What is time?
Friday Write #163
Greetings from Ohio, where I’m sitting in a chintz recliner with my feet in a shiatsu massager. The instructions say you should only use it for thirty minutes at a time, but I’m on minute seventy-five and it feels great.
Yesterday was my dad’s birthday, and tonight we’re going out for a nice dinner at the same restaurant my brother and I went to before our senior proms more than three decades ago.
“What is time? It is a secret—lacking in substance and yet almighty,” wrote Thomas Mann. I kind of feel like childhood has that quality for me now. I can remember so little of it, but it still acts on me, right?
“Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life,” Flannery O’Connor famously said. I don’t take her to mean that you need a perfect factual record. More like you have to remember what childhood felt like—its pleasures and fears, its humiliations and griefs, its hopes and bewilderments. Your material isn’t what actually happened so much as the patterns of feeling that persist, and which then can be handed to a character.
For some reason I just thought of the Sharon Olds poem in which she looks decades backwards and imagines seeing her parents when they were very young, before they were married.
She wants to warn those sweet-faced college graduates. She wants to stop the future before it happens. But she doesn’t, of course, because it isn’t possible but also because she wants to live.
Obviously we can’t change the past, and some of us can hardly remember it. But memory doesn’t have to be complete to be useful. We have fragments—a mood, a gesture, a few charged details, a handful of vivid scenes—that carry enough charge to make their way into our current work, whether it’s a semi-autobiographical poem or a wildly made-up novel.
Here’s the Olds poem, “I Go Back to May 1937,” in its entirety. Today, take a line from it and use it to begin a scene of your own.
I get into my electric car every day and imagine where my beautiful, brilliant parents and sparkling young parents could have hoped for their kids.
I’ve never thought to do this, but I think I want to try. Let’s see what new things emerge!