Tag: autobiography

Ishmael, Odysseus, and Seeing a Friend after 40+ Years

Ishmael, Odysseus, and Seeing a Friend after 40+ Years

In Moby-Dick, we don’t know how much time has elapsed before Ishmael – the only one who survives the voyage of the Pequod – tells his tale.  “And I only alone am escaped to tell thee” is the quote from the Book of Job which opens the Epilogue.  Ishmael has to remember, but there is no one left to keep him honest.

I recently had the experience of having lunch with someone I hadn’t seen for over forty years.  We were young wives and mothers together, and very close over a period of seven or eight years, but then moves, divorces, and misunderstandings drove us apart.  There was no internet in those times for casual contact, no Facebook to keep track of our families.  In addition, I knew this friend through my ex-husband’s family; she had been a lifeline when I had felt isolated in a new marriage.  But after the divorce, she drifted away with all the distanced in-laws.  After all those years, I finally told her how grateful I was for her friendship.

But how do you summarize forty years of your life? Especially, how do you do that with someone you once were close to? There are the facts of relocations, jobs, divorces, marriages, deaths.  There are the milestones of the children and grandchildren.  Ten or twenty minutes took care of the timelines; on what was really important in our lives, I think we barely got started.

And there is the question of what is important.  Seven or eight years into his trip home to Ithaca from Troy, Odysseus is washed up on the island of Phaeacia and the local king gives him a banquet.  He asks Odysseus to tell the guests about himself.  Odysseus had been king of Ithaca, he had been ten years at the war in Troy, and many years at sea.  He responds with these questions (which might very well have been Homer’s questions to himself when he started writing his epic): “What shall I say first?  What shall I keep until the end?”  These are the questions I asked myself when I sat across the booth from my old friend.  These are the questions that I ask myself when I think about my life.

I have done a lot of writing in my life   – novels, blogs, stories, reports – most of which were for my own amusement.  This blog is the only location where I share. And I have never written straight-forward memoir.  As I get older, however, I have had the urge to go back and try to make sense of the sweep of my life.  An autobiography, of sorts – or at least fragments of one.  But trying to piece my life together for my friend reminded me of how difficult that would be.

First, how honest could I be?  I found myself not sharing the more uncomplimentary pieces of my life.  Understandable, but regrettable.  If we don’t share our mistakes, we don’t bless the mistakes of others.  Secondly, I wonder how reliable my memory really is.  With friends, with family, we have all had the experience of recalling an event that no one remembers or that everyone remembers differently.  I brought up some things this week with my old friend that she had no recollection of and vice versa.  Did they really happen?  When biographers piece together a life, they look at documentary evidence of dates, events, truth.  Should we do the same with our own memories?  It should be noted, of course, that even if some of these events never really happened, they shaped our lives because we think they did.

Melville is, of course, writing fiction.  He slips in and out of Ishmael’s perspective and had to have a survivor of Ahab’s tragedy in order to have a frame for his tale.  Melville knew how the tale would end and what he wanted to include to come to that terminus.  We are trying to make sense of a life that, perhaps, does not make any sense.  We may be honorably trying to tell the truth, but our truths are more complicated than can be corroborated by documentary evidence.

I have tackled memoir-like writing at times, but always hidden behind the mask of fiction.  I wrote a novel about a woman visited by the ghost of Jonathan Swift.  By having to explain her life (and the last few centuries to him), she is forced to recapitulate and justify her life.  I also wrote a fanciful piece about a middle-aged woman and child trying to co-write – at the instigation of the child – a rule book for the best way to live (excerpt here).  I published neither, but learned a lot in writing them.  I’m with Montaigne, who said, “What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.” But, still, there was cloak of fiction, of story.  Was I being honest with myself?

Borges says that part of the problem is words. Words reduce the ineffable to the mundane.   In “Aleph,” Borges talks about seeing life as a whole, but the tragedy of having to move it into “successive language:” Yet, in his powerful poem, “Everness,” the master tries to convince us that nothing is completely lost:

One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
God saves the metal and he saves the dross,
And his prophetic memory guards from loss
The moons to come, and those of evenings gone.

“God saves the metal and he saves the dross.”  God may save, but we must sort out the “metal and the dross” for ourselves. Borge’s poem reminds me of a line from Shakespeare’s powerful Sonnet 146: “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;” I don’t know of a better credo for life.  But to do this, we must be able to identify the dross, and honest memoir writing would probably help.

Meanwhile, how would you explain the last forty or fifty years if you ran into a very old friend?  How would you explain it to yourself?

About five years ago, I wrote a blog relaying some suggestions as to how to write a life review: “Feast on Your Life.”  Maybe it could help us as we think about it again.

Does Life Have a Plot?

The title of this blog – “When I Come to Be Old” – comes from a list of resolutions that Jonathan Swift compiled as a young man about how he would behave in his old age. It is a litany of the things he finds annoying about the older people around him and includes the reminder not to “tell the same story over and over.”  We old people tend to tell stories to others and to ourselves.  We are trying to make sense of our lives.  Boring those around us with repetitive stories is definitely to be avoided, but is trying to make stories out of our lives a good thing or a bad thing?

We want to make sense of things.  We want to believe that things happen for a reason.  Whole religions are built out of this.  When we wonder why “the wicked prosper,” Christianity moves the end of the story to eternal life.  Buddhism and Hinduism and other religions of karma and reincarnation assure us that it all works itself out over many lifetimes. Whether we believe this or not, however, we want things to make sense now.  We want to be able to read the stories of our lives to a satisfying conclusion.  So we make the past into a story.

Not everyone thinks this is a good idea.  The philosopher Galen Strawson thinks that our culture encourages people to construct continuous narratives of their lives over time, while life might be better understood as “episodic.”  Things happen and then other things happen.  Lives do not necessarily make sense.  Freud gave us the idea that everything was rooted in our childhoods; if we could just follow the thread we would understand.  Maybe.  But there are random events like illnesses and weather and which roommate you were paired with as a college freshman.

In Swift’s time, it was common to talk about life in seven years segments.  Swift’s mentor, Sir William Temple (one of the old men Swift is talking about in his resolutions no doubt), wrote that “mind and his thoughts change every seven years, as well as his strength and his features.”  The seventh year (7,14, 21…63, 70) was seen as “climacterical” and having significance as a turning point.  (Climacteric is now a term we use synonymously with menopause, but that is just one kind of change.)  This theory assumes definite differences between your old self and your new self.  And surely, none of us can understand all of the decisions we made forty or fifty years ago.  And yet we try to connect the dots.

But life is not entirely in our control (another lesson we might not learn until old age), and bad things happen to good people for no apparent reason – and vice versa. The Bible contains the most significant story of a man whose life does not make sense – Job.  The last chapter of the Book of Job (where he gets new riches and new children) is thought to have been tacked on at some later date to make us all feel better.  Mostly it makes us wonder, does God really think children are replaceable?

We want it all to make sense.  In some cases it seems to for a while.  People who work hard do well – but not always.  Good parents have good children – but not always.  Love begets love – but not always. As we get old and look back on our lives – what holds it all together?  What part of my eight-year-old self endures (besides some unreliable memories)?

Autobiographies written in old age reinforce the cause-and-effect route.  Benjamin Franklin wants to convince you that he plotted out his life and developed his character according to a set of guidelines which he developed as a young man and is hoping to pass along to his poor son.  On the other hand, Penelope Lively entitles her memoir Making It Up, and by following the forking threads of decisions she made and things that happened to her, makes it clear that it could have gone another way.

Galen Strawson thinks the human population is divided into diachronics (those who see life as a continuous narrative) and episodics (those who remember events but do not forge a link). He intimates that the latter have an easier time seeing each day as a new beginning.  One might think of the Greek differentiation of time as chronos (linear calendar/clock time) or kairos (special experiences outside of time). Old age is a time for episodic reminiscing, which is often followed by an attempt to make sense of the episodic sequence.  Maybe this is a fool’s errand.  Surely it is beyond our ability.  Among the questions the Buddha said were “inconceivables” and should be “put aside” were questions as to how karma worked. 

So, when you sit down to write those memoirs or family histories, please consider that your life is not a novel.  You do not need to find a plot (or to invent one).  A number of my short stories are about people who read the wrong narrative into things (try “The More Loving One”).  But maybe reading any narrative into things should only be done provisionally.