5 .
MAKING TAPESTRY —
TEXTURE AND DETAIL

THERE IS A famous series of six tapestries, The Lady and the Unicorn, displayed in the Musée de Cluny, the Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris. They show a medieval lady and her maidservant surrounded by elements of both their natural and cultivated worlds: a bowl of fruit, a small carved chest, a harpsichord, berries, flowers, dogs, rabbits, monkeys, a lion and, of course, a unicorn. Each tapestry represents a sense, the sixth one being love. I have not learned the art of tapestry, but The Lady and the Unicorn is one of my teachers, because as well as being a beautiful work in its own right, it reminds me of what I need to do as a writer.

It includes all the senses — and adds love. It shows exquisite attention to detail; it represents the actual world as well as the symbolic world of the mind and spirit with economy and clarity; it revels in colour and texture — indigo, blood red, amber, forest green; it reveals the ordinary elements of life as extraordinary; it shimmers with what is unsayable. A writer’s needle and thread is different, but, if you work with the same attention as those unknown tapestry makers, you can create, from the strange silk, cotton, string and wool of words, your own tapestry of marvels.

It begins with attention and observation. All good writing comes from paying attention to — observing — yourself, others, your environment. You know this already, but it is so easy to let your attention become dulled, to become too busy to really notice anything,to become immersed in paying bills, getting to the office, washing up, arranging to go to the dentist. Naturally,writers must earn a living and do these daily chores — probably not many of you have maidservants and unicorns in your lives — but you can do your ordinary activities with attention so that the mind is trained, ready to write, when you sit down. See the bubbles in the washing water, hear the whirr of a bicycle tyre on a wet road. It is a quiet awareness amongst the busyness of life that Buddhists call ‘right attention’ or ‘wakefulness’. It means being properly ‘awake’, that is, being aware of what you are doing, seeing, feeling, thinking.

How do you wake yourself up? Here are a few possibilities.

• Find time each day, even just a few minutes first thing in the morning, to pay ‘right attention’ to your immediate environment, to really observe at least an aspect of your world with focused attention, with all your senses. Look at your own hand, listen to the sound of a car horn at night in a quiet street, smell the scent of a freshly opened book. Notice the myriad textures of lived experience. It doesn’t have to be beautiful — you may observe a crushed snail. There is as much revelation in an act of violence accurately witnessed as a field of poppies delicately observed. Contemplate the extraordinariness of any blade of grass existing at all. Note down what you see, hear, smell, even for ten minutes of every day. It will reawaken and sharpen your writing mind.

• Go back to a writer who has ‘woken you up’ in the past. >Re-read passages that startle you with their insights and observations — it can be like taking a perception-enhancing potion. For me,Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is always a refreshing draught. Remind yourself that you have the same capacity to observe your world.

• Seek out an inspiring work from another art form: a powerful painting, a piece of music, a song, a poem, a film — even a tapestry. Immerse yourself in it; give yourself over to another form of expression. Find artists who are ‘tearing the veil of habit’ that normally drapes itself over life. It might be a singer who wakes you up to the detail of a crumpled dress, or to the sound of a footfall in the passage at three o’clock in the morning. Experiencing art of every genre is one of the best ways to refresh a dull awareness; all kinds of neurones will begin firing and forming new neural pathways in your brain.

Sex and death and the six senses

The smell of a towel warmed by a fire, the sight of redwoods in a Californian valley, the feel of cold air on your cheeks early on a winter morning in a London park — the world is first, and every day, apprehended by the senses. Almost immediately afterwards, you have an emotional response to it. You may then conceptualise what you have experienced, and even philosophise about it, but the fundamental texture of lived experience lies in the sight, touch, sound, smell and taste of the world. To convey what it is like to be in the world, a memoir writer needs to show at least something of that texture. To do that, the writer re-creates the sensory experience — or, at least, uses words to trick the mind into thinking it is receiving information from the senses.

The more overwhelming the experience, the more difficult it can be to find the words to convey it. In intense experiences, such as the meltdown of sex or the devastation of death, the brain typically reacts in a paradoxical mode — senses can be heightened even though the mind feels as if it is floating, or numb. We may see the fly crawling on the curtain as sharply as if a high-powered film light was trained on it, while our brain and emotions feel switched off. Emotions are difficult to write anyway, without becoming too abstract or clichéd, and when the feelings are powerful, words can feel inadequate. It is easy for writing about death, loss and grief to become ‘purple’ or sentimental, easy for writing about sex and romantic love to become either flowery or uncomfortably explicit. (We all have a different sensibility about this! Some prefer scientific names like labia and testicles, others prefer colloquial names like lips and balls, others again use imagery, likening the sexual organs to a landscape of moist valleys or tangled jungles. The choice depends on the tone you want in your writing.) There are no simple answers, but if you remain as honest as possible with the simplicity of sensory details and images — iron bed, tight sheets, neatly folded tissues, surprising moles dotted along a spine — then you have a chance of conveying some of the texture of lived experience. There is also the importance of spareness, of economy. In writing sex, in particular, it is the ‘blow by blow’ account that can become either exhibitionistic or just plain embarrassing. A few well-chosen words can give more space for the reader’s own imagination, thus making the scene more suggestive and erotic. I suggest that it is both more honest and more powerful to recall the actual body — skin, sweat, freckles, muscles — than either a scientific or a sentimental body.

Words about food can actually make the mouth water; words about a threatening situation can make the heart beat faster; words about sex can create arousal. It strikes me as bordering on sorcery that a system of signs on the page can enter the mind and cause the body to react as if it had received sensory input. I remember, for example, how the vile odours evoked in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume caused my body to recoil, sickened, as if I was actually smelling the filthy streets of medieval Paris. Of course, Perfume is a novel, but as a truthful representation of life, memoir needs to pay the same attention to the sensory world — pleasant and unpleasant. Writing which connects deeply, which makes the reader feel as if he knows and understands, affects the body as well as the emotions and mind. While words shape our experience of being, they can also re-create it in the mind and body.

Writing for the senses is often taken to be seductive, pleasurable writing — the smell of coffee brewing in a sunny kitchen, creamy lilies glowing amongst dark green spears, the silky grace of a baby’s cheek — and it is true that sensual writing can reawaken the delights our senses afford us. But the world is also made of the dark, decaying and repulsive: the stench of urine in a dank alley,yellow pus oozing from a child’s infected eye, the scream of a woman late at night in the red light district, the ugly thud of a fist on flesh. This is the lived texture of life; this is what our senses tell us.

The life of the senses is also rhythmic — there is a pulse, a throb, a to-and-fro, which is an intrinsic part of the natural and built world. The rush of waves up the sand and the tugging back, the breath drawn in and let out in a sigh, the thumping of an engine in a shearing shed, the lub-dub pump of the heart muscle — nothing is still. Even stone is weathered rhythmically by the rain and wind. This rhythm can be re-created in the internal rhythm of sentences and the pattern of sentences within paragraphs. Read your words out loud so that you become aware of the rhythm — notice that some sentences are short and jerky, poking a finger at the reader; some are languid and lazy, twirling the reader around a finger; some mimic the movement of speed, sharp and racy, or the dreaminess of a hot summer afternoon, slow and long. The rhythm of sentences is essential to the re-creation of the experience of life. Virginia Woolf stated that for her, rhythm was the first impulse — that if she was blocked it was because she could not find the right rhythm.

Here is a (very) long languid sentence from Whatever The Gods Do.

When I came upon the kite it was already flying long horizontal infinity signs back and forth across the sky. I don’t know whether this was a beginning or a bold change of pace halfway through, but then it flew straight up and looped around and back down its vertical path, then glided gently down almost to the lagoon surface before curving upwards and into a sensuous jazzy dance across the top of an imaginary vertical dance floor, rolling and slinking and flirting, joyous and tempting, then suddenly diving in a death-wish straight down to the sand, jerking out of it at the last moment and dancing lazily over the lagoon like a dragonfly skitting and buzzing on a summer’s day, playing with light and air, then another long slow climb upwards, nosing this way and that, testing the limits of the upper air before performing long slow arabesques across the top of the sky. It went on and on, intricate and patterned, an airy ballet in the sky.

Feel the contrast in rhythm with the following relatively short, sharp sentences later in the same memoir. On the shelf over his bed there was a photograph of Dina, her dark eyes sparkling. I sat down on the bed and looked up at it. Theo ignored my gaze.

‘Your mum,’ I said.

‘Yeah.’

‘She was beautiful.’

‘Yeah.’

I looked at him but he was busy pulling the axle out of a plastic wheel. I looked down at the flowery boots. There was a white smudge on the toe where the flowers had rubbed off.

‘These were your mum’s.’

Theo looked at the boots briefly and then went on with the axle operation.

‘Thought they looked stupid,’ he said.

Writing for the senses is not an invitation to excess. It is about creating a convincing world on the page, be it the richly detailed world of a Breughel painting or a spare haiku by the Japanese poet, Basho. In either case there is the desire to convey one’s own perceptions of the world. It might be that rich, lush writing suits some writers, but it can be just as valuable to write in an economic, understated style. To a twenty-first century consciousness, too many details can feel heavy, overdone, or simply outdated. You probably don’t want your memoir to sound as if it were written in the nineteenth century — unless, of course, you are consciously creating a post-modern reference to nineteenth century literature by using that style.

Still, if you feel your writing is becoming too dry and overly analytical, or if you simply want to build the richness of sensory experience into your writing, try rebuilding the connection between the senses and words.

• Return to the ‘original’ memory where the details are fresh rather than analysed ‘stored’ memory. Look for ‘madeleines’ in your own life. (More on this back in chapter 3,‘The Importance of Madeleines’.)

• Include all the senses, not just sight. Many writers over rely on sight. Remember the smell, taste, feel and sound of your life.

• Remember colour and texture. Crimson, cream, cobalt; sooty, scratchy, hairy.

• Be accurate about the detail — was it azure or cobalt?

Were the leaves serrated or smooth? It is not that you must include every detail — the writing would soon be weighted like someone wearing too much jewellery — but make sure the details are precise.

• Use more sensual rather than abstract words:‘She wore a cream silk blouse and black Chinese trousers’ instead of ‘She was dressed elegantly’. It helps the reader ‘see’ it in their mind rather than merely constructing an idea without colour or form.

• Find the particular names of things rather than using general terms; for example, instead of ‘a bird flew out of the bush’, look more closely, even check in a reference book and write, perhaps, ‘a thrush flew out of the japonica’.

• Remember not to overdo it. Too many adjectives and adverbs look like clutter. One effective word can clarify more than a whole row of descriptive adjectives or modifying adverbs. As the American writers Strunk and White said,‘It is seldom necessary to say all.’

• On the other hand, if luscious excess is your preference, do it in style! Taking it to an extreme might be just what is needed. Not all writers need to be restrained and elegant!

• Replace a word of Latin origin with an Anglo-Saxon one. If you are unsure of the difference but suspect your writing may be overly academic or detached, check the origins of some of your characteristic words in a dictionary. Words of Latin origin tend to be more rarified, more academic and cool; Anglo-Saxon words tend to feel more ‘earthy’ and direct, even for abstract concepts. Try ‘truth’ instead of ‘veracity’,‘happen’ instead of ‘eventuate’.

• Read some poetry. Find Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood and luxuriate in the original imagery and rhythmic delights. Read it out loud. Go back to your own writing with a mind and body buzzing with the richness of the sounds and rhythms of language.

And what about that ‘sixth sense’, love? Perhaps the tapestry-makers were suggesting that love uses all the senses, rather than it being a sense of its own. Certainly love heightens awareness. Or is it that paying ‘right attention’ heightens love and compassion? This is, perhaps, venturing too far, making too great a claim for the practice of writing, but it could be that the more accurately and truthfully you try to write your experience of existing, the more your heart opens to the mystery of being in the world.

Many years ago, a friend at art school who was gifted with an extraordinary natural drawing ability said she distrusted ‘the lovely line’ which she could make easily and impressively. I didn’t know what she meant at the time and wondered why she criticised her own ability,but I can see now she meant that such a line is only decorative, that it did not convey any truth. She simply had the ability to make it ‘look good’.When you have a facility with writing, it can be easy to write ‘the lovely line’, to write to impress. The desire to write with beauty can easily be confused with the desire to impress. If you are really ruthless, you will take out every ‘lovely line’.How do you tell which ones they are? Look for a certain smoothness, a prideful ease; the sleek swan gliding effortlessly on the still waters of your mind.

Writing for the senses is not decoration, not a pretty painting you hang on the wall to match your carpet. If it is, throw it out. If it is padding to make the writing look or feel more substantial, throw it out. And if it is to make your writing sound more impressive or clever, throw it out. Writing for the senses is not about showing how elegant you look clothed in such fine words.

Writing for the senses is the flesh and the muscle of your writing, as essential as your own flesh and muscle. Every word you write must be necessary. Each one must be there to help construct the illusion of a world on the page. If you are using the senses to create a character, keep it. If you are building mood or atmosphere, keep it. If you are furthering the narrative or exploring an idea, keep it.

Writing for the senses is to acknowledge and celebrate and expose the marvel — or the horror — of anything existing, of letting the ordinary white bowl on the pine table glow with its own reality. Writing for the senses is part of three-dimensional writing, writing which gives the illusion of life-likeness and, at the same time, honours the mystery of existence.

Back to tapestry

To make a textured and life-like ‘tapestry’, it is worth returning to EM Forster’s perennial advice,‘Show, don’t tell’. Forster was a novelist, but memoir writers need to create a convincing reality on the page just as much as novelists do. In fact, from a writer’s point of view, it doesn’t really matter if the reality you are creating is a representation of an actual or imagined world, you still need the reader to believe in it.

Memoir writers often succumb to the pleasure of simply telling their story. In this sense ‘telling’ means recounting and interpreting events as a historian might: for example, My father was an authoritative man. It is a useful way of keeping control of the material and moving the story along and it can be vivid and evocative. At the same time, it only lets one voice be heard, the voice of the teller, and it can result in over-control of the material, over-analysis, and flatness of texture. When this happens, you, as narrator, need to step off stage and let the actors on — you need to ‘show’ what is happening.

‘Show’ in this context means creating scenes with a setting, action and dialogue. In a sense, you become more like a playwright, creating the smell and feel and look of the place and characters, letting the reader ‘hear’ what the people in your life have said, and letting them ‘see’ what they did. Shadowy verandah, tall striding man.‘Come here this minute, lad.’ It creates a sense of a three-dimensional world, one that the reader can inhabit — and importantly, it lets readers interpret the scene for themselves, just as they do in life. He must be in a hurry, or angry. Let’s see what he does next.

Showing a scene makes the experience more believable than if you ‘tell’ about it because the reader can ‘see it with their own eyes’. Stating what you consider to be a truth outright is no guarantee it will be considered convincing. The more times you ‘tell’ it, the less convincing it can become. In one class, a woman repeated many times in a piece of writing how wonderful her husband was and how much she had loved him. The more she stated it, the less convinced I was. I told her she needed to ‘show’ me her husband so that I believed that she saw him as wonderful. She went away and came back with a piece about her husband’s hands as he played the piano. Then I believed her.

In real life, all you get is what people say and do. There is no tape running along the bottom of life interpreting what is going on. You interpret, you ‘read’ life all the time. It can actually weaken the impact of an experience to have it interpreted on the page. Let your story speak for itself. Let your readers ‘read’ your life, rather than telling them what to think and how to feel all the time.

Of course, you might not remember exactly what people said and did. You have a responsibility to the truth as you perceive it, particularly where other people are concerned, but you were not standing there taking notes on your life so you do not have an accurate record. On the other hand, you are not in a court of law when you write a memoir. Remembering the gist of a conversation is enough to re-create it on the page. If you feel uncomfortable ‘making up’ the conversation, you can always state that this is simply the way you remember it, not the definitive record.

Forster’s advice doesn’t mean you ‘show’ everything. It would take too long and become dull anyway. ‘Showing’ is like a close-up in a film — it gives significance, it reveals something we are meant to pay attention to. Boots on steps. Creaking boards on the verandah. It’s not so much that you intellectually choose to ‘show’ one scene and ‘tell’ another, rather you sense that a particular event in your life would be more engaging, vivid, powerful, if the reader could ‘see’ and ‘hear’ it directly, rather than have it recounted as if by a reporter who was there at the time.

Both ways of writing are part of the tapestry. Telling is useful for the overview and for moving across and through time; showing is useful for revealing the moment. Some writers can get away with using just one or the other — Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes is almost all ‘showing’, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory is almost all ‘telling’.They are both successful autobiographies. For most writers, a rhythmic to-and-fro between the two is probably the most effective way of exploring and revealing their experience.

Stitch your tapestry with attention to detail. Even the background is important. Remember colour, shape, movement. Wire screen door flying wildly, banging shut. Puppy’s claws skittering on the hall linoleum.

READING

Drink Me

by Skye Rogers

I feel as though I know him. This tall, gentle man seems familiar to me — cut, somehow, from the same cloth. My hands regard the slimness of him — slim to the point of fragility. Daniel’s muscles are as though chiselled from bone or rock; they are narrow but strong and firm, unyielding. They betray his softness, his yieldingness, the tenderness of those great, padded hands that look like they’ve been stitched and quilted with satin. He runs them over the length and breadth of me, quite as though I am being discovered for the very first time. I feel every curve and sway and bump as he feels them, the beautiful, powerful land of my body under his hands. I am amazed at how beautiful I feel, how he has made me beautiful. Oh dear, I think, I am in deep already.

In the morning, his long back to me, I note the fragility of Dan’s skin on his lower back: it is glowing white, like alabaster, bloodless, the skin of a statue. The breadth of his upper back, his shoulders, though, unlike a statue’s, are a page of discolourings: freckles as full stops, moles like question marks, a punctuation of birthmarks. Silently I play join-the-dots until my new friend stirs.

‘Shhh, don’t wake,’ I say.‘Keep sleeping.’

‘But I might miss something,’ he says, turning over to nudge me under his arm again. I feel my toes make contact with his calves and wonder, momentarily, what it must be like to be so tall, to view the world always from so far above.‘Can’t sleep if I’m going to miss anything.’

I smile. Attempting to be funny with a crushing hangover. Now there’s a lark.

Daniel’s height, the dark, our drunkenness, mean I haven’t really seen his eyes.

Still, there will be time to look later.

Instead, I ‘see’ Daniel, look at and study him, the way I always do with things unfamiliar — I draw and draw until I get him down, give life to his features with my pastels on black paper, my pen and inks on board …

… The image floats into my mind: Dan reading the paper in his sunny little sitting room — he’d moved some months before into his own place, not far from his parents — trying to placate his worried dad, knowing exactly how to go about it. And then I am visited by the startling vision of him sitting bolt upright by his bed, neat and dead, some hours later. For a moment I think, typical Dan, sitting up so as not to ‘miss anything’. I remember all those times I looked in on him in his room, to find him sitting awkwardly with his back up against an array of junk, claiming he was ‘cosy as can be’. I can only hope he was cosy.

‘God bless you, Mary. God bless you.’ I have never said those words before in my life. And then,‘Will there be a funeral?’

A silly question, but it is the kind of moment in which they bloom.

‘Well, yes …’ A slight pause, no mention of when.

‘May I come to the funeral?’

Another thing I hadn’t meant to ask. It just came out. I hadn’t ‘stayed strong’ after all. I hadn’t been willing or able to go down with the sinking ship. Perhaps I was not welcome? I had an innate respect for Mary and Glen in that they had been Dan’s parents forever. I was his partner for seven years. Their grief differed from mine, always. Did we love the same man? I wondered. Yes and no. We’d grieve for our own versions of him.

‘We’ll let you know.We’ll probably have something private …’

After hanging up the phone, I crouch to the ground and make a noise so animal that I frighten the dog, that poor beast who is always the first witness to my pain.

The facts simply have to be digested, taken at face value. He is dead. Dan is dead.

Slap, slap, slap. This, another of those days whose reverberating shock renders everything I think I know different, other worldly. I feel tricked, betrayed by the sun still shining in through the windows as though nothing has happened, as though this event isn’t even a blip on the universe’s radar.

I ring my father who, devastated, has to pull himself together to go back on air in a few minutes. Somehow he gets hold of my mother in those minutes, who comes around straight away, holding me in a mother’s embrace for a long, long time.‘What a tragedy,’ she says, her eyes brimming with tears. There but for the grace of God, etc. I cannot cry. Shock has stolen all my tears.

The airy house feels claustrophobic, so we go for a walk. The sky is too blue, too harsh, any noise an assault. Birds, crisp as ironed handkerchiefs, are fluttering across the sky — handkerchiefs, handkerchiefs everywhere. My senses are a giddy muddle of being shut down and awakened all at once. I am rubbed raw with stimuli, bombarded by life’s insistence on continuing its cacophony all around me.

Every inch of this neighbourhood seems to hold a memory of Dan: his friend Gaz in the corner house, DB’s ‘party house’, the park where Rose would annoy him by jumping on his back and the dog would annoy him by being the dog, the pub … The pub I know I won’t be able to look at for some time to come. We walk past it with eyes lowered as though this were all its fault, its hops-sweet smell turning my stomach sour.

My mother snaps off a bough of frangipani from a neighbour’s front yard — though she doesn’t know it, it is the yard of yet another mate from the pub. ‘We’ll plant this for him,’ she says.

We wander the streets aimlessly, the milky sap from the branch leaving a trail behind us like thick, white blood.

In these passages, Skye Rogers reveals that death, too, is experienced through the senses, just as love is. In love or sexual attraction, the senses are intensely awake; in the devastation of loss, our senses are assaulted by ordinary life continuing. Read Drink Me for its honest exploration of a relationship in which both Rogers and her partner are battling for a life together, and for the way the pain and the pleasure of their world is evoked through writing the detail of sensory experience.

WRITING EXERCISES

These exercises are more for stimulation and enrichment than for including in your memoir. They are more like a homeopathic dose of Word Essence to stir up your writing self.

1. Senses and emotion

Select an incident in which you experienced strong emotion. Convey the experience without naming it and without using abstract words — no ‘grief ’,‘love’,‘anger’,‘pity’,‘joy’! Evoke the experience through the senses and through ‘showing’— action, dialogue and scene. This is an exercise in disciplined writing; it doesn’t mean you leave out abstract words forever after. It is a revelation, though, to see how much a good, hardworking, non-intellectual word can do. (20 minutes)

2. Cross-fertilising

This is for writers who feel their writing is becoming flat and predictable. Find a CD or interactive encyclopaedia which demonstrates the sound of various musical instruments. Listen to, for example, the sounds of the flute, piano, cello, triangle, oboe. For each one, try to write its colour, texture and taste. Are flute notes pale blue or lime green? Does the sound of an oboe ‘feel’ like velvet or ‘taste’ like warm chocolate? Simply write a list of associations that come to mind as you listen.(20 minutes)

3. Emotion

Imagine a series of emotions. This means not just thinking about the emotion, but actually feeling it — you will need to think of a specific memory to bring the emotion back — so it can be an exhausting exercise. As you induce each emotion, observe and write down the bodily sensation you experience and any images that come to mind. Recall, for example, confusion, jealousy, anger, joy. It is probably best to end with a positive emotion if you don’t want to be left with tight shoulders! (5 minutes on each emotion)

4. Novelty

Go somewhere or do something you have never done before. It can be as easy as going to a different part of town and sitting in a new café or listening to a new musician in a pub or eating a new food at a multicultural fair. Note and write the experience from each one of your senses.

5. Action

Make a list of movements — a cat stalking, a leaf blowing, a woman striding, a mouth yawning. Try at least five of the movements, immersing yourself in the sensations. Spend five minutes, for example, as a stalking cat. (It’s probably best done when no one is watching.) Note and write the bodily sensations and the images of movement that come to mind. (5 minutes on each action)

6. Poets know

Read a poem by a twentieth century poet — your choice of poet, but the poem must be about a person, place, thing or emotion, rather than an intellectual or political idea. Read it slowly, three times. Pick the three words that are most evocative to you. Write three short pieces using each word as a springboard for your own memories. (5 minutes on each word)

7. Remembered senses again

Try this exercise from chapter 3 once more. It is a memory exercise but is just as useful in writing for the senses. Write a list of sensory experiences — of smells, tastes, sounds, touches and sights. The list must be very precise — don’t write the smell of roses, but the smell of the red rose just inside my grandmother’s front gate. Don’t write the sound of rock music, but the sound of Pearl Jam coming from my teenage son’s bedroom. Then select one of the sense memories, concentrate on it and try to find the words to evoke the whole sense experience. (20 minutes)