 |
| Buds and Blossoms Catherine Al-Meten Meyers |
Going to the library was one of my earliest memories of feeling free and excited. My first trip to a library was a bookmobile that parked in front of a five and dime store in the Triangle shopping area of the outskirts of Long Beach in the early 1950s. I remember getting my first library card, and sitting on the floor of the bookmobile, amid the aroma of old and new books, adding to the stack of books I took home weekly. Reading was, for me, all about relaxing, finding a quiet, inner space to get lost in adventures, someone else's. Favorite memories include hanging out in the local public library once it was built. At the time I was told that thanks to Carnegie, every American had a library within walking distance of their home. It was the 50's, so I took that as fact. Whether or not it is, I don't know. If it's not a fact, it should be.
Reading passions included biography, autobiography, novels of all kinds, and an early passion for mysteries. My parents purchased a multi-volume set of Encyclopedia Britannica. Those large tomes held all kinds of interesting mysteries. I spent hours studying the planets and the solar system in the two-dimensional illustrations and explanations of each planet. School of course required that I read a lot beyond fiction. And for many years, and many decades of higher education and university teaching, I read volumes of books on subjects ranging from botany and geology to ancient spiritual traditions and ethics, and then back again to the sciences with physics and philosophy. Interest spread to archaic and mystical journeys in so many directions, that it was no surprise to me that I was an interdisciplinary student before the term had been coined.
While still in my teens though, I found my reading interests included popular romance and detective magazines, comic books (Archie and Veronica), and fan magazines that gave the inside scoop on Elvis and other heartthrobs. My high school boyfriend once suggested, as men are prone to do, that my passion for romance magazines was coloring my teenage perspective. Of course it was. At a time when we are seeking identity and wanting to know what life and love is all about, what wouldn't be interesting about the gory details of love gone wrong or Love's labors lost?
My tastes ranged. I read Shakespeare along with True Confessions. I read the Hardy Boys along with Nancy Drew. I read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle along with Dame Agatha Christie, and I was influenced by Pearl Buck and Victor Frankl, perhaps more than any other writers. I knew the King James version of the Bible, with all its thees and thines, and those, and I still prefer my 23rd Psalm in that language. I also enjoyed time alone in my Mother's friend's bedroom, door closed, sneaking a peak at a best seller, the scandalous Peyton Place. No one ever censored my reading, but I somehow knew there were some books that I had no experience that matched what happened inside their covers.
At nearly every level of education, reading was required. The more advanced my studies, the more narrow the scope and yet the deeper and more far-reaching, if that makes sense. As a dual major at the undergraduate level, English required that I read tons of fiction, old and new. Psychology took me in a different direction altogether. Side by side this dual track became the norm. As an instructor, I always required 'reading for pleasure' to enhance the courses. That meant I was reading a lot of what students brought to me. When I taught junior high and high school, I discovered works I'd missed, and my reading lists grew endless. When I graduated from university, I had some free time and began wanting to read the books I'd heard of but hadn't had time to read. The Prince by Machiavelli, which I had imagined a huge book that would challenge my abilities, I found was simple little, easy-to-understand volume that delighted me. The Decameron, the chronicle plays of Shakespeare, and rereading Austen when I was finally worldly enough to enjoy her writing.
All through school and university years, I loved drama. I acted, helped write scripts, and produced a few plays when I was young. I had wanted to be a stage actress, but was shamed out of it by Miss Bush who encouraged me to go into Home Ec. They eliminated Home Ec as a major before I graduated high school, and I would never have chosen that direction anyway. No, I knew my future had to be wrapped up somehow in books and communication. For years, I put aside my personal writings, unsure and unwilling to show it to anyone. My scholarly writing was good, and ended up to be my strength. I'm not going to go into what led me to become a writer, at least not today. Today I'm so excited because I've discovered something that I thought I'd lost to the past. The pleasure and joy of getting lost in reading.
A couple of months ago, I was invited to take my pick of what was on my friend's book shelf. I recognized a couple authors and found some I'd heard of but never read. I brought home about 8 books, and started my way through the stack. What I discovered was that I was no longer reading fiction for the sheer enjoyment of getting lost in someone else's tale. No, instead I was finding myself engrossed in the writing styles of the different authors. It just so happens, I picked all female authors. Not intentionally.
The first book I read was one by Willa Cather, one of the first authors I'd read as a pre-teen. My Antonia and a couple others, had kept me company for one whole summer. This summer The Professor's House was where I discovered how Cather got into the head of a male university professor and convinced me she got it right. I was amazed.
Next I read two books by Anne Lamott, one of my favorite writers. I had, however, only read her non-fiction books, the ones about writing and creativity. This summer I read her fiction, and was struck by how she invited me into her life and view of how you turn the pain of your life, the loss, the destruction and disappointment, into something you can laugh at and recover part way from. Then I went on to read another of my favorite writers, Amy Tan. It felt as though she was inside my head or I in hers, when she talked about the process of writing. As I try today to write about how profoundly I have been affected, as a writer, by what I've been reading, by Tan and Lamott, by Cather and Kingsolver, I find myself incapable of doing so. It's like trying to recreate a spiritual awakening or fill someone in on the most profound mystical experiences of your life. It simply can't be done.
Reading the works, the fiction and memoirs of contemporary women writers, has the effect on me of solidifying my calling. It's as if I had been traveling on the road to some literary Damascus, been struck blind by my own limitations, and then healed. To have our eyes open to what it means to be who we are, and to find those who understand the same struggles, desires, and need to bring the past and present into something healed and lasting, into something dreamed of or hoped for or not quite understood. Writing is all that, and so much more. It is the voice box of a silenced voice. It is the sensorial expression that travels across synapses, through nerve centers and down into the waiting fingers to bring life to thought, to memory, to vision, to imagination. In hopes that it will bring wholeness and catch someone's eye long enough keep on reading.
Yesterday, I picked up Barbar Kingsolver"s Animal Dreams. I may be one of the few of my generation not to have read her yet. I have always been out on the periphery of her work. What did I expect? After reading Lamott and Tan, I expected something close, I guess. That's not what I found. One of the reasons I even kept reading past the first few chapters, was because of something Amy Tan had said about reading other authors as a way to learn more about her own craft. To get better. That wasn't my original intent, but that is what happened. The transition between reader and writer and back to how they go together. A good friend of mine was in the film industry for many years. she worked as a film editor. I remember watching movies with her, and being slightly disturbed that she couldn't seem to watch a film without noticing the camera angles, lighting, and missed cues or slightly off sound tracks.
Last night and early today, I made the transition. After picking up Animal Dreams and reading the first few chapters, I was sure I wasn't going to like it. It seemed too full, to rich with imagery and minute details. I'd set it down, and get busy with something else, and feel myself drawn back. To keep reading. To see what was next. To see if anything ever started to 'happen'. I found myself drawn deeper and deeper into the landscape of her mind, her characters' minds and lives. Into the harsh environment and the quirky, strange people who the main character felt distanced from. I met her sense of alienation and outsideredness (I know there's no such word). I kept reading, and as I read I noticed how she explored or let her characters explore their psyches, wounds, and preconceptions and judgments. I went to sleep.
About 2 a.m., I woke with a start. Nothing was wrong. The cats were both sound asleep, and yet I couldn't go back to sleep. Again, I was drawn to Animal Dreams. I turned on the light and read, for how long, I do not know. It was late or early as the case may be. I finally turned off the light and went back to sleep, waking at nearly 10 in the morning. After feeding the cats and making my tea, I kept on reading. Just about an hour or so ago, I finished Kingsolver's book. I feel like I've eaten a huge banquet. And what I discovered from her was the ability to weave reality into fiction in such a way as to be unselfconscious and raw. When I finished the read, I was satisfied in a very deep way, and now feel like I need more.
Oh I don't want to stay up all night every night reading. What I do want though, is that magic of getting lost in a piece of writing to the point where you wonder what the difference is between your adventure in another's life and your own? The more we get lost in the land of fiction or some other sense of reality, we hope, I think, for something of redemption. Something we can take with us to help us forgive ourselves of our hard places, or forgive others of their lack, in our eyes. We seek wholeness, and yet what comes from reading and then writing, and then starting the cycle over, is an endless landscape that breaks off into millions of directions, without an end in sight.
