The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [97]
LY: You know Faulkner said, “Given the choice between grief and nothing, I choose grief.” The same quote has been attributed to him about pain.
I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience-bring words close to the body-as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry.
Poetic language - and by that I mean the language of image, sound, rhythm, color, sensation-is probably the closest we bring language to experience - poetic language takes you to the edge of sense and deep into sensation. So after I name my primal grief, the death of my daughter the day she was born, it felt precise to move directly to poetic language. The metaphor of collecting rocks is more “true” to me to the experience of grieving than to say, I was intolerably sad. It feels precise to draw that metaphor of collecting rocks out, to extend it as long as possible, to let the reader feel the space of grief in the house the way I did. It’s my hope that at least one person will find resonance in that extended language space.
I want you to hear how it feels to be me inside a sentence. Even if some of the sentences seem to lose their meaning. I want the rhythm, the image, the cry to remain with your body. You could probably go through this book and literally chart the moments of emotional intensity by watching where the language - to quote Dickinson-goes strange.
You have published both fiction and nonfiction. Can you talk about your experience with both genres as well as the role memory plays?
While I was writing this book, many things occurred to me about both memory and about the relationship between fiction and non-fiction.
About memory, after my father drowned and lost his wits - specifically his short-term and a good bit of his long-term memory, I became rather obsessively interested in how memory works at the level of neuroscience and biochemistry. I was trying to deal with the fact that the things he’d done had been “erased” from experience. Part of me didn’t believe it-I’d look at him and think, is the dark side of him still in there? Tucked deeply behind the gray matter?
Turns out, according to neuroscience, the more you actively “remember” something, the more the headstory you carry around changes. Every time you recall something, you modify it a little bit and that’s because brains-this is very cool - brains work through a mixture of images, pictures, feelings, words, facts, and fiction-all “recollected.” Eventually you are not remembering what happened at all, but your story or head movie about it. The safest memories are probably those embedded in the brains of people who have lost the ability to retrieve them.
In writing, every narrative and linguistic choice you make forecloses others, directs the story a certain way, focuses on a particular image, extends a metaphor that on another day, you might have chosen very differently. Form has everything to do with content in this sense. So what is “true” in non-fiction writing is also always “crafted” - given shape and composition and emotional intensity-through our narrative choices as writers. And that’s in addition to the science of memory. So the true story is always a fiction. This is why I have come to believe that non-fiction and fiction are as inextricably linked as memory and imagination - which, as it turns out, also use the same brain circuits when they are active.
So much of memory is recollecting pieces. And that’s what writing is - drawing from language to recollect and shape pieces of things. I am absolutely more able to