The Stories We Tell

 

When you write a memoir you must choose which stories to tell—and how to tell them.

Do you write from a stream of consciousness? Can you find the edges? Do you tell the truth? Even to yourself. When you write over time, over years, reflecting, re-membering, re-writing, “down the bones” as Natalie Goldberg says, does the truth change?

Can you extract the last drop of sweet to bitter, that which James Baldwin called art, or plumb the bottom of what Jungians call the complex—the tight tangle of repressed material we carry like a moat in the eye? To heal a complex Jung says one must drink the very last drop to turn bitterness to wisdom. With your words will you cross the river Styx into the underworld and make as William Styron did “Darkness Visible”?

What we dare to write does not stop being daring when we dot the last i and cross the last T and close the computer unless we are prepared to burn our pages along with our bridges and press the delete button. But if memoir is to be a piece of our individuation we may decide to take that step that Jung called the most difficult piece of the individuation process and reach across the void and say this is my story and my story is my truth.

And there may be those who get it and there will be those who do not. But once you let it go it is not yours. It has a life of its own. It is a line in the sand and in the mind of the reader. It disappears with the tide or becomes a thorn in a shoe. Or just perhaps it touches a heart in hiding. And a door opens.

On Memoir

 

Now that my memoir is in the marketplace of Amazon.com and in the hands of people I know and people I don’t know I have a new perspective, a perspective of one who has put a message in a bottle and set it into the stream. Perhaps it will catch on a rock and be buried in the mud. Perhaps a mother or a lover or an analyst or a trauma survivor will discover it. Perhaps its words will resonate with the blues that reverberate through the timeless notes of suffering and soul.

Perhaps it will begin a conversation.

What do I want from this, a reader asked me. Part of me doesn’t want anything, I said, What I have wanted, to tell my story, I have done. Then I am reminded of something Russell Lockhart wrote in his beautiful book “Psyche Speaks; A Jungian Approach to Self and World.” He writes, “a dream wants a dream; a poem wants a poem.” He writes of Eros, that spirit of longing for connection. A memoir wants a memoir. A story, a story.

But no one speaks to this more eloquently than Carter Heyward, in her book “When Boundaries Betray Us; Beyond Illusions of What is Ethical in Therapy and Life,” written in 1993.

Says Heyward, “There is in each of us a need to be heard to speech. A need born of our souls, the place of all real meeting, in which every I-Thou and all unalienated erotic power is conceived. This need in each of us is not a pathology. It is not a weakness. It is not a sin. The need does not originate in abuse. Its roots are not shameful. It is not immature. This need is not something to be treated or healed, liberated or outgrown. It is something in each of us to be cultivated and cherished, experienced and shared, with respect and tenderness, awe and humor…. There is in each of us a need to be heard to speech. This need is the root of all genuine healing and the source of all creative revolutionary movement. It is the wellspring of our redemption, and it is the hope of the world.”

Jung wrote in a letter quoted by Marie-Louise von Franz, “One of the most important and difficult tasks in the individuation process is to bridge the distance between people.” Memoir as individuation builds bridges that lead in many directions.

On what Is Real

 

When I was a little girl I stood on a chair at the kitchen counter and took turns with my mother mashing sugar into softened butter in a large yellow bowl. My mother’s cookies, a staple in our household, were kept in a tin can on top of the refrigerator.

Inside that bowl today the fine lines of tiny cracks and the gray wear of countless spoons against its baked yellow sides tell stories of tenderness and temper.

Jungian analyst, Patricia Damery, in her blog for her fascinating book Farming Soul writes about reality and perception as she refers us to her story of individuation, a deeply spiritual journey. She writes along the liminal edge of truth.

Which got me thinking about how many ways we ask the question, “What is real?” as we move to the edges of our consciousness. In my book In the Tracks of the Unseen I address that question in part around experiences of trauma and memory and dissociation. I write about the urgency that sometimes comes with uncertainty. The spiral descent to knowing.

When Jung was asked if he believed in God he answered that he didn’t believe, he knew.

For me, when I look into my yellow bowl that I now so treasure what is real is the sweet taste of cookie dough and the smiles and tears of a child.