Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

‘Poets were the first people I found who named those absurd, ugly, unbearable, and ecstatic parts of being human. They are often better named by lyric means.’

‘I don’t believe in memory as a kind of jukebox that randomly selects cuts from the past to play. Nor do I believe that our memories are all manipulated into fantasies, though they are a pliable material. I suspect that everything we remember has symbolic meaning, is redelivered to us as a suggestion, a lesson, a reminder, or else perhaps a haunting, a ghost consigned to the human realm until it completes some bit of unfinished business. Such was the case with this memory. We associate the word regret with a wish to undo or to not have done, but its origin is in the French word for looking back with longing or distress, at something done or undone. It is less oriented to guilt than to disorder.’

‘These are not perfect analogies—My primary argument is that whatever the contemporary associations with memoir or personal narrative or confession or the therapeutic elements of making art, when we write this way we are performing a process that predates those biases by centuries. I have felt its pull as far back as memory goes, and I believe that it goes back much, much further than that.

There are geometric shapes that recur in nature, the shapes on which it is most possible to build, known by carpenters and tides and insects alike. We, too—in our rituals of healing, creation, and repentance—are performing a pattern that has recurred at the centre of human life as far back as it is recorded. Why should our idea of intrinsic nature be confined to the biological, and who says that the spiritual, the creative, and the psychological do not manifest biologically? We know that they do—The spiral does not belong to the nautilus shell, unless it also belongs to the whirlpool, the hurricane, the galaxy, the double helix of DNA, the tendrils of a common vine. If there are golden ratios that govern the structures of our bodies and our world, then of course there must be such shapes among the less measurable aspects of existence.’

‘Over time, we start to narrow our thinking about what a piece of writing—what a certain story—can be, how it needs to be told. Partly, this is because we get attached to the most familiar narrative. We get attached to the one we tell ourselves, because it makes persisting easier. It makes us feel better about ourselves. It excuses us. It excuses others.’

‘I’ve spent my whole life being prescribed narratives about my own body: how it should and shouldn’t look, what it should or shouldn’t do, and what its value is. Particularly, I have learned a lot from my culture, media, government, men on the streets of whatever city I’ve lived in, men whom I have loved and not loved, women whom I have loved and not loved, and even readers and fellow writers—It has defined my relationship to my body; all my sexual and romantic relationships; my relationship to food, clothing, money, and, of course, sex—The great work of my life has been the project of its undoing, of discerning what is possible to undo, what must be lived with, and how to situate what must be lived with—.’

‘I don’t mean to argue that writing personally is for everyone. What I’m saying is: don’t avoid yourself—To William H. Gass’s argument, “To have written an autobiography is already to have made yourself a monster,” I say that refusing to write your story can make you into a monster. Or perhaps more accurately, we are already monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, its meaning, its necessary devastation.’

‘What I mean is, tell me about your navel—Don’t tell me that the experiences of a vast majority of our planet’s human population are marginal, are not relevant, are not political.’

‘Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you. For many years, I kept a quote from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet tacked over my desk: “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”’

‘There is a genre of love ballad that I am a sucker for, and it includes a range of styles—from James Brown’s “Please, Please, Please” to Usher’s “Confessions.” My own beloved does not share my predilection for these plaintive, often abject tunes. As she once said, with not a little disdain, “that’s a beggin’-ass song.”

Beggin’-ass songs have always been my favourites. Songs whose longing often has a ragged edge, a need to love and be loved, and, more often than not, to be forgiven—for misdeeds, misunderstanding, or fundamental flaws. The singer has strayed from the path that leads to the one they serenade and they now wish to return. The voices that sing these songs tie a ribbon round a similarly tender part of me and pull with recognition.

My favourite Christmas carol as a child was “O Holy Night,” and it still is, because hearing the command to fall on your knees provokes some deep and abiding longing in me: to fall on my knees, to prostrate myself before something and be found lovable, to hear the angel voices, to be struck with wonder, to be let in.

I was raised by a Buddhist and a staunch ex-Catholic. I’ve often thought that if I had been exposed to any kind of church music as a young person, but most of all gospel, I might have been called toward another path entirely. In many cases, beggin’-ass song can be another name for hymn.’

‘There was a pop song a few years ago that played on the radio frequently. After teaching a night class, I would be too exhausted to listen to podcasts or the dreadful news and I’d scan the radio. It got so that I’d always stop for this song. It was a love song, and a kind of hymn. It was, of course, a beggin’-ass song. The only Heaven I’ll be sent to / is when I’m alone with you, the singer claims. I was born sick, but I love it / Command me to be well / A-, Amen, Amen, Amen.

The song wrenched something in me so pure and hungry, it was a pleasure close to agony, near erotic. I felt it in my body. I was not in love at the time, but when I listened to that song I felt like I was. The words evoke this as much as the music, the language of supplication, the plaintive call of the worshipful. It was the same feeling I’d known as a girl, the same I’d known in love, the same I’d felt in response to so many other songs. As I drove down the night highway, my heart surged and surged. I was, of course, on the brink of writing something that scared me.

I have worshipped people the way that others worship gods, have looked to humans and chemicals for the kind of love we can only expect from a divine source. Our culture encourages this. We think love will redeem us, and it will, but not that of any human lover and not that of any material substance. I have found a church in art, a form of work that is also a form of worship—it is a means of understanding myself, all my past selves, and all of you as beloved.’

‘And while I increasingly believe that memory – even if accurate – is much closer to an act of the imagination than one of straight physiological recall, I am still shocked by what my own brain did to me—Is there something in the art itself which makes us remember it more, or less, clearly? For instance, memory rarely lets you down with Hockney’s work, clean and clear, memorable in the best way, and normally just the same when revisited, whereas you might be hard put to describe from memory a Rothko – though you might better recall its overall effect on you. Is it the case that the greater the work of art the better you remember it? Clearly not, from my examples above. Perhaps the prospect of revisiting a great work of art makes the memory tremble, as if you are going to have to sit an examination paper. And is it, finally, a bad thing if memory lets us down? Not necessarily. It might confirm some ongoing, organic relationship between ourselves and the work in question—.’