Chapter 20: A Happy Childhood
Splattering finger paint across the carpet of my bedroom, laughing as the colors morphed into an ugly green; regretting this after my easel was taken from me and stored in our attic. Crashing my childhood bicycle into a parked car; never wanting to get on a four-wheeled vehicle again. My father hovering over my curled-up body, fist clenched and face red but completely unable to bring himself to strike me; promising myself to pay him back with undying loyalty.
* * *
We all remember moments of our childhood, and we each remember them differently. The thing, though, is that it's damn near impossible for us to recall these memories in full: more often than not, they come off fragmented, and we only remember tiny bits and pieces that we found significant while having the experiences. Of course, there are some things we remember better than others, but the truth is that we can never remember everything: we just aren't hard-wired that way.
And with different forms come different techniques. I recently saw The Tree of Life, and what struck me most was how Malick had crafted a narrative around shots that seemed very much to be in the dramatic present. What was brilliant, though, was that these scenes were actually being "remembered" by Sean Penn's character. So instead of relying on flashbacks to tell the most significant parts of the narrative, Malick lets the inherent tension of the character's childhood set the tension in a very bare-boned, stripped down manner: close, cropped shots of character's faces; extended moments of silence; jump cuts that do little to indicate the passage of time. Although the movie is flawed, this fragmentation is an absolutely beautiful deviation from linear story-telling, and Malick has asked his audience to do some of the work on their own.
Cinema allows for this type of presentation; we writers, though, do not have the luxury of showing things. It's impossible for us to conjure up visual clues that accurate representations in the way that films can. I'm sure some might disagree with me here, but the truth is that the nature of our medium requires us to use descriptive words that conjure up different images with every one of our readers. This means that we have to be a bit more creative when we're trying to indicate .
Which brings me to "A Happy Childhood," one of my favorite chapter's in Lidia's book. What struck me in this chapter was the repetition. Let's look at the first section, titled "I am 6":
"My friend Katie in the water my friend Christie in the water Phantom Lake Bath and Tennis Club and summer is every day every single day in the water we swim in the morning we swim in the daytime we swim in the afternoon we swim at night we swim every day we eat rainbow popsicles we eat fudgesicles we eat creamsicles we go and go underwater laps hold your breath back and forth and back again three times no boys we stay underwater swim goggles look at each other blow your air out sit on the bottom we dive from the low dive we dive from the high dive we find pennies at the bottom of the deep end we laugh and laugh we race at swim meets in evening we race we win and win little gold medals beautiful blue ribbons we dive off of starting blocks we fly in the air we enter the water with glee of girl splashing" (p. 27).
When you first read this section, you probably thought, "Oh, how cool." Maybe you thought about how "lyrical" it sounded, or how "fun" it was to read. Maybe you thought about it for longer. I'm going to assume you didn't, because I'd like to think about how sophisticated this style of writing is.
Because I'm the kind of person that has a hard-on for grammar and usage abstractions (T.M.I.?) and a self-admitted addict of lyrical prose, I'd like to call attention to three things Lidia's done here: first, she's jammed a bunch of dependant clauses together; second, she's repeating words and phrases in the same subject-verb-object pattern; third, the only indisputable qualifying adjective is in the title. On their own, these types of usage would look sloppy and "wrong," but by combining them Lidia is painting a certain type of effect over her reader. These small fragments start building upon one another, and by the time you've finished them you've made your own evaluative opinion of Lidia's more blissful childhood memories. How can you not get to the last line ("I want to belong to something besides family") and not feel an awe-inspiring sense of pleasure? And while all this is going on, she's mimicking the way young children speak. Mind. Blown.
I know, I know -- these deviations are relatively simple ones, and Lidia's not the first person to use these three techniques. But she's definitely the only person out there combining these abstractions to tell a story that's distinctly hers. I firmly believe that every story worth telling has already been told; if that's true, the only thing writers have at their disposal is style. Ownership of our stories isn't guaranteed, but is instead earned through careful craftsmanship and attention to detail. And Lidia is owning the ever-loving shit out of these stories: people have gone swimming and have eaten popsicles before, but not like this.
You know what's so awesome about all this, though? This could be the exact opposite of what Lidia was trying to accomplish. Maybe you think that's a bad thing. I, for one, think that it doesn't matter at all: what's so beautiful about writing is that nothing is ever closed to interpretation. The nature of this discourse allows for an infinite number of interpretations, and although we're working with literature here, nothing can ever truly be "literal" -- there are just too many people thinking too many different things.
Sure, by this point of Chronology of Water, we've gotten to know Lidia and her past really well. That's all very awesome, but that's not what excites me about this book. Lidia's used a number of different narrative techniques to make distinctions between particular eras of her life, and she's using them so infrequently and so sporadically that you can't even establish a specific pattern. And that's why you can't put this book down: Lidia has you second-guessing yourself over and over; she's introduced patterns to you, then wholly disrupted them; zooming her lens in and then immediately zooming out so you're constantly on your toes. She's making you think and she's making you work, and if you're anything like me, you're incredibly thankful for this.
What I love about this section, though, is how brilliantly Lidia owns her childhood. It makes me think about how I can be better at owning the things I've cognitively filed away.
* * *
When I think about my childhood, I always seem to think about it in a very cause-and-effect nature. Maybe it's because of my Catholic upbringing; maybe it's because I'm naturally a guilt-ridden person. Regardless, that's the way I remember things: the constant unforgettable details, followed by the ways I've rationalized them.
I've been rambling for quite some time now. What I ask you is the following: How do you remember your childhood? To you tend to define it with qualifying adjectives like "happy" or "tormented"? Do you find it easy to write about your youth, or is it difficult? Are happier memories easier to write?
