GATHERING THOUGHTS:
How to Structure an Essay Collection
Hilary J. Schaper
Critical Paper and Program Bibliography
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of
Fine Arts) in Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2008.
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Gathering Thoughts: How to Structure an Essay Collection
Over the past two years, I have been writing essays, which focus on my family,
and the relationships in my family, and my journey towards a creative life. In thinking
about ways to organize them for my thesis, I have been reading and studying other
collections from the perspective of structure, specifically, the overall framework of a
collection, the form each individual essay or piece takes, the order in which it appears,
and its relationship to the others. This paper will examine Deborah Tall’s A Family of
Strangers, Mary Gordon’s Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and
Identity, and Terry Tempest Williams’ Leap. I am particularly interested in how
structure allows the writer to explore her material, and how it can extend the scope of her
inquiry beyond her own narrative to become more universal, perhaps suggesting to the
reader parallels in his or her own life. I have also looked at themes, and techniques, such
as the use of epigraphs, repetition and imagery, as organizing concepts. In the last
section of this paper, I will discuss ways in which I could structure my thesis.
In A Family of Strangers, Tall’s eloquent memoir, the writer explores her identity
through the prism of her ancestry. Her search leads her to exhume family secrets, which
have haunted her life. The book takes its title from a quotation, which she borrows from
Mandelstam’s poem, “Egyptian Stamp,” and incorporates in the first part of her book:
“Someone has attached me to a family of strangers” (24). This feeling provides the
impetus for her inquiry.
Tall’s structure reflects a sense of fracture and fragmentation. It mirrors the
nature, complexity, and profusion of the bits of material--memory, history, genealogy,
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documentary evidence--which she gathered and sifted through to discover her ancestry
and compose her narrative. Despite her work, she recognizes that “[t]hese attempts to
drag the recalcitrant past into the light piece by piece, to reconstruct a family out of a
bunch of scattered tiles, forcing far-flung pieces of the mosaic into a single design, are
probably futile” (195). The structure also reflects the sense of fragmentation the writer
must have experienced in undertaking her search. In a way, Tall has managed to meld
form and content seamlessly.
A Family of Strangers is divided into five parts: Part I “Secrets Kept and
Unkept,” Part II “Phantoms,” Part III “Post-Mortem: Facts,” Part IV “Genealogy of the
Missing,” and Part V “Geographical Genealogy.” Each part contains titled fragments,
some as short as one sentence or a couple of lines, a paragraph or two, or still others two,
three, or even five pages. (The shortest part, Part II, “Phantoms,” contains 25 separate
pieces.) The number and variety of pieces is overwhelming. In retracing her experience
of gathering and sorting information, Tall invites the reader into her process to see how it
looked and felt as she uncovered bits of new information and attempted to place them
within a larger context.
The writer uses repetition to organize her collection. Many of the fragments in
the five parts bear the same title-- “The Dream of Family,” “Home from the Wars,”
“Anatomy of Secrecy,” “Geographical Genealogy,” and “Secrets Kept and Unkept.”
(The same is true of others as well.) Through this device, Tall catalogues information
while also reminding the reader of what’s gone before, thus creating a sense of
continuity. This organizing principle reflects the way in which she herself accumulated
and evaluated information. Tall builds on the foundation she has laid, and by adding a
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fact here, a memory or a meditation there, she may be able to provide a new or different
perspective from which to evaluate the information. At the same time, I’m not sure that
this technique is totally successful. Because there are so many parts with the same title, I
found it difficult to remember the information included in each, perhaps mirroring Tall’s
own challenge in cataloguing and integrating the material.
Many of the fragments’ titles start with the word, “anatomy.” The American
Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines anatomy:
1. The bodily structure of a plant or animal or of any of its parts.
2. The science of the shape and structure of organisms and their parts. . . .
4. Dissection of a plant or animal to study the structure, position and
interrelation of it various parts. 5. A skeleton. 6. The human body.
7. A detailed examination or analysis . . . . (“Anatomy” 4th ed. 2000)
The repetition of this word embodies a concept important to the narrative.
Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to see it as a representative of Tall’s belief that a fact, in
and of itself, may not have significance, but when taken together with others, may
constitute a body, a live organism, a wholeness, that is greater than its parts. The concept
of dissection discussed in the definition is also significant, reminding the reader of the
necessity of close analysis. By using “anatomy,” repeatedly, the writer may also be
referencing the word’s relationship to the body, for, of course, the search for one’s
ancestry is an intimate endeavor, one that reveals much about one’s physical being.
Many of the fragments include quotations from other written works, some of
which are quite beautiful. Maybe the writer introduces them to provide depth to her own
inquiry. Maybe their inclusion lends a universality to her search for her own roots.
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The five main parts of the memoir map the writer’s process of discovery. Tall
does a good job of making each part a distinct segment, which travels its own narrative
trajectory, while also connecting it to the other sections. Her movement from one part to
the next is effective, logical, and allows the reader to experience the cumulative effect of
the information she is gathering as well as her process of synthesizing it.
The first section starts with a list of things, which the writer knows and does not
know. Here, she portrays her father as silent and secretive, an orphan, a man often
hidden from his family, an engineer “who knows more about the future than the past” (3).
She describes the effect of her parents’ (primarily her father’s) inordinate secrecy in a
beautiful segment, “The Anatomy of Secrecy”:
The inexplicable hunkered, glaring. It abraded daily light, left me
beaconless, off course.
Living outside a central family secret can . . . generate feelings of selfdoubt, distance, and suspicion. . . .
Make one feel forever exclude.
Less important than.
Undeserving of the truth. (36)
This part concludes with Tall’s comparing herself to Odysseus’ sailors who wish
to open the bags of treasure--here, secrets--which could change “the course of [their]
li[ves]” and prevent them from “find[ing] [their] way back” (72). In other words, the
memoirist seeks the unknown despite its risks. Through the rest of the narrrative, she
chases these secrets.
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Her inquiry continues in the second part, “Phantoms.” She imagines her
ancestors-- their “care-worn faces . . . tentative bodies in stiff nineteenth century garb”
(75). This section explores the nature of the phantom whose essence she defines as “a
precise term for my lifelong sensation” (97). She quotes a psychoanalyst who notes that
“‘[w]hat haunts are not the dead but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others’” (95).
In a way, this section foreshadows the next one, “Post-Mortem: Facts,” at the start of
which her father dies. Here, she begins to investigate the nature of memory. She notes,
“[w]hat at one time one refuses to see never vanishes but returns, again and again, in
many forms” (92). This is how the past haunts the living. “Phantoms” concludes with
the writer’s realization of the legacy--“wariness and generalized fear”--of her forebears,
though not their experience (108). What began at the outset of “Phantoms” as an image-something in her mind--becomes a reality (inherited psychological traits) at its
conclusion.
Part III, “Post-Mortem: Fact” commences with the death of the writer’s father
from a heart attack. In this segment, Tall examines the physical things her father left.
She meets his first cousin, finds a photograph of his brother, and locates his parents’
gravestones. Here begins her genealogical search. She learns that her father’s family
emigrated from Ukraine, a fact, which prefigures the two final parts of the book in which
she gathers more information about her family and travels to Ukraine to meet a remaining
family member. Here, too, she meditates on the meaning of the heart, mentioning “[t]he
Chinese ideograph for endurance: a heart beneath the cutting edge of a knife” (182). This
image concludes Part III: “[h]istory was endured, the heart under a knife” (191), a
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reference to her father’s struggle under the knife, and to his death, with which this part
began.
Tall begins Part IV, “Genealogy of the Missing,” with the news that her father’s
half-brother, Will, is alive, and can no longer be counted among the missing. In this part,
too, she learns that her father’s brother, Phillip, had lived in an institution not far from
Tall and her own family for many of the years that she believed him dead. Throughout
the memoir, the writer has pondered her father’s abandonment by his family members.
Here, in Part IV, she regrets Phillip’s abandonment. Now, in a reversal of position, she
writes:
I myself feel abandoned. I want to shake my father’s shoulders
hard, make him see.
But he is gone, the truth untransmitable.
No one else in the family seems to care about the record set
straight. (242)
Finally, in “Geographical Genealogy,” Tall travels to Ukraine. There she meets
Frieda, the sole family member remaining in Ukraine. At the end of this part, Frieda’s
grandchildren travel to America to meet the writer’s family. The writer’s search has
come full circle, and she has unearthed at least some of her father’s secrets.
Family, the search for family, and the meaning of family emerge as themes, which
pervade the narrative. They, along with themes of the Jews’ diaspora from Eastern
Europe, and secrecy, develop organically, byproducts of Tall’s search for her heredity.
From the very beginning, she attempts to learn about her father, his upbringing, and his
extended family, with little assistance from him. She realizes, nevertheless, that “Four
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dots anchor the void: our two-kid nuclear family. The absence of extended family
heightens the intensity of our bond, our isolation from the rest of humankind” (29).
Later, she notes that her nuclear family is her father’s “precious family, the only one he
needs” (37).
Tall yearns for an extended family though. Something in her needs to unravel
questions about her father’s abandonment, and needs to place herself in a larger context.
When she finally learns about and meets her maternal grandfather (for the first and last
time), she hungers for a connection. With him she shares green eyes, a dexterity with
languages, and a musical talent. In wanting to locate and know her father’s family, she
seeks to understand her “Jewish mother” (133) traits, and her general attitude of fear and
caution.
The diaspora is another theme of the memoir. After the pogroms of the early
twentieth century and World War II, many of the surviving Jews left their communities
and sailed to America. Theirs are tales of separation from loved ones and of fractured
lives, such as those of Tall’s father, his brother, half-brother and cousins.
The role of secrecy in the life of her family is also central to the narrative. A
palpable presence, secrecy--and its resulting silence--haunts the writer. At one point, she
wonders, “If there had been anything more than silence, would I have felt the need to
speak in the first place” (71)?
The Cold War and 1950s suburbia provide the backdrop to A Family of Strangers.
Tall’s father worked in a top-secret government position developing radar to spy on the
Russians. Silence prevailed in many areas of society at that time. The past was literally
bulldozed to make way for planned communities, such as Levittown where the writer
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lived. Interestingly, her father’s silence surrounding his work and his past does not
inoculate Tall from his pain. She writes:
Yet despite my father’s shield of silence, his defenses are
perforated by unintentional signals of grief--subtle to others, to me a
steady bombardment.
I am as receptive to his unspoken pain as his radar is to incoming,
enemy missiles.
I’d happily take on his sorrow, mourn on his behalf. (18-19)
Tall uses imagery to unify her work. She describes the ubiquitous silence
surrounding her father and his family as defended and forbidding. Take, for example,
“[s]ilence rises around our house like a wall, studded across the top with broken glass”
(25), or her mother’s “mantle of secrecy” (20), or “the fenced-in acreage of the unsaid”
(69).
The writer weaves the theme of memory with that of silence. Her father claims
not to remember many details of his upbringing. This refusal leads Tall to meditate on
the nature of memory. In fact, many of the titles of the fragments are “Anatomy of
Memory.” At one point, she quotes from Brian Friel, “To remember everything is a form
of madness” (46). Several pages later, she incorporates Susan Sontag’s words, “To make
peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that the memory be faulty and limited”
(49). Still later, she notes that “memory is a blessing” (65), and that “[r]ecollection
allows relinquishment. Memory heals” (83).
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Like A Family of Strangers, Gordon’s Seeing Through Places: Reflections on
Geography and Identity is a writer’s search for identity, in this instance, through places in
her life. The memoir charts her journey from a childhood in which she felt out-of-place,
to places she never imagined belonging but now claims as her own, as an adult. Its
narrative arc moves from a formal, restrictive background highly influenced by the Old
World, the Church, and obligation, to a place of freedom and enjoyment.
The title announces Gordon’s interest in place and its role in forging identity.
Whereas themes come to light in Tall’s memoir through her attention to and emphasis on
certain material, Gordon works with theme in a more deliberate manner, organizing her
narrative primarily around the theme of place. Some places, like her grandmother’s
house, Rome, a house on Cape Cod, are physical and geographic, and easily accessible to
the reader. Others are more metaphoric or symbolic. The particular house in “Girl Child
in a Women’s World” (55-73), for example, is less important in its corporeality than as a
backdrop for the writer’s nascent sexuality and introduction to the world of feminine
wiles. Similarly, “The Country Next Door” (107-137) concerns the neighboring house
more as a construct to explore sexuality--a space, in which, contrary to Gordon’s
grandmother’s house, men live, and in which women cater to them. While the places
visited in “The Architecture of a Life with Priests” (139-179), are physical locations, they
come to represent the writer’s experience as a Catholic child of pious parents (her father a
converted Jew).
Gordon is also interested in the nature of place--its role as an actor, an entity,
which, does not merely provide a backdrop to the lives of its inhabitants, but also shapes
them. (In a similar way, Tall’s Cold War America and Levittown mold its residents.) In
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the context of examining Father D’s living arrangement with his brother later in his life,
Gordon makes the keen observation, applicable equally to other places in her collection:
There’s a mystery that can surround or locate itself at the center of a
house’s life. . . . The house’s very structure, the number of or arrangement
of its rooms, has a powerful effect upon the decisions people make by
which they live and know themselves. (“Architecture” 162-163)
In a similar vein, Gordon notes that her grandmother’s house
made people act strangely, made them come to decisions that could never
be explained. My uncle on the porch, the family not telling my
grandmother about the renovations, my mother allowing the house to
decay . . . . Was all this odd behavior an expression of a family taste for
punishment . . .? It was a house of punishment; it knew how to suggest
punishment, and then to punish back. (“My Grandmother’s House” 4748)
Gender and sexuality are other dominant themes in Seeing Through Places.
“Girl” concerns itself with Mrs. Kirk’s, Gordon’s babysitter’s, house, a house of women,
a place in which men do not figure prominently. The only man in the house of a mother
and four daughters is Mr. Kirk, a kind of phantom who, due to his night shift at the post
office, wakes in the late afternoon. (A grown son returns from Korea, but Gordon rarely
sees him.) Gordon writes of Mr. Kirk:
When I saw him, it was only to observe him sluggishly proceeding . . . his
jaw, underslung like a bulldog’s, covered with a stubble that represented to
me all that I must keep away from in the world of men. He moved in the
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kitchen the way that the wet wash arrived, a part of domestic life, but
unformed and unrecognizable in its historic function. The shirts would
eventually be dried, pressed and hung on hangers; Basil would eventually
shave, dress, and go out to his job, but I would never witness either
transformation and my disbelief that either would happen made me recoil
from the steaming laundry and from the man who had the name of
husband, father, but who slept all day. (63)
In that house, she feels that she exists in a state apart from the sisterhood (in large
part because of her young age). It is there, though, that she becomes aware of her
sexuality and is caught masturbating. There, too, she observes, probably for the first
time, feminine wiles.
In “Country,” Gordon examines the antithesis of the “Girl” house, writing of “the
house next door, the house whose purpose was to shelter or serve men, to satisfy them, to
give them a place to go” (111). Here, Gordon recounts perhaps her first encounter with
boys--an incident in which the two boys next door ambush her in her grandmother’s
garden, pin her to the hard ground, and force her to eat rhubarb. Though her six- and
eight-year-old tormentors lose interest in her after she’s tasted the bitter vegetable, a
sexual undercurrent courses through the essay. Gordon feels shame over “being such a
helpless object of malignity” (119).
In this memoir in which religion plays such an important role, the issue of the
asexuality of priests arises. The essay, “Architecture,” provides another aspect of the
theme of gender and sexuality. To her mother, the writer notes in the essay’s initial
paragraph:
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Priests embodied her idea of the desirable male but without the danger to
her integrity of desire. They were observable only from a distance, like
movie stars; they were garbed like kings or like Jesus himself; they
listened to her sorrows and forgave her sins without revealing any of their
sorrows or suggesting their capacity for sinfulness. She passed it on to
me, this habit of worshiping a princely caste, the sickish feeling of delight
when you were singled out by a priest, the shutting down of the iron door
on the bleeding fingers when you were unnoticed, or (unthinkable)
castigated. (141-142)
In one memorable scene, Gordon tells of her mother and her mother’s friends
calling Father D., a favorite priest, long distance from a phone booth in the drugstore in
her office building.
Other themes around which the writer arranges her narrative are the conflict
between the old and the new, the past and the present, and tradition and modernity. Take
for example, the old-fashioned furniture decorating her grandmother’s home, which
Gordon’s aunt replaced with contemporary designs:
The old wood floors would be covered with a broadloom pattern that was
called pepper and salt, cinnamon and sugar: dots of brown and white.
The brocade couch and chairs and the doilies crocheted by my
grandmother would be replaced by something called a sectional, its color
deceptively, gold. There were orange throw pillows and orange drapes.
Instead of maroon and gold Fragonard lamps, there were rough white
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pottery lamps each with an orange stripe. A Danish modern coffee table,
in light pine. . . . (“My Grandmother’s House” 39)
Apart from theme, Gordon uses chronology as an organizing device. The
collection begins in Gordon’s grandmother’s house where she, as a young child, was
often left when her parents were busy. In fact, the first six essays begin in childhood and
move into adolescence, and, in the case of the sixth, “Sanctuary in a City of Display”
(181-205), into adulthood. In the seventh essay, “The Room in the World” (207-224), the
writer is an adult. “Boulevards of the Imagination” (225-254), the final essay, pays
homage to the New York City, and, specifically, to Barnard College and Columbia
University, where she has found her true home. Its scope is expansive and addresses her
lifetime of experience in the City, thus making it a fitting conclusion to her search for
self.
Gordon’s essays do not comment upon each other in the way that the individual
parts of Tall’s memoir do, though, like Tall’s, they build upon one another. In Family,
each successive part advances the story of her search for her roots. Each begins where
the previous one left off. Gordon undertakes her search for identity in a different way.
She examines the places in her life and juxtaposes one to another, to another, to another.
For example, in one essay, she looks at the places in which she played as a child.
“Sanctuary” examines Rome as a place. A house on Cape Cod is the focus of “The
Room.” Her method is more in the nature of a process of elimination, in which she
examines something, specifically place, determines whether its fit is right or not, and, if
not, casts it off, and examines another place.
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Mood is another technique by which Gordon organizes her memoir. The
dominant feel of the beginning essays is loneliness and displacement. (“Places” and
“Country” offer glimpses of potential bright spots in the future.) Gordon uses darkness
as a metaphor for the emotional gloominess of the places in these pieces. In “Girl,” the
entire house is in shadow:
The darkness of her house was in itself a kind of architecture. What could
have made a house so dark? Perhaps it was the bushes that grew up,
dense, shaped, around the window. And it was the blackout shades, pulled
down in the early afternoon. Still, there must have been some place, some
part of the room, a corner of a hallway, where light struck, where a
yellowish patch, transected by striped shadows, came to rest on a wooden
floor. Some moment of a day when the windows were let open that the
house must have been not dark. But I do not remember such a place or
time. (58)
In “My Grandmother’s House,” she writes:
My grandmother had no interest in having a good time -- that is, in doing
anything that would result only in pleasure -- and her house proclaimed
this, as it proclaimed everything about her. Her house was her body, and
like her body, was honorable, daunting, reassuring, defended, castigating,
harsh, embellished, dark. (15)
After her father died and she and her mother moved into her grandmother’s house
permanently, Gordon was allowed to decide on a color for their bedroom. She chose
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“apple blossom,” a shade of pink, perhaps indicating a yearning for brighter physical and
emotional surroundings.
Aware that her child-self sought something other than--in fact, opposite of--that
which those around her valued, Gordon once again uses light as a metaphor. In her
description of herself at play in “Places,” Gordon writes, “[f]rom the dark corner in front
of the closet door, I watched my father’s back” (83). She juxtaposes the dark print of
Thomas More hanging over her father’s desk, with the objects with which she surrounded
herself, “objects that involved lightness, because I was trying to construct a world of
lightness. A world which would appeal to nobody I knew well, a world I understood to
be inferior in its overly accessible desirability, to the world I believed was important”
(83).
In “Architecture,” after the priest has taken her confession and assured her that the
“sin” she confessed shouldn’t worry her, she leaves the church. As she walks away, she
wakes to life. Her senses rouse: her sight clears, her hearing sharpens, her taste becomes
more acute. Realizing the profundity of the priest’s assurance, she questions herself:
But how could I live like that in the house where my grandmother had just
died? I knew then that I would have to leave the house, that I would have
to leave the church, because to live with this new sense of lightness and
clarity I would need a dwelling that let in the light. (178)
In “Sanctuary,” Gordon claims the city of Rome as her own, freeing it of her
previous associations of it--with her first sight of Saint Peter’s through her child’s ViewMaster, her first visit with her mother and first husband, her meeting with a famous
European writer whom she idolized and whose imprimatur she most desired. At the end
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of the piece, she sits in a park “in the golden light,” in the sun, and ponders how she has
arrived at this glorious place in her life (205).
Whereas Tall examines her identity through the lens of ancestry and Gordon hers
through place, Williams investigates hers through a metaphoric journey into the world of
Hieronymus Bosch’s late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century painting, El Jardin de las
Delicias, or Garden of Delights. Leap, her beautifully written and constructed memoir,
explores her spiritual and creative evolution, beginning with the innocence of the Garden
of Eden, moving through the fires in Hell, and arriving at the Garden of Earthly Delights,
and, finally, at a more metaphoric place, a place of reconciliation and integration of her
experiences into a newfound faith.
Inherent in the book’s title is the allusion to a “leap of faith,” the act of believing
in something, which cannot be proved with certainty. The title is particularly rich for its
reference to both the memoirist’s leap--her conversion from her religious heritage to the
“middle way,” a discovery she makes in the Garden itself--and the “leap,” on the
threshold of which Bosch painted--from the Middle Ages to the Reformation, a period in
which “Martin Luther, Erasmus, da Vinci and Michelangelo offered a personal vision of
what was to come, the inevitability of a free, sovereign mind” (143). Of course, through
her journey, Williams forges her own sovereign mind.
Leap consists of four sections. Borrowing from the construction of Bosch’s
triptych, the first three sections take the names of “Paradise,” “Hell,” and “Earthly
Delights.” In each, Williams explores the corresponding panel of the painting.
Interestingly, as a child, she slept under a reproduction of the Paradise (left) and Hell
(right) sections, the central and larger section hidden from her slumber, though she writes
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that she dreamt it. The final section, “Restoration,” addresses the physical conservation
of Garden of Delights, Williams’ symbolic restoration, and the issue of conservation and
restoration of the natural environment or ecology. Leap, like Tall’s and Gordon’s
memoirs, is cumulative: each section builds on the previous one. It resembles Tall’s
more, as Williams could not move to a place of integration had she not traveled through
each landscape.
An epigraph, charting each section’s narrative arc and summarizing its central
idea, appears at the start of each section, and will be discussed in this paper as each
section is examined. Paul Tillich’s words provide the touchstone for the first, “Paradise”:
“The new can bear fruit only when it grows from the seeds implanted in tradition” (3). In
this first section, Williams introduces the subject of her work, confessing her secret--one
she concealed “for fear of seeming mad” --that “[o]ver the course of seven years, I have
been traveling in the landscape of Hieronymus Bosch” (5). She declares, “[l]et these
pages be my interrogation of faith. My roots have been pleached with the wings of a
medieval triptych, my soul entwined with an artist’s vision” (5).
In “Paradise,” the writer describes the Edenic landscape. As elsewhere in the
memoir, she employs the technique of imagining herself into the painting. She sees
herself falling asleep “on the banks of the pool . . .” (36). In “Eve’s obeisance” (9), she
relives her baptism, in “Eve[‘s] standing in the Temple of the Lord” and “holding the
hand of Adam” (37), she sees her marriage to her husband at the Salt Lake temple, and in
assuming Eve’s identity and “walk[ing] toward the Tree of Life” (41), she feels her own
hunger for knowledge. Through this technique, the writer creates a correspondence
between Bosch’s figures and herself, and, in so doing, places herself in an environment
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informed, at least in part (Eden and Hell) by the Bible and her religious upbringing as a
follower of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon
religion. Williams has planted the seeds of tradition to which Tillich refers.
This section, too, marks the first intersection between her religion and nature.
Even as a child, her faith in the church derived from nature:
When I would bear my testimony before members of my own
congregation, I would say I believed in God not because of what I learned
in church but because of the geese I watched each spring and fall, the fact
that they knew their way, that they always returned. My parents said that
it was a sweet analogy. Not knowing what the word meant, I said, ‘No,
they are not my analogy, they are my truth.’ (16)
The memoirist asks, “If we follow their [the wild geese’s] migrations will we
better understand our own spiritual genesis” (16)? Her question at the end of “Paradise,”
“[C]an wilderness be a prayer?” (42) underscores this connection. By linking nature and
spirituality, she plants more seeds, hinting at the challenge she will later make to the
orthodoxy of the Mormon Church.
In her companion question at the end of the section, “[C]an a painting be a
prayer?” (42) the memoirist sows yet more seeds, introducing the concept of art, of
creativity, as a means of salvation and regeneration. She writes at Leap’s start:
[t]he gardener’s hand is evident. There is an overall narrative to be
followed, nothing is random. Each hedgerow, each bed now flowering
was an idea before it took root in the land. The leaves of each plant
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express themselves rhythmically. Iambic pentameter. Blank verse. A
sonnet. The arrangement of leaves can be read as poetry. (9)
And so it is with Leap. Nothing is random. William’s able hand is obvious in the
seamless stitching together of the various parts of her journey.
The epigraph--“I am asking you to study the dark” (45)--leads the reader into
Bosch’s bleak landscape of damnation: “the mind of the mad, dark and duplicitous” (47).
In this second section, Williams suffers a crisis of faith after abandoning Paradise and
arriving in Hell. Again, she imagines herself in the painting:
count[ing] the rungs, every one, as I walk up the ladder to the Tree Man’s
body, his eggshell body, one, two, three, four, who is holding the ladder
for me, don’t look down, keep rising, keep counting, five, six, slowly to
seven, there are no cherries in Hell, eight, nine, I must suffer this heat,
steady my feet, and here I stand, I am standing inside the body of a hollow
man, brittle and dry, dry heat, I look down as my hands blister at the
thought of all that is burning. (47-8)
In Hell, she juxtaposes the fires with the horrors of contemporary life--headless
frogs, “Frankenstein foods” (58), fireflies with glowing ears resulting from DNA
ingestion, the disappearance of insects in a war zone--comparing the cutting of her breast
(to remove a cyst) with the ravages of the land. Losing her bearings in Hell, she calls out,
“WHAT DO I BELIEVE?” (112). She despairs:
There is no True North in Hell. All is relative. Is this the curse of
modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no
context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is
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imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is
shadow and what is flesh? There is little to orient me here. What I take to
be stars in the midst of smoke are merely sparks that disappear. (52)
Here, she frames questions central to her spiritual and artistic exploration: “What
happens when our own institutions no longer serve us, no longer reflect the truth of our
own experience? . . . How can we learn to speak in a language that is authentic, faithful
to our hearts?” (118). Later, she inquires, “[H]ow do you paint your own conversion?”
(122). A partial answer: a scene showing the reader the “ceremony” she and her husband
celebrated in which they lit fire to the certificate marrying them in the Mormon Church
and she threw her wedding rings into the Great Salt Lake. “Earthly Delights” and
“Restoration” provide additional answers.
Hell” concludes with a kind of “free fall of souls” (125)--a kind of rant, a dizzying
breathless declaration in which she equates the destruction of nature with Bosch’s
burning hell fires. In the next to last sentence of this section, words collide
“Whataboutthecovenantswehavemadenottobebrokenwearebrokenwearebrokenthisrecordo
foursisbrokenisbrokenisbrokenwearebrokenthisrecordofours” (126). Her final sentence:
“God forbid. God forgive” (126).
The epigraph of “Earthly Delights,” excerpted from Henry Miller’s Big Sur and
the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, provides:
Paradise or not paradise, I have the very definite
impression that the people of this vicinity are striving
to live up to the grandeur and nobility which is such
an integral part of the setting. . . .
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There being nothing to improve on in the surroundings,
The tendency is to set about improving oneself. (129)
After traveling through the misery of hell, Williams awakens to the beauty and
pleasure of the Garden of Delights, which represents “another way of being, another way
of seeing” (133), one melding the sensual and experiential with the spiritual, epitomized
by “knowledge transmitted through a blackberry placed on [one’s] tongue” (146).
Imagining herself once more in Bosch’s world, the memoirist hears her characters in their
joyful chant at the beginning of “Earthly Delights.” In the Garden, all of her senses are
aroused “in the service to the Sacred within a shared community” (146). Here, she
discovers the utopia Joseph Smith had envisioned but which the contemporary
(corporate) Mormon Church has lost sight of. Here, she feels the union of all beings and
realizes that “all are in concert with their own curiosities that contribute to a world of
wonders” (135). Leap’s vastly different landscapes also operate, as did those in Family
and Seeing through Places, as entities, which form their residents’ identities.
In “Earthly Delights,” she returns to seeds planted earlier: the relationship
between religion and spirituality, and the relationship between nature and spirituality. At
the Mormon Pioneer Pilgrimage, she feels disconnected from the Mormon Church. In
Spain, in Saint Teresa’s city of Avila, experiencing a spiritual drought relieved only by
nature (the scent of lavender and rosemary), she can neither feel her heart nor cry. She
writes movingly of the “desire in [her] soul to see, [the] desire in [her] heart to be here,
finally, in peace” (132).
After asking, “[h]ow do we remain faithful to our spiritual imagination and not
betray what we know in our bodies?”, and “[w]here do we hide our passions, our
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positions of truth, when everything around us lifts a finger to our mouth and says, ‘Hush,
do not disturb the peace’?” (147). Williams take the leap by converting:
With Paradise on my left and Hell to my right, I can play in the middle of
my life, with the middle of my life I will play. Run. Jump. Leap. I will
leap with my eyes wide open and land without knowing anything except
my feet are on the earth, this beautiful Earth where we live and breathe and
love and work and play and pray that we might never lose sight of how
delicious it is to open our mouths while of these emblems we partake of all
the bounties of the Earth, a jay drops a berry into a mouth that is open. We
can remain open.
To open is not a sin.
To play is not a sin.
To imagine is not a sin. (137)
In the Garden, she re-imagines the orthodox religious principles by which she was
raised. She comes to understand the generative and regenerative power of art--and its
genesis in nature. For her, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, epitomizes the innate unity of faith
and nature. At the end of “Earthly Delight’s,” Williams ascends and descends into the
organic form of his cathedral. This section’s exuberant final passage, a proclamation of
joy and of faith, leads the reader “down, down, down” (232) into Gaudi’s architectural
shell, as her feet settle firmly on the ground and her spirit soars. Williams’ journey
attests to “nature’s grandeur”--as Miller alluded--an essential component of spirituality.
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This dizzying conclusion precedes the epigraph of the “Restoration” section taken
from Ether 13:9, Book of Mormon, “And there shall be a new heaven and a new earth;
and they shall be like unto the old save the old have passed away, and all things have
become new” (237). Restoration, Williams contends, follows restlessness, as in the
dictionary. Her journey--the flight from Paradise, the trek through Hell, and arrival in the
Garden--necessarily precedes her own personal restoration. In the context of the memoir,
“restoration” applies equally to restoration of the Bosch painting, which a museum
conservationist describes as a “spiritual process . . . demanding everything of us” (258),
and to environmental conservation. Of restoration, she writes:
The restoration of nature, even our own, will require a reversal of
our senses and sensibilities.
To see with our heart.
To touch with our mind.
To smell with our hands.
To taste with our eyes.
To hear with the soles of our feet. (261)
Prior to the painting’s restoration, Williams notes that she only saw color.
“Now,” she notes, “what I see is light. White light. . . . It is the light, the throbbing
illumination, glowing on the horizon, rippling in the waters, blowing through the grasses,
that touches my lips” (263-64). Light becomes a metaphor for knowledge, experience,
trusting oneself (as does the blackberry touching the tongue) and leads the writer to
discover her faith:
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This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question,
explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn,
dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke,
emote, scream, sin. . . . I choose to believe in the power of the restoration,
the restoration of our Faith, even within my own Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints. Faith is not about finding meaning in the world, there
may be no such thing--Faith is the belief in our capacity to create
meaningful lives. (264)
She concludes this section and the book: “I am the traveler returning home after
having wandered through a painting” (266).
Williams uses many techniques to organize her memoir. As previously noted,
each section begins with an epigraph. Each section’s conclusion leads into the next
section. At the end of “Paradise,” Williams leaves Eden. At the beginning of “Hell,” she
refers back to her abandonment of Paradise, and notes that she now reads the Garden of
Delights “as a map of the human mind” (47), Paradise being childhood innocence. At the
end of “Hell,” the fires are burning. At the start of “Earthly Delights,” Bosch’s men and
women sing “healing chants, offering [her] the chance to live after [she] was almost dead,
have you ever felt dead to rise again in joy, enjoy this Garden of Delights” (132)?
“Earthly Delights” concludes, as mentioned, with Williams’ feet descending to the earth.
The beginning of “Restoration” finds the writer leading her father to see Garden. She
notes, “[m]y feet walk automatically” to where the painting had hung.
Williams’ stance in imagining herself in the painting allows her to enter her
material and to create identification with Bosch’s vision. Often she uses an image in the
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painting as a springboard into her own experiences, thus creating a framework in which
to interpret them. Borrowing the structure of the painting for her narrative works in much
the same way.
In terms of style, at times when the memoirist experiences great emotion or
wishes to emphasize a point, she abandons the use of punctuation or uses it sparingly,
even writing in fragments. Through this technique, Williams’ language reflects her
experience, her consciousness--be it a loss of control, or a moment of transcendence.
Take for example the end of “Hell,” where, as noted previously, the words run together
when she asks about the broken covenants. The joyful chant at the commencement of
“Earthly Delight” is another example:
Why why why joy enjoy joy joy
Why why why joy enjoy joy joy
Why why why joy enjoy joy joy
Why why why joy enjoy joy joy
Why why why joy enjoy joy joy . . . (131)
Williams writes of her travel in Hell, capturing the experience of circling, of
obsessing, and of engaging in circular reasoning:
numb wandering . . . circling around and around the daily performance of
reward and applause and nonverbal treats oh yes and what is Heaven if not
the expectation when will we get to Heaven and if we dwell on the
pleasures of our own bodies and imagination oh no don’t count to seven
instead the seven deadly sins avarice slothfulness gluttony pride lust envy
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anger again say them right not before you forget avarice slothfulness
gluttony pride lust envy anger. . . (70).
Theme is an organizing principle in Leap, as it is in Family and Seeing Through
Places. One central to the narrative is the struggle to unite the seemingly mutually
exclusive areas of sensuality and spirituality. Williams’ childhood religion cannot be
reconciled with the world of experience, the body, and knowledge. She writes, “I hear
the voices of my Elders: You can’t have it both ways” (147). But, the memoirist’s
triumph here is her ability to integrate those two worlds into a faith of her own making.
Another important theme is creativity, which Williams introduces initially
through Bosch’s painting, and which she also discusses in terms of art’s generative and
regenerative powers. She ponders its role and the role of its companion, imagination,
asking, “Where did El Bosco [Bosch] receive ‘his instructions’? And how does one’s
creativity inform and interpret any Truth?” (40). As the fires of Hell burn, she wonders,
“What are we to do? In times of trouble, I call on the painters ancient and new to draw
the world together” (51), affirming her faith in the artists’ imaginations.
The writer’s friend, a visual artist, a fellow seeker, and a student of Bosch, tells
her, “‘[t]he choices an artist makes are the same choices a human being makes each day.
Finally, they all become choices of spirituality’” (157). And, in the Spanish Gaudi who
challenged traditional boundaries, Williams finds the model of an artist for whom “each
day became a spiritual revelation as he perfected the structure and oversaw the
construction” (228) of his astounding cathedral, an edifice, which he wished to “stand as
a tree stands” (228). In Leap, art--beginning with the ability to imagine, and then to
discover, and finally to create--becomes a necessary element of spirituality. She writes,
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“[i]t is the nature of art to offend. It is the nature of art to offer. It is the paradox of the
artist to both widen and heal the split within ourselves” (184).
The conflict between the individual and the institution is another significant
theme, as revealed by the question cited earlier, “[w]hat happens when our institutions no
longer serve us, no longer reflect the truth of our own experience?” (118). Later, the
writer notes, “[t]he danger is in what we codify, commodify, and exploit. The symbol
becomes the sign” (148). One of Williams’ concerns with her Mormon religion is
exactly this commodification. At the huge gathering at the Pioneer Pilgrimage, she cries
as she witnesses the dissolution of her belief “that there is only one true church” (181),
and the end of her identification with the formal aspects of Mormonism.
Nature, and its promise, is another theme central to Leap. Williams writes of the
utopia Bosch created in the center panel of his painting: “a perfect world in harmony
with discovery, not vulgar, not profane, but a responsible inquiry into the fruits of our
experience” (146). In this she finds “the delicacy of a sensual life, not in the service of
the Self, but in service of the Sacred within a shared community honoring the dignity of
all its members” (147). Juxtaposing this sense of balance with the world our
contemporary society has created, she writes of the defilement of nature, as Hell’s fires
burn, as “our souls travel without brakes” (125): “[c]learcut. Cutthroat. Cut the road
into the mountain. Cut. Take one. Take two. Take three. Take out the entire hillside for
a house for a subdivision of the future. We are developing. See how we are developing.
Six million and rising” (125). She writes, too, of the horrific, unnatural results of
scientific experiments, as noted above.
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In Tall’s, Gordon’s and William’s memoirs, each writer charts her journey from a
place of discomfort or detachment--real or metaphoric--to a place of relative peace. In
each, I felt that their explorations were well worth the trip, that each had learned
something valuable about herself along the way, something, which had contributed to her
personal development. I very much like this model for it rewards introspection and
insight. If I am to follow it, my challenge in ordering the essays in my thesis is to create
a similar sense of movement from one point to another, to reach, if not a sense of peace,
at least, one of temporary accommodation in which I, too, have grown.
I believe that my essays most resemble Gordon’s in terms of their distinctness,
that is, in their ability to stand alone as individual entities. Each part of A Family of
Strangers derives its importance in relationship to its other parts. No one part can stand
alone. Instead, each needs the context of the others for Tall to create a sense of her
inquiry and the multiple strands, which she must pursue to reach resolution. Similarly,
though each of Leap’s sections is interesting, only within the context of the other parts
does the full significance of each become clear (just as one panel of Bosch’s triptych,
taken alone, fails to convey a sense of the entire painting). Whereas Gordon’s essays
certainly benefit from being collected in a single volume--each providing a more detailed
and nuanced portrait of the writer, and each building upon the essays that have preceded
it--each, nevertheless, addresses a distinct place understandable without reference to the
places explored in the others. My essays, too, build upon each other, each lending more
depth to my portrait, but no one is dependent upon another for its meaning.
How best then to order the essays? Most of my essays address my family of
origin, and my relationship to its members. “Paterfamilias” explores my relationship
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with my husband’s family, specifically, my father-in-law. Many of these pieces share the
theme of distance and separateness, a possible principle around which to organize my
thesis. “Double Portraits,” for example, uses David Hockney’s portraits to examine the
distance that separates people, and, in particular, that between my parents. “Prodigal,” in
which I write of my sister’s abandonment of me and my family, and “Round and Round,”
in which a game of musical chairs becomes a metaphor for my displacement in the
family, examine the distance that has developed between me and my family since my
sister’s return. Even “Conversion” addresses the distance and separateness I felt from
classmates and how this influenced my conversion to Christianity. In “Beneath the
Surface,” I reflect back on my relationship with my father.
Another possible theme, which could guide arrangement of my essays, is seeing,
particularly the way in which art provides a way for me to see and examine my life.
Many of my essays--“Prodigal,” “Bearded Spirits,” “Reflections on Red,” “Beneath the
Surface,” “Counting on Fingers,” “Double Portraits,” and “Standing” --use a painting or a
sculpture as a springboard for my personal stories, as Leap did. Perhaps I could employ
the same techniques used in seeing art to interrogate my own life, something I do in
“Standing.”
Connected to the theme of seeing is that of being seen and not being seen, of
looking and of not looking, and of wanting to disappear. In “Conversion,” my differentness caused me to wish to become invisible. Conversely, at other times, I felt compelled
to look at others--others who were disabled and different from me--though I was, in a
manner of speaking, disabled emotionally. In “Meditation,” I, myself, injured from ice
30
skating, ogled the wounded soldier in the rehabilitation unit; in “Counting on Fingers,” I
stared surreptitiously at disabled children.
Fear is another theme shared by several of my essays. Perhaps it is most palpable
in “Standing” in which I describe how it invades my body and affects my ability to write.
In “Impasse,” “Counting on Fingers,” and “Meditation,” fear of disabled people, of
becoming disabled, and of helplessness and abandonment is central. The issue of
obsessive/compulsive behavior goes hand in hand with the phobias. “Bearded Spirits,”
while not addressing fear, nevertheless explores my adulthood obsession with bearded
“spiritual” men. Perhaps, this obsession in some way mirrors my childhood obsessions.
Perhaps then I could begin the collection with the childhood obsession and conclude it
with the adult one. The latter’s content is humorous, and its structure is playful in its use
of footnotes.
As in Gordon’s Seeing Through Places, chronology could organize my pieces.
More than half of them take place, at least in part, during my childhood (though some
also move into my adolescence or adulthood). “Counting on Fingers,” “Round and
Round,” “Meditation,” and “Impasse” all begin and end in childhood. “Conversion”
starts in childhood and moves into my twenties while “Prodigal” and “Bearded Spirits,”
and “Standing” begin in childhood and continue to the present. “Double Portraits” and
“Beneath the Surface” take place in the present.
I could look at my essays through the lens of movement or “progress.” In
“Conversion,” though I convert from Judaism to Christianity, I realize that my reasons
for doing so were not informed by a true hunger for a spiritual life. Later on, I reject
Christianity but do not reclaim Judaism. I have moved from one point to another and not
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quite back again. In “Prodigal,” I move from being an insider in the family to becoming
an outsider, yet, at the end, I reach no resolution with respect to my status. My journey is
more satisfying in “Paterfamilias.” There, I stand outside, as a daughter-in-law to a man
to whom I do not feel close or even particularly like. By the end of the essay, I become a
true member of the family and am able to help my husband’s father in his time of need.
“Standing,” which occurs in the present, commences with images of bondage and moves
to a kind of liberation--if only temporary. Perhaps, as it addresses my challenges with
respect to writing, it would be a good choice for the final essay. Though the four
memoirs I have discussed end with fairly upbeat summations with respect to “progress,” I
might want to leave my collection more open-ended, and my reader with more to ponder.
But I wonder whether a reader would feel unsatisfied if I did not build to a celebratory
conclusion.
Another consideration in ordering the essays is their relative lengths.
“Paterfamilias,” “Conversion,” and “Prodigal” are much longer pieces than the others and
are close in length to one another. For this reason, I prefer to place them apart from one
another and to sprinkle shorter pieces between in order to provide the reader some
variation.
Based on this analysis, I plan to arrange my essays in the following order. I will
start with “Counting on Fingers,” first because I think that the subject is interesting and a
little offbeat, it introduces the use of art in my work, and, because if I arrange the pieces
in roughly chronological order, the events recounted in this essay occurred in my
childhood.
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Next, “Impasse,” which addresses the issue of these same childhood phobias and
my counseling for them. From there, I’ll move to “Conversion,” which picks up on the
theme of my feelings of discomfort and separateness during childhood, and their
ramifications in my young adulthood. “Meditation,” an essay about my love of skating
and the haven it provided me in childhood, touches on my fears, but also my ability to
face them, and my resolve to move on. I will put “Prodigal” next as it, too, arises out of
my childhood experiences. Additionally, it introduces my family and its secret, a theme,
which appears again in “Round and Round,” the next essay. “Red,” an impressionistic
essay, employing a painting as an introduction to a meditation on the color, will follow.
I think that it provides the reader a more sensory experience than my other essays
and as well some respite from the family issues. Next, I will include “Double Portraits,”
another work inspired by art, and another one, which deals with distance, separation, and
relations between people. “Beneath the Surface,” which addresses the nature of my
relationship with my father will follow. “Paterfamilias” will come next; this placement
juxtaposes my relationship with my father with that of my father-in-law. It also shows
the movement towards resolution, which I discussed previously. “Bearded Spirits,” a
light piece, which touches on obsession, and, in so doing, brings the reader full circle
from my childhood obsessions, will be the next to last essay.
I will close with “Standing, which most clearly reveals my sense of my growth,
both personal and artistic. Since other essays in the collection do not directly address my
development as a writer, this piece provides an apt conclusion to my thesis. It charts the
enveloping sense of fear, my grappling to express myself, and, too, the profound
satisfaction I’ve known in my journey as an artist. Most notably, its actual writing
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“breaks out,” in a sense--embodying my experiences of writing several of the essays in
this collection, as well as the thinking and writing of this piece itself--to reflect the
loosening of the emotional strictures, which bound me; most important to the collection is
the way this final essay gives form to the psychic transformation the collection strives for
throughout.
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WORKS CITED
“Anatomy.” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 4th ed.
2000.
Gordon, Mary. Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity. New
York: Touchstone, 2000.
Tall, Deborah. A Family of Strangers. Sarabande: Louisville, 2006.
Williams, Terry Tempest. Leap. New York: Vintage, 2000.