For a while I read Alice Miller, and was moved to underline this quotation in one of her books: “The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our life. And we often impose our most agonizing suffering upon ourselves.” Although not consciously Down to a Sunless Sea works this premise up into stories such as “Billy’s Mirrored Wall,” “Mortise and Tenon,” to some degree, and “Herbie.” And the above essay, which is factual ,reveals my own relationship to my mother (See “The Parable of the Sea Wall,” La Fenetre, 2007, online).
A sample: Something by someone close to me has been done to me and so well and so insidiously and so powerfully, systematically, slyly and cunningly and incrementally, over eons of psychic time, that it has taken more than half my life to become “aware” of it. It is analogous to being informed as a student that man originally came from the sea — fluids, salts, renal systems et al, Or that birds probably descended from dinosaurs, note their feathered “scales” or snake-like heads (think flamingo). It is difficult to imagine much less believe and it is equally disconcerting and smells of overripe fiction, yet the weight of fact and science bears it out — and what one does with this is to often put it out of mind, which leads me back to my point.
Consequently something was done to me and with me that immobilized and shocked and froze my infantile systems.
I feel that the writer often composes literary “transistional objects,” to use the analytic jargon, to soothe him or herself. He writes stories that are coalescent, epiphanies to suck on. And the purpose may well be to quiet down the distress, to seek some constancy in life as it chugs by. Yes, we write to grasp, to understand, to feel, but I believe we also write repetitively about constant and similar issues in order to make sense of them, to rub them smooth in our hand, like turning snow into good packing for that snowball that flies through wintry weather with directionality.
I feel that in my own life I rework the same themes over and over, as if I was some kind of zen master of rote. I am simply trying to figure out what was done to me (Miller) and what has come of that. If I were to know the answer, and sometimes I arrive at partial truths, it really doesn’t seem to make much difference. Insight isn’t that much of a big bastard, after all. I write ultimately, it appears, to just suck on my thumb relentlessly. Ah, writing as perseveration.
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