CHAPTER 4

Writing Workshop

The conscious mind always wants to be liked and wants to be interesting. The conscious mind is going to suggest the obvious, the cliche, because these things offer the security of having succeeded in the past. Only the mind that has been taken off itself and put on a task is allowed true creativity.

—David Mamet

 

 

In his much-cited Letter of Lord Chandos, the fin de siecle Viennese poet Hugo Von Hofmannsthal describes the despair of a writer who has become so disenchanted with language that he can no longer write. In the winter of 2009, something akin to Von Hofmannsthal's “inexplicable condition” afflicted me. At first I suspected that my inability to write stemmed from a disenchantment with language that had been deepening for many years—a doubt that words could ever capture or convey a sense of the life one lived or the world one lived in but only gesture pathetically and longingly toward experiences that remained forever beyond one's grasp. Most writers are all too familiar with the sense of disillusionment and disgust that overwhelms them when they return to passages that they believed to have captured the vitality of an event, only to find no trace of what had been so vividly in mind during the act of writing. Some, like T. S. Eliot, have likened the poet's “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings” to the existential plight of humanity, waiting for God to reveal Himself, to illuminate the “dark cold and the empty desolation” of life on earth. The fictitious Lord Chandos, whose “inner stagnation” imposed on him “a life of barely believable vacuity,” admits to being able to keep his despair from his wife and servants, going about his business as if nothing untoward had occurred, “rebuilding a wing of his house and conversing occasionally with the architect.”

I was not sure how long I could pretend that I had not lost my way in Dante's selva oscura. Rescue came in the form of an e-mail from two Irish anthropologists, inviting me to lead an ethnographic writing workshop in County Wicklow that spring. Rather than confide to Keith and Fiona my current difficulties, I accepted their invitation in the hope that my inability to resolve my own quandary would not prevent me from offering useful advice to others. Certainly I had more to gain by travelling to a country where I had never set foot than sitting at my desk, staring at an empty screen or out the window, waiting for my ice-bound creativity to thaw. Even if my crisis continued, I might stumble on some other form of self-expression and even reinvent myself in the process.

I was lodged in a thatched cottage that adjoined a cemetery and a ruined chapel. Though picturesque from the outside, with its whitewashed walls and wooden doors, the cottage was dank and musty, with cold flagstones underfoot. After depositing my rucksack in a room under the rafters, I set off for the commune at Sli na Bande where our workshops would take place. There was a cool wind blowing, with snatches of sunlight between banks of cumulus cloud, and as I trudged up the narrow road, I felt sudden relief at having escaped the university office where I had sat deadlocked and uninspired for so many months. The flowering gorse had a coconut scent. Or was it better described as biscuity? The roadside was a tangle of nettle, sorrel, brambles, and buttercup. A missel thrush whistled in a hedgerow. And when I looked east across the indelibly green landscape, the Irish Sea was visible as a slate-gray slab under the suddenly cloudless sky.

Over the next two days, I listened and responded to a series of research papers on topics that were as diverse as they were arresting—the lives of sex workers in Dublin, children's games in Northern Ireland that bore traces of “the Troubles,” the struggles of classically trained musicians to find work in Athens, evocations of deceased loved ones through touching their photographs or objects and clothing that preserved their memories, stories of pilgrims climbing Croagh Patrick in County Mayo, the preoccupations of people in the Shankill and Falls Road areas of Belfast, the vexed situation of an ethnic minority on the Sino-Burmese frontier, the “archives of sorrow” in Australia, in which the stories of the stolen generation are stored. How trivial my own impasse seemed by comparison with those described with such sensitivity, in such detail, and in such searching ways by these students—determined to do justice to their interlocutors, constrained by academic protocols, yet hoping to communicate their findings to audiences beyond the academy and in some small way ameliorate the lives of others.

That night I woke from a dream that recalled a disconcerting moment in the life of Andres Segovia. Toward the end of a recital in Berlin, Segovia's guitar developed a crack, and he was forced to abandon the stage. A few weeks later, Segovia learned that a friend, who had made the guitar, had died in Madrid at the precise moment that the instrument split and became unplayable. Worried that my dream signalled an oblique connection between my inability to write and some remote disaster of which I was as yet unaware, I crawled out from under the heavy duvet and in pitch darkness felt my way to the hole in the loft floor where a short flight of wooden steps led down to the kitchen. One had to stand on the third step in order to reach the light switch. However, the 40-watt bulb that hung unshaded from the rafters gave insufficient light to read by, and so I blindly made my way back to bed where my thoughts turned to Glenn Kurtz's book, Practicing, which I had read some weeks before. A child prodigy who took his first guitar lessons at the age of eight, appeared on national television backing Dizzy Gillespie, and was accepted into the elite New England Conservatory of Music, Kurtz had his heart set on becoming the next Segovia. But after suffering a crisis of confidence at the age of twenty-five, he gave up the instrument that he describes in the language one might use of an unrequited love. “Only a very few loves can disappoint you so fundamentally that you feel you've lost yourself when they're gone. Quitting music wounded me as deeply as any relationship in my life. It was my first great loss, this innocent, awkward failure to live with what I heard and felt.”¹ Kurtz avoided music for more than ten years, lost touch with friends from his Conservatory days, and worked in a publishing house in New York City before migrating to California, “land of the reinvented self.” Throughout these years he struggled with the pain of losing the skills and sensibilities he had worked so hard to develop, finding little compensation in his new employment. Then, on a cold March day, after sorting through some old notebooks and journals that his parents had shipped to him in San Francisco, Kurtz remembered the passion he had once felt for music. Taking his guitar from his closet, he opened his music books, “like a long-lost cache of love letters,”² and began to play. His return to music was not easy. Periods of regret and humiliating incompetence were punctuated with minor breakthroughs as he recovered techniques that lay “concealed in his hands.”³ No longer did he hope to build the fabulous career he had once mapped out for himself in his imagination, but perhaps he could again enjoy practicing the music of which he and his guitar were capable, carried away by the sense of an instrument perfectly in tune, its strings and body resonating in sympathetic vibration, player and guitar becoming one. This sympathetic vibration, Kurtz writes, “reaches across centuries and languages, binding us together like with like.”⁴ And there his memoir ends, with the last lines of “Weeping Willow Blues” still ringing in one's ears.

The following afternoon we piled into several cars for an excursion to Glendalough, the site of an early medieval monastic settlement whose founder, Saint Coemgen (Saint Kevin), spent seven years as a hermit in a nearby cave, living on wild herbs and fish brought to him by the otters in the lake. Legend has it that a local farmer became curious as to why his cow began producing copious amounts of milk, and he followed the animal to Kevin's retreat, where he watched as it licked the anchorite's feet and clothing as he knelt in prayer. Converted to Kevin's Christian faith, the farmer then persuaded the hermit to return to society and spread the Gospel.

Keith told me that Glendalough flourished for several centuries. People came from far and wide to consult the monk, who possessed oracular powers and could perform miracles. If a penitent travelled seven times to the Glen of Two Lakes, this journey would be considered the equivalent of a pilgrimage to Rome.

Keith went on to tell me about his own journey to Santiago de Compostela in Galacia, northern Spain, where the bones of St. James are thought to be interred. Along this medieval pilgrimage route, Keith got to know individuals from as many walks of life as the sorrows they carried in their hearts. While some sought closeness to God, others saw the pilgrimage as a pretext for a vacation, while others hoped for some alleviation of personal suffering. One man had been walking parts of the road for several years, grief-stricken over the death of his beloved daughter. A young woman had chosen the Camino as a way of overcoming the numbness and immobility that had oppressed her since her father's death. An elderly Norwegian couple joyfully drank their way through each day, marking “their third and final Camino, and the reality that they would not be able to walk it again.”⁵ An American man in his forties, whom Keith got to know particularly well, confessed to feelings of failure, unfinished business, and aimlessness. The Camino, Keith said, offered all these people a way of leaving themselves behind. Through the rhythms and routines of the pilgrimage they hoped to experience themselves anew. As for Keith, he was not only seeking an anthropological understanding of pilgrimage, he was searching for new insights into his fluctuating relationship with the Roman Catholic Church.

I was so affected by Keith's account of these pilgrims, and his allusions to how deeply our biographies are embedded in whatever work we do, even as ethnographers, that when we reached Glendalough I wandered off on my own, scarcely aware of the wooded glacial valley that now held me in its hands, or the oaks, holly, hazel, and mountain ash that encroached on the ruined settlement. Only gradually did I take in the reconstruction that had begun there in the late nineteenth century, including the priest's house, the cathedral, four churches, and the six-storey granite and slate tower where, according to Keith, relics and treasures were stored for pilgrims to venerate.

It was not until much later that day that I realized the common thread that connected the seminar papers I had heard that morning, the anecdotes Keith had shared with me on the road to Glendalough, the restoration of the old monastic city, destroyed by the English in 1398, and W. B. Yeats's preoccupation with towers, including the round tower at Glendalough that conjured, for him, images of “winding, gyring, spiring”⁶ stairs that led in one direction to ancestral figures and in the other to close friends like Major Robert Gregory, killed on the western front in 1918, his artistic promise unfulfilled. Given the losses we sustain in life, how on earth do we begin again? One can readily understand the traveller who seeks to “walk out of a depression,”⁷ and the perennial hope that when stuck, blocked, or stagnating we can get back on our feet and walk out into the world again, recovering our lives.

Much later I tracked down a dimly remembered poem by Yeats and discovered that his thoughts at Glendalough had also turned to the possibility of redemption. Speaking of “some stupid thing that he had done that made his attention stray,”⁸ Yeats questions the temerity of even thinking that one can change one's ways and be born anew. No doubt Yeats was thinking of Saint Kevin as he wrote these lines, not only the life-transforming miracles attributed to the Irish saint, but his harmonious relationship with all wild things. It is said, for example, that as a seven-year-old child, sent by his wellheeled Irish parents to St. Petroc's Monastery in Cornwall, Kevin was kneeling in prayer on the first day of Lent when a blackbird alighted on his upturned hand and commenced to build its nest there. In return for this secure nesting place, the blackbird fed the boy berries and nuts. Like Seamus Heaney, who has written of this episode, I was amused by the irony that, having offered his hand as a sanctuary for the blackbird and “finding himself linked into the network of eternal life,”⁹ the devoted boy had to remain in physical agony until the fledglings had hatched and flown. So it is that we wait for a resolution to our difficulties, the reconciliation of our competing desires, and an amelioration of our pains. If the anecdote of the blackbird calls to mind the dark night of the soul in which the believer waits for God to appear, or appear again, then it also speaks to more secular hopes, such as a break in the weather, a broken relationship repaired, a change in one's fortunes, an error forgiven, the recovery of something lost. And I wondered if my resistance to the idea of perfection, either artistic or moral, as well as my repudiation of certainty as an attainable intellectual goal, was simply another way of walking the Camino.

One of the students who had made a presentation that morning was suffering from what she called writer's block. She needed what she variously called a framework, an overview, a coherent map, before she could write. I suggested she set aside these abstract considerations and focus on a specific event or particular observation, allowing her mind to become deeply absorbed in a detailed description of something very concrete. Gradually, I said, an interpretation of this episode will dawn on you, and connections will be revealed with other episodes that at first sight seemed unrelated. In this way your thesis will emerge like a seedling from the black loam of empirical particulars.

By the time we got back to Sli na Bande that evening, I was wondering whether I might well take the advice I had given my student and whether I had somehow lost the Zen technique for writing that I had developed in my early thirties, allowing it, the writing, to eclipse myself, the writer, whose thoughts, anxieties, and expectations could only be obstacles in my path. My routine was to write for two or three hours each morning before the distractions of the day intruded. Even if I had more time, I would not use it, for I had always had a strong sense of having a finite amount of writing to do each day and that this quantum had been prepared overnight in my unconscious. As soon as I had exhausted this small fund of events, ideas, and images, I would give myself over to e-mails, lecture writing, student consultations, committee meetings, and the other matters that make up the everyday life of an academic. But by late afternoon I was always home or walking in the woods, resting my mind, allowing it to fill again with what would become my next few pages of prose narrative. That walking loosens the mind, opening it up to the possibility of unbidden and illuminating thoughts, is a mystery that many authors have remarked on, and there were echoes of this refrain in Keith's reflections on pilgrimage. For it is when the physical rhythms of walking occlude the workings of the discursive mind that new understandings tend to arise. Yet how difficult many of us find this yielding to the road, giving up the desire to comprehend our condition or search for God, even though we know that such resignation is a precondition for the very transformations we crave. As Thoreau observed, in suggesting the need to let things lie fallow, “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”¹⁰

The following morning we met for a final workshop in which Keith and Fiona led a discussion about Irish anthropology. Several participants expressed a concern that a country that had endured six hundred years of occupation and won its independence at the cost of so many lives should not nurture a colonial form of anthropology that exploited the cultural knowledge of ordinary people for academic ends. How could one move from an anthropology done to us to an anthropology done by us? How could ethnographers keep faith with those who opened their hearts and homes to them? How best could that debt of hospitality be repaid? Within minutes, the case of “The Yank in the Corner” was raised, and students recalled local reactions to the American ethnographer Nancy Scheper-Hughes who did fieldwork in a village on the Dingle Peninsular, County Kerry, in 1974–1975. To the criticism that she, an interloper, had not consulted local people before publishing intimate details of their lives, Scheper-Hughes countered that she had divulged no “personal” secrets and had written only of what was common knowledge: “the depressions and drinking associated with the lonely winter months, the difficulty of keeping an heir on the land, the old people sent off to die in institutions, and the distance and alienation between the sexes.”¹¹

There was, the locals admitted, “a lot of truth in what she said, you can't deny that. But did she have the right to say it, so?”¹² And people spoke of the shame they felt, their lifeworld intruded upon, “bits and pieces” of themselves severed and strewn about with no consideration of the consequences.

I saw no point in taking sides. As Joan Didion observed, “writers are always selling someone out.”¹³ But it was clear why a people whose history had given them every reason to be wary of outsiders, and whose isolation had only increased their sense of vulnerability, should see the preoccupations of this anthropologist as both alien and condescending. Admitting her “brashness,” Scheper-Hughes asserts that “anthropology is by nature intrusive, entailing a certain amount of symbolic and interpretive violence to the ‘native’ peoples' own intuitive, though still partial, understanding of their part of the world.”¹⁴ But does this entitle us to ride roughshod over the interests and wishes of others, even though they might seem misguided and self-defeating? Rather than persuade others that our values and worldviews might be advantageous for them to adopt, we would do well to find ways of expressing solidarity with others, despite the differences between us. Surely forging a bond with others is more valuable than possessing knowledge of them. Scheper-Hughes shows sympathy and gratitude to those who offered her and her young family hospitality in “Ballybran,” but she is not prepared to place her way of seeing them on a par with their way of seeing themselves, or for that matter of seeing her. “You wrote a book to please yourself at our expense,” one man tells her when she comes back to Ballybran twenty years after the publication of her book. “You ran us down, girl, you ran us down. You never wrote about our strengths. You never said what a beautiful and a safe place our village is. You said nothing about our fine musicians and poets, and our step dancers who move through the air with the grace of a silk thread. You wrote about our troubles, all right, but not about our strengths. Look, girl, the fact is that ya just didn't give us credit.”¹⁵ In the closing pages of the 2000 edition of her book, Scheper-Hughes attempts to address the complaints and make amends. But like so many anthropologists, she needs to have the last word, to privilege her voice over the voices raised against her. “In the end perhaps we deserve each other—well matched and well met, tougher than nails, both of us. Proud and stubborn, too. Unrepentant meets Unforgiving. And in a way villagers were right to say, ‘We don't believe you are really sorry.’ For in their view this would mean nothing less than a renunciation of self and my vexed profession, a move I could not make.”

I have far fewer qualms about renouncing myself and my profession, particularly if it comes to a showdown between the jargon of the human sciences and the idioms of those we subject to our analytical gaze. For me, what matters most are the ways in which the anthropological project can make possible and mediate forms of coexistence. These social considerations may so completely eclipse our ambition to interpret, explain, or change the lives of others that some anthropologists refrain from publishing the results of their research, not wanting to build a career on the knowledge acquired during fieldwork. Although I have experienced these doubts, they have been allayed by Kuranko friends who see my work as an affirmation of their worth and not a betrayal of their trust, and this has reinforced my resolve to find ways of writing ethnography that respects the Kantian imperative that one act in such a way that one always treats humanity, whether in one's own person or in the person of another, never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end.¹⁶

What then had stayed my hand? Brought my writing to a standstill?

On our last night together, we were sitting around the dinner table in the farmhouse, warming to one another's company, our tongues loosened by red wine, when someone suggested we take turns to recount an embarrassing anecdote from our fieldwork, a mistake or faux pas that had made us ashamed to be an anthropologist.

My story went back to 1970, when my wife and I were living in a town in northern Sierra Leone. Our daughter Heidi had been born at the beginning of the rains, and after many months of exhausting fieldwork in remote villages I was desperately in need of a break. One night, after closing the shutters and doors of our house, my wife and I fell to talking about Cambridge and the life we would return to when my work in West Africa was done. When we heard voices approaching the house, we stopped talking and waited for the inevitable knock on the door. It was my field assistant Noah and his wives. They had come to greet us. I shouted that we were in bed, hoping that Noah would take this to mean that we did not want to be disturbed. But among the Kuranko, as in many other societies, deafness is a metaphor for social insensitivity, if not madness, and so our visitors sat on the porch, talking softly and rapping on the door from time to time as if waiting for us to come to our senses and invite them in. Half an hour passed before they finally drifted off into the night. And though I apologized to Noah the next day, the shameful memory of my churlishness has never left me.

As we went on in this confessional vein, Marlene, our hostess, moved between the kitchen and dining room, bringing out bowls of homegrown vegetables, tofu burgers, and salads and clearing away our dirty plates. But she was also listening to our stories.

When a lull came in the conversation, Marlene announced that she too had a story. “I am not an anthropologist,” she said, “but I know what it is like to be an outsider, to invade another person's space and feel shame at one's insensitivity.” Marlene met her Irish husband, Douglas, when she was nineteen and backpacking through Ireland. They shared a dream of buying a piece of land and establishing an alternative community. Marlene would practice meditation and psychotherapy. They would generate power from wind and sun, grow organic vegetables, and achieve a sustainable lifestyle. When they first visited the property, however, they thought it gloomy and uninspiring. But they returned for a second look on a sunny day and decided to buy. That first year they suffered several mysterious setbacks: their vegetable crop was stolen, their car was gutted by fire, and the chalet they had built had its windows broken. One night Marlene witnessed a Victorian funeral cortege making its way across their land toward the ruined church and graveyard that lay on the side-fall of the hill. The coffin lay on a horse-drawn carriage. The men wore top hats. The women wore black veils. Marlene had been told that faeries once used this route; now she realized they still did. It had been the spirits of the place that had resisted Marlene and Douglas, reminding them that they were interlopers. Marlene arranged a ritual. Eight friends stood at the cardinal points as she addressed the genii loci, asking if they could live side by side in peace, the faerie path protected, and one part of the farm left uncultivated for their use. The “other crowd” did not trouble her again.

This would not be the last time I was made aware of the Celtic twilight, and of how history haunts and sometimes hounds the living, interfering with our efforts to create lives on our own terms in the here and now. In Dublin, for example, I stayed in a hotel opposite Kilmainham Gaol, now a museum, where the British imprisoned, court-martialled, and executed the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916, including James Connolly, whose ankle had been shattered by a bullet during the siege of the General Post Office. Connolly had to be strapped to a chair in order for the firing squad to accurately aim at his heart. During my rambles around the city in the company of Keith and Fiona, visiting the General Post Office on O'Connell Street, the house at 82 Merrion Square, where Yeats lived, or crossing the Liffey and recalling the figure of Anna Livia Plurabelle, I was mindful of the eternal recapitulations of time and history and the ways in which our stories are drawn into the same vortex, their leitmotifs combining and recombining in ceaseless repetitions and cycles—what is one's own entangled with what belongs to the wider realm of one another.