Arenas and Galeano, ¡Presente!

Thursday 20 March 2008

In the fall of 2000 I had a couple hundred pages of drafts for a book on Mev, but what I was lacking was a structure: how to tell this story? That September, I began reading a book by Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lighting. For years, I had read for insight and inspiration her 1986 book, Writing down the Bones. In Thunder and Lighting, Goldberg admitted that a book that provided a model for Writing down the Bones was Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Goldberg wrote, “Once I had a strong framework I could pour my wild mind into it, secure that something held it up.” [Thunder and Lightning, 22] About plot, she wrote, “It is what happens. It better be good, it better matter, it better not trail off or give up or wimp out. It better lodge in the heart. It better take up residence and live on in the hearer, the listener, the reader. It better be a living transmission.” [53]

Later that fall and winter, I happened to read Reinaldo Arena’s The Color of Summer. Well, I didn’t just “happen” to read it; I bought the novel after reading a review of it by Lee Siegel in the Sunday Times Book Review, especially the following paragraph: “At the center of this verbal whirlpool, spinning out stories, prayers, lists, tongue twisters, letters, taxonomies, lectures, vignettes, aphorisms, dreams, confessions, diatribes and farces, a manifestation of the real-life author is fragmented into three personalities: ‘I’m not a person, I’m two or three people at the same time. For you, I’m still Gabriel, for those who read what I write but can hardly ever publish, I’m Reinaldo, for the rest of my friends, with whom I escape from time to time in order to be totally myself, I’m Skunk in a Funk.’” There was something in that first sentence that stayed with me. Evidently, Arenas believed as a modus operandi a saying one of my dear friends, Sheri Hostetler, told me years before I read the Cuban: “Hold it all.”

Then, when I began to read Arena’s novel, the table of contents immediately seized my imagination, with examples of chapter titles like the following: A Prayer, A Letter, Some Unsettling Questions, Nouveaux Pensées de Pascal, ou Pensees d’Enfer, The Seven Wonders of Cuban Socialism, A Scream in the Night (Though It Was Bright as Day), and A Tongue Twister (1) through (29).

Soon thereafter, I began reading Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces. I devoured this book because, like Arenas’s The Color of Summer, it exemplified a style and structure that I began to see I could adapt for my second book: short, compressed, packed chapters, thematically linked over the course of the book by numbers, with ample illustrations, mixing autobiography, journalism, theology, history, and lyricism. Here’s one of Galeano’s chapters, The Night/1: “I can’t sleep. There is a woman stuck between my eyelids. I would tell her to get out if I could. But there is a woman stuck in my throat.” [92]

Northrup Frye, in his CBC lectures, The Educated Imagination, writes, “But Shakespeare’s plays weren’t produced by his experience: they were produced by his imagination, and the way to develop the imagination is to read a good book or two. As for us, we can’t speak or think or comprehend even our own experience except within the limits of our own power over words, and those limits have been established for us by our great writers.”

Thus, by the spring 2001, the examples of Arenas and Galeano helped me to comprehend and structure my experiences with and after Mev.

By summer, the draft with its new-found structure was done.