Medifestos: Notes on Writing Memoirs

Frank Walters

January 4, 2012


Medifesto combines the words meditation and manifesto. Meditation is often defined as focused, private thought, usually associated with intense religious contemplation and a desire for enlightenment. Most westerners, especially Americans, think of Buddhism when they hear the word, though the earliest occurrences of the practice can be traced to ritual chants and offerings going back at least a thousand years before organized religion domesticated the practice and thereby ruined it. In the Catholic tradition, one objective of meditation is to come face-to-face with the true nature of one’s sinful self, the “dark night of the soul,” as Ignatius of Loyola so charmingly put it. A manifesto is a public declaration of principles, usually, though not always, of a political nature. The most famous, at least by name, is Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, though The Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (France, 1789) are equally as famous, if not more influential. The list also includes Mein Kampf, The Southern Manifesto (a diatribe against the Brown decision), The Port Huron Statement, and Ron Paul’s Revolution: A Manifesto. Definitely treacherous terrain to cross. What interests me is the fertile meeting ground of the two: the inward search for truth, where there are no restraints, and the outward expression of meaning, which is governed, like Plato’s Republic, by self-annointed philosopher-kings.


***

I propose not to write a memoir of my life, but memoirs of the lives I remember living. Why the plural? Don’t we just live the one life, an unbroken reality arc from birth to death, between which occur a finite number of events neatly lined up, like soldiers, one after another? Not if we have memories. Does this mean that the lives we recreate in writing, shaped by memories, are all invention and no facts? Not at all. We remember facts, but in remembering them we also reshape them, making them new and something other. We can’t help it. We invent our past every time we set it down in words. Yes, we write the facts as we remember them—we are obligated to do nothing less--accepting that our memories might get them wrong. But if we’re honest about this obligation we’ll do more: we’ll write truth, which is not bound by the facts and escapes mere quibbling over pointillist fidelity. Leave that for Oprah and Fox News. And if the truth contradicts the facts? I’ll stick with the truth every time. Facts are the alpha, truth is the omega, memories bind the two. Most of the time, facts are other people’s excuses for calling you a liar.


***

We are told to provide motives for our characters, including ourselves, but how many times do our readers know the motives for their own actions? They want to read about a stable, predictable, cause-and-effect universe, but actually living in such a universe would drive them insane. Suppose we want to show our readers that people often times do things without motives or with conflicting motives. We want to show them a universe where people can’t explain their actions, or won’t, or change the explanation at each telling: in other words, a world where all explanation beggars the reader’s credulity and experience. Indirection and undecidability reveal a more authentic, a more persuasive, a more truthful story than any plain recitation of cause and effect ever could.

On Christmas Eve in 1964, my father pulled out of his pocket two tickets to the NFL championship game, which would be played the coming Sunday in Cleveland, a few hours’ drive from our home in Pittsburgh. All that fall I had ushered the home games for the University of Pittsburgh, a job my father had gotten for me through a business contact. Every Sunday I would pore over the sports section like a Talmudic scholar, writing down the scores of every college game played the day before. On Mondays I filled out the contest forms for picking winners for the coming week’s games and mailed them in to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. I’m sure my father saw the trip as a chance to bond with his son over a common interest. He also wanted to see the game, which would feature stars like Jim Brown and Johnny Unitas. But the fact is I cared little for professional football. And my obsessive attention to college football was less an interest in the sport or games per se than a means of imagining worlds in far off places: Towson State v. Furman, New Mexico v. Colorado State, Maine v. the Coast Guard Academy, USC v. UCLA. On the day of the game we got up at six o’clock to attend seven o’clock Mass. The drive to Cleveland took about three hours. Our seats were in the top row of the upper deck of the old Lakefront Stadium, and for more than four hours we sat in the teeth of a fierce and icy wind coming off Lake Erie. By the end of the game my feet and hands and face were numb and I was shivering uncontrollably. On the walk back to the parking lot, inadequately bundled against the blue-steel twilight sky, my breath a helmet of fog, I secretly wished he would crash on the ice-slicked roads while driving to work the next morning. Memory, it’s been said, is a huntress that works best in the dark.



***

I once saw a man in tattered clothes sitting on the sidewalk outside a church on Vallejo Street in San Francisco, proclaiming strange gospels with the fervor of an evangelist. I bought him a sandwich and tried to engage him in conversation, but he would neither eat nor speak to me. Two days later I saw him sitting in a Starbucks on Market Street, drinking coffee and writing feverishly in a notebook. Now everything I imagine about him suddenly makes no sense whatsoever. And that makes him one of us and therefore fit for the page.


***

Sign on the door of a porn theater: Beyond This Point, You’re On Your Own.


***

Is America a safe place to be an essayist? No more than it is to be a witch. Consider this: one of the first European immigrants to arrive on the continent, John Winthrop—the one who proclaimed the New World to be the “city upon a hill”—believed that, at long last, God had brought his people home: the beleaguered, the persecuted faithful, after long trial and endurance, ostracism, death, dismemberment, humiliation, had been led to the gateway of the New Jerusalem, the true city upon the hill, the one and only Civitate Dei contra Paganos, threshold of the true and only Heaven, where God’s justice and man’s justice would finally merge into one, where nature, man’s especially, would be tamed into submission by divine law. The essayist would be forbidden to enter the realm and would be hunted down like the very devil himself if she so much as cast a shadow across its consecrated borders. In fact, you didn’t need to be an essayist to suffer that fate, just a woman whose behavior and words departed from the community norm. They were called witches. Let us therefore call essayists witches and witches essayists: bedazzlers both, conjurors, questioners and explorers of the canonical norms of belief and representation, norms whose purpose is to enforce silence and the rigid code of conformity. They are the true assayists in every sense of the word. Both, essayist and witch, seem not so much to be mirror images or flip sides of the same coin, but each other’s double, partner-creators of a shared vision, as sacred and welcoming in their realm as it is profane and unwelcome in all others.

American culture is still permeated by Winthrop’s vision, which by inclination is hostile to the essayist’s project. And we know what it meant, and still means, for witches. True, the vision has suffered somewhat by virtue of its association with modern-day ne’er-do-wells whose acts belie their words. Mark Sanford, the former Republican governor of South Carolina, a professed Christian, said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, when in reality he was dallying with his Argentinian mistress. OK, you say, just another typical, even touching, instance of one man’s depravity and hypocrisy, and Sanford can always curry favor with the unsexed Christianists of his realm by calling upon the tender mercies of a forgiving Christ, a call which, take note, he will have to make with words gathered from the fields of memories. But having bitten deep into the forbidden flesh, having confessed and humiliated himself before a drooling media and sanctimonious priesthood, to the essayist he will never be anything more than depressingly, lovingly, and recognizably human. On something less than the whole, then, Winthrop’s idea has endured, a testament to its staying power, strange considering that it originated with a man who had no clue that west of him lay 2500 miles of what he and his progeny would call the dark wood of Satan, but what its native inhabitants had long called home, which in their tongues translates into “where the spirit dwells.”

So, now, here we are, nearly four centuries later, still assaying that city upon a hill, which, if truth be known, has been crumbling around the edges for some time now. God lit out for the wilderness, left the key, but changed the lock. Clever move, pointing the way to the city but never letting us in to eat in the fire-lit rooms, sleep in the warm and cozy corners. And what did we do when the way into them was barred? We destroyed them. They were occupied, you know, by witches and essayists. What, you’ve never heard a real native American tell a story? A pity, because there are so few left, and their stories weave magic and truth together. So we essayists and witches do what we can, bewitching and bewildering, conjuring and confusing, fact-checking and truth-building, our callings. Is America a safe place to be an essayist, a witch? No. But I know it’s a good place, the right place, to be a witch, an essayist, because it needs us. I think that these two callings are the only decent things there are left to be in this dark and unsafe place that is not, and was never intended to be, our home.

Cities built upon hills are places where the inhabitants can throw you off a cliff. I prefer the wilderness, because that is my home. Because that is where the spirit dwells.


***

At the door of every morgue there should be a welcome mat, and each time you step over it to go outside, there should be a comedian behind you calling out, “I’ll be seeing you!” Until then, do something good, if for no other reason than to deserve the laughter that’s been reserved for you.


***

The wages of sin are almost never commensurate with the labor, but the Protestant work ethic demands that we keep trying to equalize the two.


***

From Plutarch’s Sayings of the Spartan Women: A Spartan mother’s son ran away during battle and returned home to her. “Vile snake,” she berated him, “cowardly in flight, why have you come here? Do you think that you might slink back in through this cunt that expelled you and find safety?” With that she lifted up her garment and spread her legs. In other versions the mother slays her son or banishes him. The message seems to be that there is nothing more uncompromising and more unconditional than a mother’s love.


***

Faith demands the doubt that contradiction breeds. It’s what saves us from a life of servitude to the certainties of others. The real reason Pontius Pilate asks, “What is Truth?” (John 18:38), isn’t because he was trained in philosophy and sitting in judgment of the Son of God, but because he was trained in the law and sitting in judgment of a man. Pilate was, after all, a loyal Roman and a consummate bureaucrat, and John allows his respect for the law to override his ignorance of the truth. But there’s a hidden danger to John’s words, which speaks to the ambiguous circumstances that surround truth whenever it’s translated into meaningful sentences. Pilate tells the Jews that he sees no guilt in the man before him, which places Jesus but one brief utterance away from salvation. Imagine if Pilate, a stickler for the law, had pronounced Jesus innocent and set him free. But Jesus said he had come to replace the Old Law with the New Law, to tear down the temple and rebuild it, and his instrument for doing this was a Roman prefect who, in a moment of doubt, abdicated his judicial responsibility but fulfilled his divine mission. And so Pilate washed his hands and turned Jesus over to the throng. Thus does history turn on the unuttered word. John the Evangelist: ironist. Typical of most religions, Christianity calls upon us to have faith in something that was never said.

The roots of the word evangelize can be traced back to the koine Greek verb kerusso, “to proclaim.” The word rarely appears in Greek outside the canonical New Testament. The Latin evalgelium comes from the Greek εὐάγγελος , which originally meant a reward given to bearers of good news. The Greek term combines the words ἄγγελος,(messenger; cf. Latin angelos) and εὖ, (L: good), hence “bringer of good news,” later shortened to “good news,” whose Old English godspel also meant “good news.” This seems to be an adequate summary of the career of a propagandist who never doubted his own certainties. And yet we know so little about the historical John, whose name comes from the Hebrew Yohanan, “God is Gracious,” that we’re forced to choose between several possible career tracks. John might have been the “Beloved Disciple” of his eponymous gospel, the younger brother of James the Greater, sons of Zebedee and Salome. He might have been the John who retired to Ephesus, where he wrote the Gospel and died of old age, the only Apostle not to die a martyr. Ephesus was the birthplace of Heraclitus (c. 535-c. 475 BCE), the pre-Socratic philosopher whose theory of flux, or change, proclaimed that all existing things were made up of contrary properties, and who is famous for saying that “no man steps in the same river twice,” that “the path up and down are one and the same,” and that “all things come into existence through the word [logos].” John’s Gospel begins: “In the beginning was the word [logos].” He might have been the John who was exiled to Patmos, an island in the Aegean, where he wrote Revelations.

In many ways, the Gospel of John is a memoir, recording what can only be called the author’s pride of place in the presence of the Lord. And what prodigious pride John had! He sat next to Christ at the Last Supper and placed his head on Christ’s breast (13:23, 25); he (with Peter) followed Christ upon his arrest into the palace of the high priest (18:15); he alone of the Apostles remained at the Cross, with Mary and the pious women, and took Mary into his care (19:25-27); he (with Peter) was the first to arrive at Jesus’s tomb and the first to proclaim the risen Christ (20: 2-10); he was the first to recognize the risen Christ on the shore of the Lake of Genesareth (21: 7); he refers to himself throughout as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” The full text of John 18:38 in the King James Bible reads: “Pilate saith unto [Jesus], What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.” At all: so like a judge of men, so like a Roman prince. It is also possible that King James could not imagine an evangelist who would create a prince who spoke in equivocations.


***

The war memoir has been in existence since early humans documented the hunt on cave walls and told stories about their battles with other men around the fire. Some of the earliest stories on record are about war. Conflict is not in our nature; it is our nature. Let’s be truthful here. Seeping from between the lines of every war memoir, no matter how somber the tone, even if written to remind us of the horrors of war, like blood from a thousand cuts, is an incomparable joy in battle, in killing, that the writer can’t disguise, and the writer who tries would be committing an act of singular betrayal of the reader. But what also gushes out, like blood from a cut artery, is the love of life, a true celebration of life, not just because the memoirist has survived to tell his tale, but because life doesn’t come fully to life—ask any combat veteran—until the moment when it seems to hang from its slenderest thread. Once, during an artillery barrage at An Hoa, I heard music. A Marine from H&S Company had turned his reel-to-reel tape player up full blast and was dancing on a pile of sandbags to the Temptations’s “Cloud Nine” while brown mushrooms sprouted among the barracks full of frightened, vulnerable men. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., an officer in the Union army, wrote in his memoirs, “We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youths, our hearts were touched by fire.” This is a fine sentiment, an old man’s sentiment, the consummation of memory and imagination, and it is true, every word of it, but it is only one truth. Here’s another. John Del Vecchio, in The Thirteenth Valley, tells the story of Cherry, a young soldier in Vietnam, whose heart smolders with a different sentiment. At the very end, while being borne to safety in a helicopter, Cherry learns that his best friend, Egan, who had been left for dead on the battlefield, is still alive, the enemy closing in, and he says, “Fuck it. It don’t mean nuthin’.” But the whole point of the story is that it does. It does. It does.