Virginia Woolf had her own term for such "shocks" of memory. She calls them "moments of being," and they become essential to our sense of self. They're the times when we get jolted out of our everyday complacency to really see the world and all that it contains. This "shock-receiving capacity" is essentially for the writer's disposition: "I hazard the explanation," she writes, "that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it... I make it real by putting it into words." Woolf's early "moments of being," the vivid first memories from childhood, are the smallest, most ordinary things: the pattern of her mother's dress, for example, or the pull-cord of the window blind skittering across the floor of their beach house.
The memories that can have the most emotional impact for the writer are those we don't really understand, the images that rise up before us quite without our volition: the flash of our mother's face as she sips from a cooled cup of coffee, for example, her eyes betraying some private grief we've never seen before, or the smell of grapefruit ripening on a tree outside the bedroom window. Perhaps the touch of a stranger...
These are the "river teeth," the "moments of being," the ones that take your breath away. What repository of memory do you hold in your heart rather than in your head? What are the pictures that rise up to the surface without your bidding? Take these as your cue. Pick up your pen, your net, your magnet, whatever it takes. Be on alert. This is where you begin.
No comments:
Post a Comment