Two minutes on each of these topics:
____A memory of cabbage
____Some instance of a war
____A cup you loved
____A peace march you didnât attend
Where do thoughts come from, memories, words? All of it is carried in mind. Note: I didnât say âyour mindâ but âmindâ itself because we are all run by the same principles of mind. We each have our individual details but the functioning of mind works the same way in all people.
You interrupt here to assure me that you are way more messed up than most minds. You wonât fit, you canât write, you are hopeless.
Everyone feels this way. Shut up and listen. Yes, you are special but your mind isnât. Your mind at its base functions like all other human minds, just as your legs walk similarly to other peopleâs and your hands do the same gripping and touching, poking and holding.
One basic thing the mind does is generate thoughts. The problem is: itâs hard to settle it down. The mind has a tendency to wander and drift off or barrage us. Even before we get to a first thoughtâthe ones that carry vitality, that are connected to the bodyâwe are lost in critical second and third thoughts: âI canât do this writing. Thereâs a sale on tuna. My kids need attention. I have nothing to say. Iâm boring.â These divisive, churning thoughts are telling you a lot, but not what they are actually saying. Itâs an indication of nervousness and energy. It tells you you want writing bad, but at the same time are terrified to write.
We call this monkey mind or the critic or editor. We run from this voice, but at the same time we believe it, listen to it as though it were God declaring the sacred truth: yes, indeed, you are a dud. And donât try to be anybody. Donât speak.
Everyone has this voice. Even if you had the ultimate in supportive parents and encouraging teachers, the human mind generates this old survival technique. Can you imagine if cave people had decided to wander off and contemplate their past? They wouldnât have gotten meat on the table. But this inheritance is not obsolete. We still have a fear of our inner world. Will we survive if we take time to think, to examine, to understand? Instead we prefer to go hurtling from one war to another, from one marriage to another, from one painful situation smack-dab into one more. We think that if we stay blind, ignorant, and keep going, we will make it through.
And plop!âin the middle of all this you decide you want to write a memoir, to look back, to ponder. Of course, your deep survival mechanism, old monkey mind, is going to go bananas.
It wants to protect you at all costs. But itâs also testing you. Do you have the mettle, the wherewithal, to behold the gems of your heart? The jewels are sometimes handed to you bleeding, encased in betrayal and deception, reeking of disappointment and disillusion, slimy with heartbreak and pain. How bad do you want the bright pearls?
This is important for you to understand. It helps you to bear up under the screeching in your ear. Monkey mind can take the form of your mother, a nun, a professor, a priestâwhatever it needs in order to do the job.
Your job, in the middle of this noise, is to keep your hand moving, to be steadfast. Find people to do timed writings with you, make a schedule even if itâs only twice a week for half an hourâand stay with that schedule. (Be realistic. If you can only write once in the coming week, put it on your calendar. And show up. You donât blithely cancel a doctorâs appointmentâthis date is as important.) Do what it takes.
With time and determinationâsometimes a lot of determinationâmonkey mind does quiet down, does settle. It never goes away, but you create a genuine understanding of it. It will never so easily run your life again. At the same time, you are developing a curiosity, a commitment, and a love of the writing process. You are following what pleases you. Monkey mindâs screeching canât get as much attention.
Eventually monkey mindâs concern with survival transforms. You finally hold the jewels. You rule now. Monkey mind becomes the guardian at your gate. Sheâs not a squawker anymore. She pays silent vigil, has joined your forces. But you wonât recognize her right away. Your armor now is compassion, your defense, love. The jewels are in your hands. No one elseâs.
In the essay âWild at Heartâ in a book called The Poem That Changed America: âHowlâ Fifty Years Later, Vivian Gornick writes:
Letâs look at this. The first paragraph is a detailed list of the specifics of Allen Ginsbergâs early life. Yes, he was born in Newark; yes, yes, his father was what Gornick says he was and his mother is described aptly. It is true he was inclined to love boys when he was young. But then the stunning line: âNone of this accounts for Allen Ginsberg.â Huh? I thought in writing we build up the details and create a picture of who we are? This is exactly the problematic trick.
You can be told what materials make a handâthe skin, the fine bones, the nails, the persnickety thumb, but then all the ingredients fuse and explode. Whose hand is this? A leap happens. Allen Ginsberg became a huge figure that changed the face of poetry. Notice, too, it is not only Allen Ginsberg the man, who created himself, but also his work that met the momentâhe ignited with his time. Something dynamic happened.
We donât live in a vacuum. That extra ingredientâthe flint snapping across the rough edge of our era, the day the news broke, the flavor of our decade, our generationâmakes the spark spring up. You never talk just for yourself. A whole flame shoots through you. Even if youâre not aware of it, even though your sorrow, your pain is individual, it is also connected to the large river of suffering. When you join the two, something materializes.
When Bob Dylan sat in the third row first seat in B. J. Rolfzenâs English class in Hibbing High School, this public school teacher had no idea that this quiet boy would, two years after he left his family at eighteen, write some of the best songs of the twentieth century.
Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan were brought up thousands of miles apart. Bob Dylan had stable middle-class parents. His father sold electrical equipment, stoves, refrigerators to iron ore miners in Northern Minnesota. His mother belonged to Bânai Bârith. But ânone of this accounts forâ Bob Dylan. Dylan took a leap into another life. As an adult fourteen years older than Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg heard Dylanâs songs and knew the torch of inspiration, of freedom, had been passed on to the next generation.
We each are endowed with original mind, which is like a river under the visible river, unconditioned, the immediate point where our clear consciousness meets the vast unknown; yet weâve blown smoke screens to cloud it. Fake images, false illusions. When Allen Ginsberg sat down one night in his twenties to write what was really on his mind, he replaced the rhymed poesy heâd learned from his father and from school. That decision was the beginning of one of the most famous poems in our language. Imagine! the power of writing whatâs truly on your mind. What you really see, think, and feel. Rather than what you are told you should think, see, and feel. It causes a revolutionâor at the very least, a damn fine poem.
Raw material is poured into a burning vat and something different comes out. Maybe in past generations when people didnât leave home and raised their children near their parents in the same town where they grew up and if your father was a steelworker, you became a steelworker or if your mother was a secretary, you became an office manager, you might not have had the luxury of wondering about yourself. You might not ponder how A became B and produced C. It might all have been obvious. But I bet that even a third-generation physician on his way to work in his hometown who suddenly notices the glint off a parking meter, stops still and questions: Who am I? and is left in this swirl that doesnât make sense. One lives and then one dies? Who thought this scheme up anyway?
We go back to our past to piece things together. âI always loved coffee ice cream, roast beef, and hopscotch.â It still makes us happy to remember these things, but how did they lead to moving from the sprawl of a city on the East Coast to listening to mourning doves on a dead branch outside our kitchen door in the vast West? Can we turn around fast enough to catch a glimpse of our own face?
In some ways writing is our attempt to grasp what went on. We want an answer. We want things to be black and white, to be obvious and ordered. Oh, the relief. But have you noticed, it doesnât work that way? We live more in the mix of black and white, in the grayâor in the brilliant colors of the undefined moment.
Can we bear to hang out in incongruity, in that big word, paradox? How did I end up with the partner I have, the children that sprang from me? How can I love my father, who betrayed me? This isnât a call to ditch it all even though nothing makes sense. Instead, donât reject anythingâthe person who did something unforgivable, the white rose at the edge of your driveway, the split pea soup you never liked.
There are no great answers for who we are. Donât wait for them. Pick up the pen and right now in ten furious minutes tell the story of your life. Iâm not kidding. Ten minutes of continuous writing is much more expedient than ten years of musing and getting nowhere.
Include the false starts, the wrong turns, the one surprising right thing that happened. A lot of it is ...