Some days I can hardly wait to live my life (and record my thoughts about it), other days it feels like I am pushing through tick-and-chigger infested undergrowth or salt-bathing the resulting wounds and welts from that (summer life in an Ozark forest!). Life rarely feels still to me though.
Comparing living to painting as the writer quoted below does is an interesting exercise. 'If your life were a painting, what kind of painting would it be?' In attempts to actually paint, I've noticed that I favor 'blown-up details'. Danny Kaye is quoted as saying: 'Life is like a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can.'
The question of truth and the ethics of memoir was discussed interestingly and at length by Carol Spindel in a article entitled 'When ambiguity becomes deception' in The Writer's Chronicle, December 2007, p. 19-24. Here are some extracts from that article:
As much as I value truth, I also value a good story, and good stories are often made better by a thimbleful of embroidery, a sprinkle of exaggeration, and a trainload of boxcar-sized omissions. In order to articulate an ethics of memoir, we have to bring the compact between memoir writer and memoir reader into the light of day.
...
I do not change the order of events or compress characters in my own nonfiction writing ... I want to be a painter of still lifes. And yet the still life paintings I most admire are cubist, with their own particular and exaggerated way of seeing. Psychology tells us that our beliefs and perceptions about what happened may be more important than what actually happened and I would not want to exclude this mythology from the literary account of a life.
... memoir as it is presently evolving, has a particularly fluid and ambiguous compact with it's readers.
Regards ethical questions and audacious storytelling, one of the best books I have read in recentl years is Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, 2003. It is specifically labeled 'A Novel' but the author's biography on the back cover gives the reader cause to speculate about that.
Sentenced to nineteen years in prison for a series of armed robberies, he escaped and spent ten of his fugitive years in Bombay - where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gun runner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia.
Despite this unnerving account, I (like many, many others) found the story to be both thrilling and touching. A film starring Jonny Depp (one of my favorite actors) and directed by Mira Nair is currently in preproduction (for 2009).
Gregory David Roberts now lives in Bombay and is very active in support of charitable causes as well as sharing his writing skills. His website was quiet for a few years but he began posting again in May 2008 and it's well worth a visit.
He notes there: 'I’ll say this now for the record ... all the characters in my novel are created characters, fictions, invented by me, and none of them resemble living persons in any way.' Apparently, he's been deluged with letters from people who feel deep empathy with the story and have found much healing in it.
'It’s a funny thing, how people react to the “discovery” that Karla and Prabaker, Abdullah and Khaderbhai, Didier and Khaled Ansari and all the others are created characters, and not real beings....[They are] stricken with disappointment...'
'I understand the thoughts and emotions involved. The novel is so closely linked to the real experiences of my life that people read the book as autobiography, rather than as the novel that it is. The rule of thumb for Shantaram, and for the sequel, which I’m completing now in these months, is that the experiences are all real, taken from my own life and direct personal experience, but the characters and the dialogue and the narrative structure are all creations. I gotta tell ya, dear Friends and New Visitors, that it’s a strange thing, a strange, double-edged sword of a thing to have readers utterly convinced and committed by your creative art, and then disappointed by the same creativity at the same time. I hope, if readers pick up and read the sequel to Shantaram, that they’ll find all the new characters left standing at the end of Shantaram just as fresh and alive in the sequel, and in the company of a whole new set of characters to know, and love, and revile, as the case may be.'
An aphorism I came across recently really seems to apply here: Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation. That's something I hope eventually to get to in my own living-writing - neither explaining nor apologizing but just telling it like it is for me.
Along the same lines is another aphorism: Never let someone else's opinion of you become your reality. And one more favorite of mine: If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning (attributed anonymous I beleive).
Back to pondering the question of what kind of painting my life would be, if I painted it. To be honest, I think the best thing to do here is get out the paints or the scissors (for collage) and see what images come through or appeal. I'll be sure to share the results with you here.
