"Carnality" in Memoir
In which I discuss writing sense imagery
I’ve always been a sensitive man, given to great depths of feeling. I’ve not always worn my heart on my sleeve, though there are a couple of movies that make me cry flowing tears - not of sadness but of a wistful sentimentality, a tinged happiness (Cinema Paradiso and Life is Beautiful and Romeo Lies Bleeding).
It’s my sensitive nature that has allowed me to keep the fires of the writer burning inside while pursuing my work as a teacher. I’ve wanted to wallow in the mud of writing and words, and now I can. It’s my sensitive nature that has nurtured the positive out of unhealthy relationships - putting the positive spin on difficult situations. I’m not exactly the glass half full or glass half empty philosopher either.
I’m more of a - “I have a glass and there’s water to be found nearby. Let’s find it” kind of person. I make my way through the world, despite all.
Writing thrives with sensory imagery. Sight is implied, but authors must use all five senses — touch, taste, sound, and smell — to engage readers so that they accept a story for what’s real and what’s imagined. This is no more important than in memoir, where (again, whether real or imagined many years from the event) veracity of detail begets authenticity.
In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr says, “Of all the memoir’s five elements, carnality is the most primary and necessary.” She says, “By carnal, I mean, Can you apprehend it through the five senses? In writing a scene, you must help the reader employ smell and taste and touch as well as image and noise” (p. 71).
I call this writing 101.
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a thrumming din of sound, a cesspool of smell, a paint bucket of color and image, an emotional torch to the skin that leaves you tasting the world’s moral decay. But it is the texture of my own life that gives my memoir its own carnality.
From Kansas in the 90s and early aughts, to San Diego from 2005-2015 during one of the greatest droughts and rising temperatures in California history, my whole world was filled with sensual delights and torments.
Here is a small sample from my memoir:
As I spoke at my brothers’ funeral service, after his suicide, his “celebration of life”:
My hands shook as I stood at the podium. My voice cracked. I had never felt this broken. Tears blinded me like glittering diamond prisms.
When my niece Elly called me, distraught over the suicide of her brother:
She sobbed fresh and full, with a catch every time she breathed. Her phone call was a delicate package of pain dropped at my feet. Her heavy cries sounded as if she were pulling broken shards of glass from her flesh.
Learning about my brother’s death in Portland, Oregon from my father in Los Angeles, as I stood around the bed of my dying father-in-law in the marble hospital on the opposite coast, a continent away, in Sterling, Virginia:
My tears flowed faster than the knowledge of what happened could reach my brain, faster than knowledge made memory, than memory made fact. I saw my tears hit the floor, though I couldn’t see through them, a flood of tears like in a cartoon. My body slumped.
Returning home to the heat of Kansas in August after a month setting affairs in order with my family and my mother-in-law:
We were trapped by heat. The heat that overwhelms. Thunderstorms bloom like atom bombs in the distance. This heat cracks the earth into deep, dry crevices. This fucking heat. . . . We lived in the middle of nowhere, separated by half a continent from what we know, from who we are, she to the east, me to the west. And it was hot. A heat that kills. The center cannot hold.
And I find this passage, an allusion to Eliot’s poem, which I’ve laid out for your comparison.
From the The Waste Land, the beginning of III. The Fire Sermon:
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
And from my own memoir:
It’s September, and August heat yet clutched the land. The shores of Lake Perry and the river Kaw bore the refuse of summer: cans, wadded napkins, torn condom wrappers, fishhooks, tangled fishing line in the dry rocks. The vacationers had departed. The air was heavy with the throbbing of cicadas, no relief from the noise or heat. Cicada molt stuck to trees, sidewalks, window screens, like abandoned carcasses from a forgotten war. To be alive was to sweat. There was no relief from this death.
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I declared I would be a writer at age 21. And I began my study. Then I became a teacher, and a reader, but mostly a grader.
Kurtz’s last words could have been: “The Grading! The Grading!”
But I never lost that will and the idea that I was a writer, even if I couldn’t devote myself body and soul to the task. I observed acutely, took notes, scribbled ideas for later, played with rhyme and meter and rhythm and metaphor, studied language and literature and read and read and read and argued about words and meaning. I became the thorough academic. But I never lost the sight (or sound or feeling or smell or taste) of the writer’s life.
Now, having sloughed off my slumber and awakened to human voices - I will not drown.
In writing my memoir, I have tasted what I missed all those years. Though it feels late at night, I’m ready for this uphill battle.
My memoir is an account of a lifelong uphill battle against forces largely out of my control. I’m battle hardened and battle ready.
Now, I write.
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Fall is here. Bundle up, settle in, stay healthy and warm.
For me, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!
Karr, Mary. The Art of Memoir. New York: Harper Perennial, 2015.