Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. Amy Tan
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used for its metaphoric imagery, but which is rich enough to produce one.
I was swimming in open water, eye to eye with a twenty-five-foot-long whale shark on my right, within touching distance, so close I could see the velvety details of the white spots on its taupe body. As I drifted back to admire the pattern, I felt a light tap on my back and thought I might have bumped into Duncan or Lou until I saw a wall of spots loom up on my left, and all at once I found myself cradled in the small wedge between the velvety bodies of two behemoths. I was so euphoric over the magnificence of what the three of us had created—a primordial womb, a secret place—that I never considered I might have been instantly crushed between them until the sharks slowly swam past me and disappeared into the fathomless deep blue of open water, leaving me alone and unprotected.
In rereading this anecdote, I recognize the emotions as those I have felt with infatuation during my youth. I recall being attuned to every detail of my lover, feeling the euphoria of our specialness, being unmindful of danger, until I was left suspended with uncertainty over the safety of my heart. Of course, the two experiences—infatuation and whale sharks—differ greatly in the actual degree of danger. The chances that you will get hurt are extremely high with infatuation and they are unlikely with sharks, as I discovered after swimming with them for five days. They remained curious and extraordinarily gentle. One was considerate enough to wait for me whenever I tired and could not swim fast enough to keep up.
The best metaphors appear unexpectedly out of the deep blue by means of intuition and my infatuation with nuance.
When I wrote my first short story, I used the image of a gardenia. The story concerned a woman who was struggling to understand the sudden death of her husband. It was heavily influenced by my own emotional experiences with the sequential deaths of my older brother, Peter, and my father. When my brother died, flowers arrived at our house, offerings of condolences in the form of carnations, chrysanthemums, roses, asters, lilies, and gardenias. My father had been the guest minister of many churches, and their clergy as well as the church members had all prayed for the needed miracle. Their floral outpouring of sympathy lined our kitchen counter and dining room table. Some were set on our coffee table in the living room. A similar variety of flowers arrived at our house when my father died six months later. I recall the colorful array of flowers and their mingled scent. I remember thinking about the cost of all those flowers. My parents rarely bought flowers. They were an unnecessary extravagance. The condolence flowers wilted within the week, but we kept them until the petals fell off and the stems rotted and smelled like dead flesh. Life is fleeting. You can’t hang on to it. That was the meaning of those flowers.
I had once thought gardenias were the best flowers. They had a heavy perfume, creamy white petals, and thick glossy leaves. A wristlet of gardenias was the coveted flower of high school proms. But after my brother’s funeral, I no longer liked gardenias. Their beauty and scent belied their purpose as the messenger of grief. When gardenias arrived after my father died, the smell was nauseating.
In my story “Gardenias,” I used the imagery of a room choked full of gardenias. The dark green leaves were viewed as stiff and sharp enough to cut tender skin. Their heads bowed as they died and the creamy white petals turned brown at the edges and curled like the fingers of corpses. That was indeed the image I had of them, which was why the smell of them had become as repulsive. They were the same odor of the rotted stems, the odor of dead bodies. Those flowers became the imagery of grief I could not express as a teenager hiding in my room. In the end, my metaphor broke under the burden of meaning so much that I had to abandon the story. But the heart of it—the nature of grief—remains mine.
I read an article today on the findings of a study on visual imagery, which gave me an insight on why I like to both draw and write. MRI imaging was done on the brains of twenty-one art students and twenty-four nonartists as they drew a likeness of an object before them. The findings showed that the artists’ brains were clearly different, the most interesting being a greater density of gray matter in the precuneus of the parietal lobe, where visual mental imagery is processed. The researchers said no conclusions could be drawn as to whether the extra padding of gray matter was present at birth. But, if that was the case, it would suggest that some degree of artistic skills are innate. The scientists affirmed that exposure to art activities most certainly plays a role, as does the “environment”—for example, having an art teacher who says you have a good imagination. So now I wonder: Did my drawing proclivities in childhood increase my aptitude for the visual and emotional imagery I would later use in my writing? If I draw a bird a day, can I increase the gray matter in the precuneus and further enrich my metaphoric brain? With age, the normal brain loses cells at a faster clip, taking with it the names of common gizmos, the items you were supposed to buy the next time you were at the pharmacy, and the best way to get from your house to that place where you’re going to do the you-know and that’s why you can’t be late. I would like to sock away extra stores of gray matter for a rainy day.
The study made me realize something about the way I write. When I see a visual image in my mind as a scene, I try to capture it in words. The process shares some similarity to drawing a bird. I look at what I imagine, I sketch it out in my story, and I do constant revisions as I try to capture it more clearly. The imagery I see is somewhat like looking through a virtual reality headset, in which I can turn myself 360 degrees to have a complete sense of the visual imagery around me. That imagery may be incomplete at first. The lawn has been planted, but the flowers haven’t bloomed. I need mosquitoes to show up before it feels real. I put myself in the imagery and I walk through rooms, sit in the garden, and stroll down the streets. I look at every detail of rooms I imagine. If it is not there, I conjure it up. I inhabit the room and experience the noises, smells, and personal details. I work toward emotional verisimilitude in all the details of experience—the way it happened, even though this is something that in reality has never happened. The “good eye” that enables me to draw the likeness of a cat is the “mind’s eye” that enables me to write a scene based on the imagery in my head. I sense the good eye and the mind’s eye are linked. I don’t have to wait for scientific research to tell me whether that’s true.
Drawing of a crossbill eating grit inspired by a photo by ornithologist and friend Bruce Beehler.
I once did a TED talk on the subject: Where does creativity hide? I did not understand the question or its intent. So I focused my remarks on my own writing, my particular area of expertise, as it were. I traced my origins as a writer to some mysterious confluence of my unknown innate abilities with early life experiences, especially trauma, which had led to the kinds of stories I am drawn to write. The talk I gave went over well enough, but I was not satisfied with it. In fact, I hated the talk. I had never explained what I thought creativity was, and that’s because I could not wrap my mind around that huge boggy box of a concept. It was like being asked those impossible metaphysical challenges, such as, “What is thinking?” While answering, you are thinking about how you are thinking. How do you even begin to parse the vast notion of creativity and isolate the elements and processes as they relate to writing? I kept seeing creativity as a neurological version of a Rube Goldberg contraption, in which one word triggers a thought, which leads to a question, and then three guesses, and some “what if” scenarios, which then plunk you into a continuum of interactions hither and yon.
And then one day, quite by chance, I learned something about the way I think, which in turn told me something else about the way I write. I was at a social gathering of scientists, artists, musicians, and writers. A researcher from a university did a short presentation concerning a potential cure for AIDS. He was on a team that had extracted a piece of DNA from a man who had a rare genetic mutation that made him immune to the AIDS virus. The scientific team engineered a molecular structure, known as zinc finger, which could hold the proteins with this DNA mutation. This was then transplanted into the immune system of a patient dying of AIDS. The patient became not only free of the virus but also immune thereafter. During the break, I talked to a molecular biologist, a pioneer of zinc finger. I asked him how the transplanted DNA proteins had made this possible. Did it change the virus, kill it, or did it alter something in the cells of the immune system that made it impossible for the AIDS