In the famous Monty Python skit, the Ministry of Silly Walks elevates expressing and, in the process, embarrassing oneself in public to an art form encouraged by the British government, much as our NEA and NEH provide support and legitimacy for more traditional creativity. Writing a memoir is partly an exercise in taking a silly walk, as the trip back through time demands doing a jig here and dodging a jam-up there, sidestepping un-repaired potholes and perilous pitfalls and pitiless, bottomless pits of self pity, and keeping your feet out of the pungent piles of shit into which it is so startlingly easy to place them. It’s a stutter step walk, like the thing impatient people in Manhattan (an oxymoron if there ever was one) do when they’re walking too close to the person in front of them. And yet, writing a memoir is also a measured marathon, a race to keep pace with the run of memories, thudding one foot in front of the other to maintain forward motion as the mind races back to reclaim a scene, a scent, the schematic of a an experience, a name, a place, a particular word or phrase, a passage of poetry, then sprints ahead to catch up with the story, which has already reached the next mile marker.
The process is both exhilarating and infuriating, and you eventually hit the wall of forget, which like love in the e e cummings poem, “is more thinner than recall/more seldom than a wave is wet/more frequent than to fail.” You can’t just push through it. You have to step over it, and before that, dis- and reassemble it, tearing it down on one side and rebuilding it on the other, brick by brick—or in the case of what few have the courage to call the magic of invented memory—trick by trick. Factual recall is inevitably impaired by time, and the battle between veracity and verisimilitude rages until you discover these twisted twins are not true opponents, but close, if cautious, friends, that will both serve your cause loyally.
At the top of the wall stands Jack Nicholson, from “A Few Good Men,” shouting to Tom Cruise, “You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall,” warning Cruise that he can’t handle the truth, claiming he is doing the distasteful but indispensable duty of defending what’s right from the onslaught of what’s true. But Jack’s Colonel Jessup, who was disposable in the film, is demanded by the writer, who is rebuilding and re-mortaring the wall, rearranging the bricks by revealing their patterns, the nicked edges that fit neatly together, the striations and discolorations that indicate which ones sat side by side while time wrought its sublimely destructive work, even occasionally fashioning entirely new bricks—facsimiles of those that were smashed or lost or have decayed beyond recognition. This is the architecture or more accurately the engineering, the masonry of memoir.
Within the memoirist’s Ministry of Silly Walks is the Bureau of Reclamation, which, as an agency of the United States government within the Department of the Interior (where, of course, all memoir lives before it is written), is the nation’s largest wholesaler of water and second largest hydroelectric power producer. This organization’s operations—harnessing the raging rivers, impeding with dams the water’s inexorable flow, containing a river’s energy, collecting and distributing its juice, slowing an endless rush to a manageable and meaningful trickle—this is exactly how the memoir writer reclaims his or her story—a story that, like a dry riverbed, is brought to life with a raindrop of recollection, a story whose path was never lost but needs to be re-found, re-mapped, re-channeled, and sometimes even reversed before its convoluted and meandering course makes any sense at all.
Every river has both a source and a mouth, and every writer does, too, the source being his heart and the mouth being her voice. In Robert Lowell’s poem, “Man and Wife,” he writes: “you were in your twenties, and I,/once hand on glass/and heart in mouth/outdrank the Rahvs in the heat/of Greenwich Village, fainting at/your feet—“
Have you ever had your heart in your mouth? Try writing a memoir.
