Reason #3 For the Recent and Alarming Contemplation of Elephants:
One of my favorite things that we did on a family trip to England (besides walking five feet ahead of everyone hoping that some dashing young British man with proper dentition would come and swoop me away for tea and crumpets) was to visit the ancient city of Bath (which my dad embarrassingly pronounced "B-ah-th" in spite of his being, you know, American.) It was all just so ancient and so Roman and it thrilled my little preteen soul to walk on those cobblestones and smell the sulphur and know that I was gawking at the very tiled seats where so many royal and imperial bums had sat and soaked. The other thing I loved was making rubbings of the old brass tomb plates. They were engraved in intricate detail and depicted the very royalty I wanted to marry into. (This was before the whole Diana Disillusionment.) So, for a few pence (which at the exchange rate then was probably about 65 American dollars) you got a giant piece of black paper and a gold crayon thingy and you could do a rubbing of the brass of your choice. It was so much fun to run the gold crayon across the paper and watch the picture appear in relief. (It was also a great way to take these beautiful brasses home without committing a crime against the Queen.)
I was thinking about this the other day after I read Masked Mom's post entitled "Can I Get That In Writing?" It's an incredibly thought-provoking post about the things that we choose to write, or actually the things that we choose not to write and what we learn about ourselves from examining that. It sparked a whole mess of comments that were also thought-provoking, one of which mentioned elephants and sent me dancing with the pachyderms again.
Jane In Her Infinite Wisdom said this: "These are the things I don't write about in the blog, things I can't help but remember, things I don't want to share...not because I don't want you all to know me but because I don't want to hurt those who've hurt me. They are my large elephants and I still struggle to maneuver around them without acknowledging they are there."
All of us have these elephants. What do we do with them? Do we dress them up as furniture and bark our shins on them in the dark? Do we dress them in a tutu and turn a spotlight on them and make them dance for a crowd? Do we cower under them and hope they don't shift their position and stomp on us? Do we feed them and let them grow huge and poop all over everything? I often try to answer very important questions with very silly mental images. And I guess that's sort of the point. We all have different ways of dealing with these elephants, some more effective at times than others.
I consistently find it the most difficult to write directly about the things that are most important to me. So I travel back to Bath. I grab my giant piece of black paper and my gold crayon and rub away. I take those elephants' pebbled hides and use them as my brass. I don't touch them directly, but I rub and rub and bring forth their texture, their shape, a piece of their enormity. And it brings relief. Almost everyone I've ever heard of who writes, does so out of a sort of compulsion. They've got to. Whether it's because they have a fantastic story to tell, or because it helps them sort things out, or because they like to entertain, it comes from a drive akin to hunger. It is a relief to write about things - whether fictional or not, whether it's scribbling away in your tear-soaked unicorn journal or a blog or (heaven forbid) writing a best-seller.
These elephants of ours give us vast resources upon which to draw when we write. I suppose there's a time and a place for stark revelation of the elephants themselves, but I know that even in my tear-soaked unicorn journal it is often more illuminating to write around the elephant, over the top of it and back again, giving it a once (or twice or thrice) over with my gold crayon. It's not ignoring its existence, it's drawing upon its existence. This gives me a chance to take it a piece at a time, to notice details I wouldn't have otherwise seen, to appreciate the texture and contours of different aspects of it. Is it likely that I will somehow forget how much I love my husband and monkeys if I don't write it down? Will I stop missing my dad if I don't use exactly those words? Will my maternal anxieties vanish if I don't address them directly? Probably not. But those are things that I can't write about directly; not well anyway. But I can tell a story about something the monkeys said, or my husband did. I can recall a fond memory of my dad. I can laugh about some minute anxiety (barf). All of those things will bring into relief the bigger picture and the more I do it, the clearer the picture becomes. The same is true of the uglier, darker, more hurtful elephants.
This is especially true of my public writing. It's a great way for you to take these beautiful elephants home without committing a crime against the Queen.
One of my favorite things that we did on a family trip to England (besides walking five feet ahead of everyone hoping that some dashing young British man with proper dentition would come and swoop me away for tea and crumpets) was to visit the ancient city of Bath (which my dad embarrassingly pronounced "B-ah-th" in spite of his being, you know, American.) It was all just so ancient and so Roman and it thrilled my little preteen soul to walk on those cobblestones and smell the sulphur and know that I was gawking at the very tiled seats where so many royal and imperial bums had sat and soaked. The other thing I loved was making rubbings of the old brass tomb plates. They were engraved in intricate detail and depicted the very royalty I wanted to marry into. (This was before the whole Diana Disillusionment.) So, for a few pence (which at the exchange rate then was probably about 65 American dollars) you got a giant piece of black paper and a gold crayon thingy and you could do a rubbing of the brass of your choice. It was so much fun to run the gold crayon across the paper and watch the picture appear in relief. (It was also a great way to take these beautiful brasses home without committing a crime against the Queen.)
I was thinking about this the other day after I read Masked Mom's post entitled "Can I Get That In Writing?" It's an incredibly thought-provoking post about the things that we choose to write, or actually the things that we choose not to write and what we learn about ourselves from examining that. It sparked a whole mess of comments that were also thought-provoking, one of which mentioned elephants and sent me dancing with the pachyderms again.
Jane In Her Infinite Wisdom said this: "These are the things I don't write about in the blog, things I can't help but remember, things I don't want to share...not because I don't want you all to know me but because I don't want to hurt those who've hurt me. They are my large elephants and I still struggle to maneuver around them without acknowledging they are there."
All of us have these elephants. What do we do with them? Do we dress them up as furniture and bark our shins on them in the dark? Do we dress them in a tutu and turn a spotlight on them and make them dance for a crowd? Do we cower under them and hope they don't shift their position and stomp on us? Do we feed them and let them grow huge and poop all over everything? I often try to answer very important questions with very silly mental images. And I guess that's sort of the point. We all have different ways of dealing with these elephants, some more effective at times than others.
I consistently find it the most difficult to write directly about the things that are most important to me. So I travel back to Bath. I grab my giant piece of black paper and my gold crayon and rub away. I take those elephants' pebbled hides and use them as my brass. I don't touch them directly, but I rub and rub and bring forth their texture, their shape, a piece of their enormity. And it brings relief. Almost everyone I've ever heard of who writes, does so out of a sort of compulsion. They've got to. Whether it's because they have a fantastic story to tell, or because it helps them sort things out, or because they like to entertain, it comes from a drive akin to hunger. It is a relief to write about things - whether fictional or not, whether it's scribbling away in your tear-soaked unicorn journal or a blog or (heaven forbid) writing a best-seller.
These elephants of ours give us vast resources upon which to draw when we write. I suppose there's a time and a place for stark revelation of the elephants themselves, but I know that even in my tear-soaked unicorn journal it is often more illuminating to write around the elephant, over the top of it and back again, giving it a once (or twice or thrice) over with my gold crayon. It's not ignoring its existence, it's drawing upon its existence. This gives me a chance to take it a piece at a time, to notice details I wouldn't have otherwise seen, to appreciate the texture and contours of different aspects of it. Is it likely that I will somehow forget how much I love my husband and monkeys if I don't write it down? Will I stop missing my dad if I don't use exactly those words? Will my maternal anxieties vanish if I don't address them directly? Probably not. But those are things that I can't write about directly; not well anyway. But I can tell a story about something the monkeys said, or my husband did. I can recall a fond memory of my dad. I can laugh about some minute anxiety (barf). All of those things will bring into relief the bigger picture and the more I do it, the clearer the picture becomes. The same is true of the uglier, darker, more hurtful elephants.
This is especially true of my public writing. It's a great way for you to take these beautiful elephants home without committing a crime against the Queen.
