’s not linear and it’s not ‘about’ any of these things. It’s about
tawny owls
slate
heather
willow
sticklebacks
gorse…
It’s about a body living a story, the cusps and the liminal moments, the feeling of trance the first time I saw a stained glass window, the touch of a hand, the taste of angelica on the tongue as I walk into a forest…