Before-and-Afters, Music, Our Voices/Representation/Truth

Happy Friday! The week seems to have galloped by faster than everything that needed doing could possibly follow. I've spent most of the day so far trying to get the cabin tidied/cleaned for our guest, whom Phil is driving to Anchorage to pick up. Also caulking more windows, taking this insulation project as an opportunity to take everything apart and put it back together better.

Before-and-Afters

So, some before-and-afters! I showed our laundry in the rain on Wednesday, with a red ladder clearly in view on our countertop, sprawled over my claimed work corner. The ladder is now gone, but it'll be back, as we haven't finished covering the ceiling! Here is how my workspace prefers to look:

- books, piles of paper, etc, happily back in place - and here's the context. (And whoops - you can just see the caulk gun and some screws that I left on a chair - not done with this cleanup yet!) 

This is a ridiculously tidy version of the counter: being the one major horizontal surface in our tiny cabin, it gets swamped  with books, tools, harvest of any kind, obviously it's my only food-prep surface too (although I often get down on the floor eastern-style to knead Phil's bread).  But the inspiring thing about a major cleanup is that it motivates its own maintenance!

Last night around 11pm, when we were so ready to go to bed after hours of cleaning and organizing, we went outside to look at the sunset. Can you believe this picture was taken at 11pm?

Here's a similar view January.

Our Voices/Representation/Truth

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of 'voice' as a writer or performer of any kind, including a cook/chef/food preparer, and want to share some ideas. However, as so often at the moment, I'm feeling pushed for time to express myself clearly, and also have so very much that I'm thinking and want to say… So I'm going to take it in chunks, and do some of it now and some tomorrow (or Sunday, if I don't get online tomorrow).

As a performer, voice is, presumably, the externalization of identity. What you offer says something about who you are, and thus to some degree defines how people react to you - whether they identify with you and feel agreement and sympathy, or feel threatened, or feel politically unaligned, etc, etc. Nancy Lord was saying on Tuesday that she thinks that one shouldn't have to be limited to a single 'voice' - and I agree. As skilled performers (writers, cooks, musicians), we should be able to make offerings that harmonize with many different aspects of human experience; as sensitive human beings, we should be capable of sympathy with a wide range of perspectives and of belief in a plethora of possibly conflicting views. 

But this is the point at which I get stuck: the ethics and also the physics of the relationship between truth and representation. I want to touch the truth, and I have the hardest time with the fact that sometimes, in order to represent, one has to exaggerate or to highlight. I know that it's just like wearing make-up on stage to clarify features for a large audience at a distance. And of course I'm egotistical enough to desire a large audience for my poetry - and for the food I prepare and write about too, for that matter! But does that mean that I need to use a microphone and wear make-up - or, to borrow a metaphor from Bill Roorbach, to baste my turkey with motor oil - in order for a realistic representation to be received? (Bill invokes this metaphor, by the way, in a beautiful story he tells in the introduction to his anthology of creative nonfiction titled The Art of Truth. The light oxymoron of this title conveys precisely the dilemma that I'm trying to talk about.)

'Impersonation' - speaking in the voice of another - is traditionally all about putting on a mask (persona = 'mask:' the Latin word actually came from Etruscan but the Greek 'mask,' prosopon, yields its etymology clearly: it's what you put in front of your face. 

On the one hand, putting on a mask is liberating. Someone who read at our writers' group yesterday is writing a memoir. Since she started writing it in the third person and changed all the characters' names, including her own, she has discovered a delightful new lease on it and her exuberance, joy and enthusiasm for the way that a very interesting and unique story is now simply flowing out is a wonderful thing to see. Another lady in the group, who is involved in theater, commented that a similar liberation takes place when you are acting the part of a character. You can do any goofy thing and 'blame it on them!' I suspect that this obviative capacity, this ability to shift the responsibility onto the part you are playing, then seeps back into the sphere of speaking for yourself: perhaps saying something intensely personal and confessional becomes easier when you are used to making the confessions of the part you are playing. And perhaps, if you're doing it really well, you become more universal.

On the other hand, putting on a mask is obviative - it's stepping out of the way of responsibility, and claiming to speak for someone else (as if you could know). It's forsaking reality for a picture or fiction of the reality, or of some different reality that doesn't exist. Now, perhaps everything is picture/fiction anyway and I'm worrying about nothing. Hindu cosmology would certainly say so, as would postmodern theory and certain skeins of cognitive neuroscience. So, why am I so reticent to attempt to portray a variety of perspectives? 

First, I will say that I'm not alone in this. I think a lot of Li-Young Lee's poetry is predicated on this question. The only time I saw people get really heated at the Writers' Conference last month was over the question of taking on characters from other cultures and 'impersonating' them - this raises the specter of political correctness and also the question of the disadvantaged person 'what gives you the right to tell my story?' One participant was really offended that it was suggested she didn't have the right to write from the perspective of her black neighbors with whom she'd coexisted for years. Another confessed that she writes science-fiction, based in an imaginary universe, precisely to avoid such issues. But, from my angst-y perspective, she thus potentially places herself in the same bind of avoidance of reality - unless she can say forceful things about the real world through depictions of an alternate world. And this is where some hope comes in - masterful writers like Ursula LeGuin do say forceful things about the real world in their fiction. That was what I liked so much about David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas also, as I blogged about recently.

I do find myself paralyzed by the unfulfillable need for omniscience, though. If I'm going to write from another person's world-view, I feel that I need to know everything about it. And sometimes the fact that I pick up so much psychically is an impediment rather than a help: intuitive, empathic knowledge is often ineffable and I'd be able to present (not: represent) the character far better by being able to show their drinking habits or what age they were when they first learned disappointment.

While I was cleaning, I was listening to the Best of Sting. It's the only Sting cd Phil owns and I love it! Sting was big when I was growing up, and yet, through the various quirks of my upbringing and later life I was almost completely unaware of him until Phil first played me this cd. I love how many different characters he evinces in the course of that one disc, as well as how many current/political affairs he glances at. I admired his being a voice for what many people think - and what many people disagree with also! But I was also stricken with anxiety about my suitability to represent a person who grew up in England in the 80's, as I did myself, whilst having been almost oblivious to popular culture of the time!

I need to get back to cleaning pretty soon, and posting this blog, downloading what-all else and some grocery shopping are a rainy-wet bikeride away. I hope that these musings are any kind of coherent. I prescribe myself an assignment - to write some persona poems!

Interim bottom line for me: when I write, I want people to see themselves, not for them to see me and identify with me. Or when I'm representing objects or events, I want to take them right there, not have them be distracted by my docent voice. But then, I love to get lost in the beauty of words juxtaposed, also - and sometimes that pure, abstract beauty is the closest thing I find to truth.