(dave e)

clear springs

i finished reading something just now, and i want to experiment recklessly with a rubber-hammer-to-the-knee response. it's comforting to complete a book you like.

bobbie ann mason's family memoir, clear springs, may be guilty of rehearsing a familiar story, the history of sons and daughters who rush away from home as soon as possible and return years later afflicted with the compulsion to know the origin myths of their families and worlds. in this case, though, mason makes the problem of return and recovery a collective one, in which several generations of her entire family, very much rooted to its western kentucky space, learn to tell the story of where they come from. in that sense, this is a family story about telling a family's story. mason's dialogues with her aging mother, as both review the artifacts of the old family home, soon to be leased to tenants outside the family, structure an especially thoughtful narrative of archaeology, memory, and storytelling. regretfully confessing, "i have stirred up too much, too many imponderables" (271), mason attempts to respond to the vague distinctions between memory and invention:

i'm coming to understand how memories are imposed on the past and also how they get lost. we reach a point where we do not know whether we remember an actual event or an imagined one; we cannot remember whether a significant event actually happened. in studying a photograph, which is documented proof of our presence at an event, we analyze the event as if we had been there, when for the purposes of memory we had not, for it has vanished from the mind. so i come near to inventing these old great-grandparents and this mysterious grandfather, while being as scrupulous to known fact as my brain will allow. (271-272)

that passage fails to explain much about the "impos[ition]" of memory, but it does catalogue the phenomenon of memory cues well. here, the memory becomes the symptom of the document, and not the more conventional other way around, in which an image is supposed to call up the authentic version, stored away in the mind.

mason simultaneously troubles and reaffirms the travel story in american history and life. early on, as she places her immediate family in the context of her ancestors' wanderings, she cuts down the romance of movement:

our ancestors had been lured over the ocean to america by false advertising--here was the promised land, literally--but once arrived, they had to clear rocks and stumps and learn to raise hogs. we inherited their gullibility. we wanted to go places, find out what was out there. my sisters and i didn't want to marry farmers; we were more interested in the traveling salesmen. (11)

and yet, instead of simply doing away with the wistfulness of movement, she offers this explanation of going away and coming back home:

the way i see it, a clever cat prowls but calls home occasionally. the answer is the mingling of sunlight and shadow; it's ambiguity, not either-or. the best journeys spiral up and around--the journey of odysseus on the wine-dark sea or bloom in the winding streets of Dublin. in the zen journey, when you return, you know for the first time where you came from. we're always yearning and wandering, whether we actually leave or not. in america, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home, a notion that something--our point of origin, our roots, the home country--is out there. (280-281).

an over-romantic explanation of the desire for return (she goes on, sentimentally: "in its inception, the idea of America was heaven on earth. now that dream is fractured and we're looking for the pieces"), but the inescapable work of "where i'm from" always determines the journey's point.

life-writing of most sorts relies on collective memory, and the memoirist always tells more than her own story. mason's good memoir makes that condition part of its point. writing who you are means that you write who they are, too.

Posted by dave at November 13, 2003 1:22 PM | TrackBack