Turning Over the Compost

Gary Snyder writes that sifting memories should be seen as turning over the compost. “When we deepen ourselves, looking within, understanding ourselves, we come closer to being like a mature ecosystem. Turning away from grazing on the ‘immediate biomass’ of perception, sensation and thrill; and reviewing memory … blocks of stored inner energies, the flux of dreams, the detritus of day-to-day consciousness, liberates the energy of our own mind-compost. Art is an assimilator of unfelt experience, perception, sensation and memory for the whole society.” [from “Poetry, Community and Climax,” in The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979, p. 173]

I like this metaphor for working with memory. Getting in there with your pitchfork, turning, aerating and sifting through the past to see what comes to light. I use a lot of plant metaphors for mental flowering. The drive to bloom is universal and the uniqueness and variety of our blooms is constantly surprising. Snyder’s way of looking at things has been an inspiration for me for many years. In the same essay, he says, “All of evolution may have been as much shaped by the pull toward climax as it has by simple competition between individuals or species.” Introducing the notion of ecological climax (the height of one’s blooming) holds implications for how to look at one’s maturity.

In sifting through my generally very sharp memories for the sake of Line, Marty and Paul, I’ve several times been surprised by the new understanding that comes up. Brought into the light, perceptions change, connections are made and ordinary things take on new shapes and meanings. Such as realizing that a relationship upon which I lavished a couple of years of attention, was probably more a mental construct of one of my friends than mine! That my mother was probably less calm and powerful than I generally found her to be. That, after 50 years, the high school girls basketball state championship I was so excited about has lost nothing of its poignancy and heroism. That the come-uppance the character most like me often got was totally deserved!

Nonetheless, memory doesn’t really work to write from. One must be wholly in the moment, the numinous, everyday present, in order to make story. As noted here in a previous blog post, Gertrude Stein states, “The business of art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to express that complete actual present." The present might be seen as “vertical time” as opposed to “horizontal time.” In the present, or in vertical time, the bloom we might become is wholly present as possibility, if not yet visible. But loosening the soil around those memories, giving them some compost, giving the rootlets nourishment, is bound to allow fuller bloom!