The first time you hear a piece of music, you strain to catch the melody and the words—and, if you are serious about music, the harmonies and the instrumentation. The next time, hearing things that were not evident the first time, you are better able to appreciate the piece. The more complex the music, the more attention is required before you can grasp its full complexity.
Something similar occurs the first time you live an experience. You cannot fully grasp its significance, and you struggle to make sense of it. You are more certain of how to react if you go through the same kind of experience again. If similar things happen to you over and over, you are more equipped to deal with them every time they happen.
I have come to see events in life as themes that repeat themselves. And even if you have never noticed this, you can understand how it is possible to apprehend the fullness of an experience more completely by re-living it—by thinking about it, and especially by writing about it. I use the concept of the fugue to bring this out in my memoir.
Here is another way of looking at the same thing. The older you get, the more everybody you meet reminds you of somebody else. It’s their smile, the way they tilt their head, the way they bore you by speaking without thinking or talking without listening; it might be the jokes they tell or the jokes they cannot understand. In the same way, more and more of the things that happen to you remind you of some other event. They evoke some old emotion, they require a familiar response, or you can tell what is coming next.
All of these things are examples of the patterns we find in life. And these patterns form the basis of the most effective memoirs.
What makes your story unique is not simply the incidents. It is also the way you link occurrences to each other and how you convey the patterns you discover.
You can’t read the novels of Charles Dickens without being struck by his use of coincidence. The author was impressed by how small our world really is, and by the connections between people. He even calls attention to this plot device in a couple of places, commenting that most coincidences are curious but that remarkable coincidences happen over and over again.
Coincidences are only one kind of pattern that can be imposed on experience. You may want to focus on your remarkably good luck or a string of misfortunes, or you may have had help from strangers at a number of crucial moments. You may realize that unexpected opportunities have often presented themselves suddenly, or that acquaintances—people from your old school, or your old neighborhood, or your old club—have been sitting across the desk several times when you were looking for a job or a loan.
Early in my work career, I applied for an editing job with an employer who was worried about the progress of a book being prepared for his organization in Hebrew and Aramaic. I could not have contrived the proper linguistic skills and knowledge for that situation, and the employer could not have known how to look for me, but there we were across the table from each other exactly when we could do some good for each other. I was probably the only person within 200 miles who could have satisfied his need. The job he hired me to do led to a variety of editorial positions afterward.
As I wrote my memoir, I had to decide whether to cast that event as an odd coincidence or as pure luck or as providence. The technique I chose was determined by the story I thought I was telling; at the same time, it made the story what it became.
If your own story is to be more than a simple chronicle of unconnected events, you must recognize as many patterns as you can so that the narrative does not tell a different story than you intend.
One of the things that can happen after you think you have lived long enough to begin methodically recalling the past—especially if you do it in order to understand the present and prepare for the future—is that you begin to see time as a physical object, with events giving it extension, depth, and shape.
I once saw a large spider web in a shrub, presided over by a gigantic black and yellow object, the proprietor, the captain of a mysterious natural realm that existed in parallel with my world of fantasy and hope. The first time I touched the edges of the web it bounced back, as resilient as filaments of wire. I was fascinated by it and returned day after day, looking for some knowledge about a reality beyond my own.
I sometimes see the events of the past sitting like transparent and orderly droplets along a similar network of wires. Each one of them can catch the rays of the sun and project all the colors of the rainbow onto a receptive screen. But I’m not that screen—all I see are the arrangements of separate bits of water.
This awareness is a start, but only a start.
I perceive future events as if they were on a line stretching out in front of me. They will eventually be no more than bumps on that line, points of departure for vaguely formulated memories, individual and isolating, memories that will not be shared by anybody, even the people who were there at the same time. Soon enough, the experiences will move from a hopeful future to a brief present to a fuzzy past, and they will sit like droplets on the web of life, a reality only in my mind, observed only with great effort and with too much fluidity ever to be known with absolute certainty.
My attitude toward the continuity of tradition has been ambivalent. I have continued to hover around the subject like a moth thinking it is toying with a candle, and I have never been able to escape its fascination even as I tried to chart my own course. For most of my life I have vacillated between skepticism and hostility toward the religious traditions of my youth.
My memoir describes an incident in the Park Street subway station in Boston, in which I admitted to my father’s sister that I had lost my connection with the Jewish community. She asked why I wanted to act as if the lives of her parents, my grandparents, were meaningless.
At another point I quote an early journal entry ridiculing English teachers who want their best students to become English teachers so that they can encourage their best students to become English teachers.
I derided my father for his structured days, and I often argued with him about the relative value of set ritual and spontaneity in a religious life. Yet I never plumbed his deepest feelings about these things.
I do not know the meaning of the lives of my grandparents, and I do not even know any facts about the lives of their parents. My father’s mother’s father Yitzchak Shlomo, after whom I was named, is no more than a name to me. No face, no occupation, no address, no connection I can point to. Beyond the name, all is silence and the darkness of the past. We all take our place in the rolling cavalcade of humanity, but the Bodzin family never gave me any hard evidence that we were walking in the footsteps of real people, just that we were following their way of living.
I never set out to act as if my ancestors had lived meaningless lives; I merely wanted to find my own meaning. But like the adherents of any orthodoxy, my aunt thought that the family’s story had to be hers as well, and mine. I have lived my own, then explored it, discovered it, written about it.
Some people try to gain immortality through their children (the future) or their community activities (the present). Others try to find continuity in genealogical study (the past). The memoir is one way of finding your role in the continuity of humanity, of defining your own place in the universe, regardless of the stories that are being forced onto you from outside.
My grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who are likely to lack the talmudic tradition I knew as a child, will at least have some other link with what came before them. The story of my struggles and my transition will live for them so that they will not have to face a blank wall when they search for the past, as I have had to.
It is very fine in theory to want to remember all the major events in your life, but people are not capable of methodically and chronologically calling up very all the significant things that have happened to them. It has taken me more than a decade to write my life story, and significant memories continue to float into my consciousness for the first time in years.
Remembering the past is a discipline that can be improved with practice. In fact, once you start, it may be impossible to keep new memories from flooding into your mind. Recalling one memory can easily bring a second to mind.
A number of years ago I taught an extension course in Fort Frances, Ontario, a small mill town on the Minnesota border, connected to International Falls by a wooden plank bridge built a century ago to link lumber companies on opposite sides of the Rainy River. I crossed that bridge a number of times, and it was always an adventure, with the car so close to the river that it seemed to be driving on water.
When I think of that bridge I also think about the weather reports I used to hear from Duluth, which proudly referred to International Falls along with Hibbing and Houlton and Cut Bank as the coldest places in the United States on winter mornings. And I think about the radio stations I used to hear in winter, from Fort Wayne or Pittsburgh or Del Rio, Texas.
The radio, the weather, the far-off places were all an essential part of my past, but they are not memoir material unless I can relate them to some theme or pattern that has been meaningful to me. Those distant radio stations get one small mention in my memoir, for example, because they help paint a more complete and vivid picture of how I reacted to military life in the barracks at Fort Knox.
But as significant as any of these things were, I can never allow myself to forget that my memoir is not a story about bridges, or cold weather, or faint radio stations. It is about me. Details about anything (or anybody) else matter only if they contribute to a more immediate picture of my life at a certain point.
Many people have told me that I spend too much time inside my head, and that I should try to get out more. Well, it takes all kinds, and I just happen to be one of those mental kinds. Memories and ideas that get into my head swim around with all the other things in there, looking for a peg to hang on. I used to convert random thoughts into essays, and now they become linking life patterns.
I sometimes pick up a magazine at a health food store. It has hundreds of minuscule ads—barely readable notices submitted by people who are planning meditation retreats, reiki practitioners, people who have perfected pirhana therapy and veterinary massage. Those ads make me wonder why an imaginative person would have to write fiction any more. One of the most esoteric of them promises to show how the problems in your life might be the result of sins not yet worked out in a past life. Apparently, your karma is now treatable.
It all reminds me of an afternoon almost thirty years ago, sitting across the table from a woman whose sparkling eyes and musical laugh made me remember I was still alive. When I could not keep the excitement to myself, a friend tried to explain this attractiveness: “Maybe you recognize her from a past life.” Why not from a future life, I asked. And this friend, who also recognized that time is illusion, just shook her head.
Some people who believe in past lives explain every unpleasant event in terms of karma. Even when they do not understand why, they believe everything that happens to them is their fault, payback for yesteryear.
I wonder how any philosophy can blame all the people affected by a war or a school shooting or a tornado that hits a city—as if all of them deserved their suffering because of some cosmic fault committed in a previous existence—as if all of them were thrown together into that one place by a petty, bureaucratic, chess-playing cosmic accountant, so that the sum of what they owed the universe could be set back closer to zero.
I do not commit myself strongly to any philosophical position, and a mild skepticism permeates my writing. I try to communicate this in my memoir even without mentioning it explicitly. But it is not hard for a careful reader to see that I have little faith in karma. It is one thing my head has no room for.
Since I began to examine my past, I have become aware of a fundamental quirk about my memory: I can never be certain that I have recalled the whole truth about even a single instant of my life.
You may deny this about your own recollections, or you may find it slightly depressing, but just think for a minute and you’ll realize that it takes forever to really know anything or anybody. In fact, we’re unlikely ever to understand anything completely.
How can you expect to capture the essence of even a single moment of experience? Sit in a group of people, for example, and try to imagine all the circumstances that brought everybody together. Even in yourself at that moment, can you fully articulate the depth of your emotions, motives, impulses? If you can’t grasp a moment of the present completely, what kind of hope is there for recalling any of the moments that dissolved years ago?
In a memoir, you are not writing history. You are writing what you remember about the development of your life, or some aspect of it. As much as you wish to recapture only accurate memories, you may be stuck with parts of the past that never happened at all.
Comfort yourself with the fact that nobody ever wrote a personal life story without glossing over the embarrassing parts, exaggerating other incidents, taking credit for more than was warranted, and either forgetting or ignoring the most shameful actions.
Luckily for you, nobody else who was in your primary school class is likely to have any memory at all of the incident you think changed your life. If you are one of the few people alive who even remembers the name of the school, it is unlikely that anybody will come back to claim that you are describing a fiction invented in your head.
Do not worry about whether you have accurately described the first guitar chord you played when you were nine, or your brother’s reaction to it. What is important is that you played a chord, and that it motivated you to become a musician, or that it made you decide never to touch the guitar again.
And do not be overly concerned about whether you have said everything there is to say about your life. I repeat: I can never be certain that I have recalled the whole truth about even a single instant of my life. And I suspect the same is true for you.
When asked why he had left certain facts out of a story he had written, Mordecai Richler said, “That’s not what the story is about.” Your memoir may look like the story of your life, but it probably says more about your memory than about any of the events that may or may not have taken place.
In his Preface to The Art of Fiction, Henry James gives some valuable advice to inexperienced writers. After stating the obvious (“Write from experience, and experience only”), he adds, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.”
When you begin to give shape to your memories, you cannot know what facts or observations will eventually be significant or interesting. That’s why you should write everything down as soon as you think of it.
For years, most of my best ideas have come to me as I shower in the morning, and the survival of any of that material depends on whether I can get to the word processor before my porous memory erases all my recent thoughts.
As you start putting memories on line or on paper, you may think you have so much to say that it doesn’t matter if you miss a memory or two. You will end up deleting some ideas and incidents anyway. But you should not risk losing useful ideas. It’s better to write everything down and decide to cut later than to have gaps in your story because you did not take notes.
Fleeting thoughts that are not written out may disappear forever. Blaise Pascal’s Pensées contain thousands of reflections. One of them is a brief item referring to a thought that had not been written down. He wryly notes that he has been reduced to writing that he had a thought. The state of mind will be all too familiar to every writer who has left his notebook at home.
Even when I take note of my ideas, they can disappear before I can elaborate on them because I can’t figure out what my notes mean. What am I to make of “the way Henry walks in the snow” or “the drop box at the Salvation Army”? There were once whole ideas waiting behind these words, but now they sit meaningless on a page.
Few people have anything like perfect recall. Most of us cannot even distinguish between what actually happened when we were five years old and the stories our families have always told us. If we want to create the most accurate record possible of the past as we remember it (note that I do not say “as it was”), we owe it to ourselves and our readers to capture every image that floats to the surface as soon as it comes.
Dreams are a special kind of memory. Nowhere else in life do we recognize that we have made up all the “facts” we remember. Nowhere else do we almost always acknowledge that what we recall is either inaccurate or incomplete.
I have remembered dreams for as long as I have remembered anything else, and have never met anybody who remembered more dreams than I did. When I was young I never thought about the source or the meaning of dreams, only my ability to entertain others with the ready-made stories I had experienced while asleep.
We rarely question the background of a dream. Sitting unprepared at an exam, walking half naked down the street, it’s all in a day. The analysis comes later. But remembering is a challenge. While we have years to puzzle out the meaning of our life, dreams can be gone forever if we do not take advantage of the first few minutes after we wake up to fix them in our mind.
Dreams are not easy to recall even if you write them down as soon as you wake up. The words used to describe every dream recorded in my memoir were written within hours, often as soon as I was alert enough to grab a pen.
Even people who find little meaning in life sometimes remain fascinated by dreams—as if they somehow had more meaning than life. Dreams have often helped me find meaning when life did not, and many of them showed me where I was and where I was going.
Dreams help me comment on the time I am writing about, and I rarely focus on their substance. If I use a dream from 1992 to illustrate a situation that occurred in 1973, it is because it sheds some light on my frame of mind in 1973. In the same way, a dream from 1966 can help teach something about an event that occurred many years later. I have no reservations about using dreams that came to me as I was writing the memoir, years after the incidents described here.
Most readers will agree that if dreams are elusive, their meaning is subjective. You are free to ignore the dates of my dreams—and the dreams themselves, for that matter (though I hope they have some entertainment value). Armchair psychoanalysts may treat them as a curiosity.
Our families seem to have a great deal of substance when we are growing up. Yet, for most of us, much of what we learn about family has less to do with objective reality than with collective memory, the mythology carved out of the memories that people agree to share. An essential part of that mythology is the belief that what the family remembers about the past is more accurate than what any individual might recall.
One of the insights I have discovered in writing my memoir is that what we remember about any event depends less on objective reality than on personal psychological factors – such things as how we felt about ourselves at the time we are describing, how we feel about ourselves now, how we feel (and once felt) about our family, their expectations, their attitudes. That is why it is common for our brothers and sisters, and certainly our mothers, to recall an entirely different version of any experience we shared, even if we remember it vividly.
We rarely share more than the most superficial aspects of our selective memory with anybody else. Memory is a fickle companion. But after all the gains and losses are tallied, it is our last possession, and one of the most precious. To lose our memory, and with it a sense of our history, is to lose identity.
Regardless of how many moments family members spend together, what they retain and share of the past consists entirely of a created myth that suits their collective purpose.
False memory is as common in families as in individuals. But conspiracy gives it strength. When individuals die, their memories go with them; but family memories remain if they are based on a strong enough mythology. Much in these memories is misplaced hope, a nugget of faith that the past happened as they retell it.
What is a false memory other than a subliminal wish that things had been as somebody remembers them? Individuals who try to transplant hopes and wishes from their proper place in the future to the past are treated as delusional. But, like other groups, including countries, families are able to perpetuate this delusion freely, to insist that collective myth should obscure individual memory and take precedence over it, acknowledging only the authorized story of the past.
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau said he had traveled a great deal in Concord. It was a subtle joke for the in-crowd, and I have appropriated it by including place names at the start of each chapter in my book. The names locate me on a map, and the text fills in a picture of where I was. Obviously, my state of mind says more about me than my geographical location.
To know where I was at any given time in my life, a reader must know what I was doing and thinking. The title of my book is metaphor.
I spent almost all of my early years within two blocks of Dexter, a street in the heart of Detroit. It was not like the street where I lived, which had only houses, no stores. People gravitated to Dexter because that’s where the buses ran and because “going to Dexter” meant going shopping.
For those years, the street was the heart of the Jewish community. Most of the Jews in Detroit lived within walking distance of Dexter. Even though the name of the street appears only rarely in the book, the early part of the memoir is permeated with what it meant to me to live in that area and with the attitudes I learned there.
By mentioning Dexter in the introduction and by putting it in the context of a broad historical overview of Detroit, I give it as much importance as any human character in my story. Like dreams, like ways of thinking and doing and being, the area haunted me for much of my life. It took on mythical significance for me, and much of my life after I moved away was an effort to escape it. Today it lives on as a metaphor of a lost time, a lost city, a lost neighborhood.
Nostalgia-infected friends sometimes send me an e-mail message that brings candy cigarettes back to mind, or wax bottles filled with sweet syrup. My story could be punctuated with the flavors of Bubby’s cholent or Mrs Burke’s cookies. If I were more of a gourmand, the foreground of my story would make way for the first time I smelled cinnamon toast. I still have fresh memories from the 1940s of sounds from the radio: Rinso White, happy little washday song; Duz does everything; Chesterfields—they satisfy; the Shadow knows; welcome to the Ford Sunday Evening Hour.
Plumb far enough and there is a bottomless mine of sensory memories like these, which are often more vivid than anything we can recall about the people and events we remember. All of them, and hundreds more, can become images that give shape and interest to a life story.
Memoirs seem to overburden the shelves of our bookstores. Even people who have never written anything more complex than a letter want to describe what they have seen and endured. Mundane file clerks are as eager as survivors of torture to show that their lives have been interesting. And the market seems to be receptive: enough readers want to learn about the lives of other people that new memoirs appear almost daily.
My memoir is peppered with quotations. I lean heavily on writings that either foreshadow or illustrate some aspect of my life. You don’t have to go very far into the memoir to recognize my spiritual and intellectual links with the major American Transcendentalist writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Both spoke out against some of the same soul-destroying aspects of commercialism that I encountered.
In Walden, Thoreau—in his typically blunt, no-nonsense way—pointed out that not all books are as dull as their readers. The same could be said about lives. Like books, they have to be read carefully before they can become interesting. That means learning to be a close observer of details.
On learning from life. There’s a training exercise that splits the group into teams and gives each of them only some of the clues needed to solve a puzzle. The teams are not told that they cannot work alone, that they must discover the need to cooperate.
The rules of this game apply to much of life as well; the discovery of these rules became one of my major life lessons.
Teachers used to bore me by asking what we might learn from some trivial event that they were talking about. Today the question fascinates me. Honing the discipline of asking ourselves what we can learn from life helps us become richer than we were before.
The universe is a gigantic object lesson for each of us, and we never stop learning. Recognizing this is one of the rewards of aging. But acknowledging it can be hard: our life may lack variety, and we may be surrounded by people whose conversation bores us to tears.
Learning from others does not mean having to like them or wanting to be with them; it means only that the moments when we must be with them can serve as lessons. Even the most negative experiences can become instructive. When asked how he could have endured so many years with a shrewish wife, Socrates said that the gods must have wanted to teach him patience.