Letter to Joe: Seasick (or My Life as a Crab)
At a Provincetown workshop with the poet Nick Flynn I found myself out at sea without ever leaving dry land.
If you’d like a background explanation of this letter format, see my previous post: Letter to Joe: Flatiron Days. — Thanks, Peter
Dear Joe:
When we met at the lighthouse that morning in August and stood there next to the bay after not seeing each other for years, you paused for a moment and told me a story about the sea.
During the Great Depression, you said, your mother got a job as a babysitter for a family vacationing in Florida. One day she — on a boat? standing watchfully onshore? I don’t recall — saw the family’s son struggling in the waves and swam to him, pulled him from the sea and saved him from drowning.
That first part is an anecdote, but you had a story. Allow me to steal your words here.
About 35 years later, in the late 1960s your sister was taking classes at the community college in Cincinnati, she had an English professor who pushed her to improve her writing and put in the time to help her. One day, they were exchanging stories and it came out that the English professor was the boy your mother had saved and here he was now, in a sense, saving your sister, who was struggling with undiagnosed learning disabilities, by teaching her to write. Your sister went on to University of Cincinnati, got a degree in education, and spent her career to as a teacher and a school principal, certainly saving others in kind.
You are an excellent storyteller. Maybe all those cassette tapes of "A Prairie Home Companion” we listened to while driving to Montana had an effect on you. Or maybe it’s just a matter of recognizing which moments in a life should be woven together to make a story. Me, I tend to lack coherence. I’m usually drifting or being pushed by some force one way or another from one moment to the next.
I hope you tell this story in your own words someday. But for now I’m going to tell another story set by the sea.
A few summers ago, I went to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., to take a memoir writing workshop with Nick Flynn. My friend Max, another fellow writer, had signed on to go and urged me to come along. I hadn’t taken a workshop in 25 years or so, and I was overdue for some learning and discipline, so I did.
The fact that Nick was leading the workshop was a big sell for me. As an adult, I have only ever studied with people I admire and I admire Nick very much. OK, yeah, I’ll just say it: I’m a fan. At the time, I'd already read many of his poems and his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. I love Nick’s work in both its execution and its spirit, its mystical yearning and woundedness, its raw pain, religiosity, benevolence and utter compassion — so many other things I don’t have the time or expertise to go into here.
The workshop was called “Memoir as Bewilderment.” In the catalog description of it that I read Nick summons Beckett: “Dear incomprehension, it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself in the end.” He promised that students would “look closely at work we bring in to find ways to transform it, go deeper into the shadow world.”
Bewilderment sounded exactly like my kind of thing.
I rented the tiniest, cheapest room I could find to in Truro for the week (which was very tiny, but not very cheap), and arrived in a sort of whirl, with the voices of the last few writers at I’d edited at The Times the week before still banging around in my head. I believe I had submitted pages to begin the course, but I had only a vague sense of what I would really be working on there. It wouldn’t take long, I thought, before I got my bearings.
We were a small group, about 10, I think. We met three hours each day in a spacious room and carried out these sort of cryptic exercises under Nick’s guidance that didn't seem to me be exactly about what we had written, but were designed to draw what was inside out, to reach into our subconscious minds and our guts, stir up our memories, and maybe sort out our feelings about them. We used photographs, word play, some meditation and collage work to dig all this up. I liked it.
At one point Nick told the group: “If you feel like you don’t have a problem, you have a problem.” I wrote that down. I was in.
In Provincetown, we were very much in a nautical place, and a literary place. And I felt the elemental forces of that powerful strip of storied land everywhere around us. I suppose this was intentional, that we were meant to feel that we were out at sea. Put off our balance. Carried a little bit here and there by the waves. I felt that Nick was cleverly and gently guiding us into these places, these pools with their currents and tides, and letting them do their work on us.
You probably know this: The sea is everywhere in my life. Growing up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, not far from the water in either place, we spent summer vacations in Seaside Heights or on Barnegat Bay at a house that my grandparents rented there. These are the places of some of my very earliest memories. At the workshop, I was exploring this time of my life with the idea of writing an early childhood memoir, one that would channel as closely as possible the interior voice of my five- or six-year-old self. Not in the language I spoke then, of course, limited as it was, but in what I guess I’d call a pre-verbal language, a language of sensory impression and feeling, rendered with the powers of language I now possessed.
This was a challenge: Would this be “memoir”? Who can possibly recall with any reliability events that happened 50 years in the past? You can’t. We all know that. Memory is an editor. But it is a fabulist, too. Still, I didn’t feel compelled to define what I was doing just then. I only knew I was driven to express the conscious experience of that small boy as it could be summoned by memory. The interior monologue of my five-year-old self.
So I immersed myself in the past that week. My head was full of sand and pebbles and rotting wood and waves crashing and tides. Of my grandparents, my father and mother and sister. Of damp houses that didn’t smell the way our house smelled. Of meals cooked in pots and served on plates we didn’t own. Boats tied to docks, night skies full of stars, the sound of little bay waves lapping in moonlight.
But I also kept running up against myself in the present. I recall one exercise: Early in the week Nick gathered a group of words — I don’t recall them exactly but they were actions or gestures rendered as verbs, suggesting attitudes or emotional states — and asked us to come up and claim one as a sort of conceptual label or lens for our work for the week. I remember now, with some embarrassment, feeling like a teenager in the group, very self-conscious about seeming too eager or enthusiastic to participate in this game, to be like the other kids, wanting I guess, pathetically, at this advanced age, to seem cool. And so I hung back and let all my fellow writers line up and choose their words. Not surprisingly, when I finally got up to choose mine, there was no choosing to do. There was only one left: TO DENY.
In the pages I brought there was a scene I'd been working on. As I recall it, I’m on a small outboard motorboat with my father and grandfather out in the bay. We’re going crabbing. Like a lot of these scenes that I was channeling from that time, this one was almost all sensation: the excitement of going out with my father and grandfather on a man's journey. The fear of it, too. The smell of the little boat and the brine. The buckets of bait and blood. The spray of the water on my face as I leaned over the side of the boat while my father got it up to cruising speed. The heat when we got out into the open water of the bay, getting more intense as the sun rose in the sky. The queasy feeling that came that came over me as the boat rocked. The primal fear and wonder evoked in me as I peered into the bucket of crabs, trying to comprehend their prehistoric design, confused by the idea that they were not objects or things but living creatures like me. The moment I realized that crabs had eyes and then there was one on top of the pile looking at me. Hypnotized. I stared in a sort of trance into the crab’s eyes, feeling a primeval connection just then, even a sense of compassion.
Later, when Nick gave each one of us a piece of soft clay and asked us to turn it into an object that appeared somewhere in the work we were doing in our pages, I fashioned a crab.
I also spent a lot of time thinking about my grandfather, Peter Catapano, my father’s father, the man for whom I was named, who died suddenly at 61 when I was 12. I had spent that entire spring of 1976 excited to think that he might come up from Florida to Staten Island to see me play in my very first Little League All-Star Game. But he never made it. I suspect part of me wanted to recreate that time so that I could see him again.
Somewhere midway through the third day of the workshop, things got a little weird. That afternoon after class I began feeling queasy. I felt very distinctly that I was seasick, yet I hadn’t left dry land or stepped on a boat. I took a walk to steady myself but I only felt worse. It was as though the hard earth of the Cape had begun to shift or had become a boat itself, like that little boat on the bay whose rocking had made me ill. I spent the last two afternoons after workshop sprawled out on the bed in my room, trying to right myself enough to attend the nighttime readings and socialize. I felt dizzy, raw, fragile, and quite frankly, alarmed at what seemed to be happening — that I appeared to be having a physical reaction to an “intellectual” exercise.
What was going on here? In one workshop session we offered comment on each other’s work and the woman sitting next to me said: “I see tides and currents all through your work. Forces acting on other forces. The current pulling the boat away from the shore. The boy being pulled by the arm on to the boat, the boat drifting, the men pulling crabs out of the cage.” I thanked her. I was entirely surprised by what she had seen in the writing that I hadn’t seen at all. It was almost as though I was afraid to understand what I was doing. If I did, I might lose interest in it. It might die and go away.
I tried to get my head around the idea that in diving this deeply into memory I seemed to have cast my body as well as my mind out to sea. Now I had a chance to right myself. To hold steady. But I didn’t know if I wanted it.
At the end of the week each student gave a two-minute reading of their work and I read a tight edit of a scene with me, my father and my grandfather on a boat. It’s OK. I’d say I made more than half of it up in my room that week. Memoir. But it’s telling to me that this artifact, which I dug up today along with the rest of my workshop folder, now seems to be the least interesting product of my experience there.
I left Provincetown very glad for my time there, but I couldn’t shake the idea that I had failed in some way. I just wanted to go home, where it was safe, with its comforting, smooth, hard surfaces, back to my family and my own bed.
I don’t know exactly what I “learned.” But it seems clear to me now that the pursuit of memory and the entanglement of emotion with those memories and the forces and currents and eddies and tides there find their way inside us, that they affect us and physically, just as from our beginnings the sea is always within us. And I think that maybe that summer that my body was telling me that I was not ready to go back there yet. And I may not ever be. But in writing to you, I feel that I may be paddling back, slowly.
What do you think?
as ever, your pal
— Peter
WHAT I LISTENED TO WHILE WRITING THIS
I was reminded, several times, oh so very sweetly, of this exquisite song, Lilac Wine by Jeff Buckley. If you have never listened to it, please take three minutes to do so. You won’t want to get them back: I feel ... Unsteady. ...
And another song about memory: The oddly named but evocative These Photos of My Chlidren Make Me Want to Climb Into the Frame: By Dylan Henner:
ON NICK FLYNN
I hope you will also check out the work of Nick Flynn. He has a web site and is on tour now — STARTING TOMORROW — for his new book of poems, Low.
Thurs., November 16 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm EXILE IN BOOKVILLE / reading & talk / LOW w/ DINA PEONE / ILLINOIS (chicago)
]Fri., November 17 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm POWELLS BOOKS / reading & discussion / LOW w/ MARY SZYBIST (incarnadine) OREGON (portland)
Sun., November 19 @ 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm MOON PALACE / reading & talk / LOW w/ DOBBY GIBSON (little glass planet) / MINNESOTA (minneapolis)
Mon., November 20 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm BOOKS ARE MAGIC / reading & talk / LOW w/ PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA (poetry unbound) / NEW YORK (brooklyn)
My favorite line: It was almost as though I was afraid to understand what I was doing. If I did, I might lose interest in it. It might die and go away." It is funny that, when my memories of you and me come back, we are on solid ground, the Flatiron, plunged securely for almost a century (then) in Manhattan's bedrock schist, or more dramatically, our hike on the highline loop at Glacier looking down and over those arrows of Granite pointing up at an infinity we sensed every minute -- an infinity of time, we thought, an infinity of space in skies that shifted and changed as we hiked in a little pack of 20 somethings with our urges and dreams in relatively plain sight, visible in our eyes and leaps and gestures as we experienced almost every season in a morning and afternoon on an incredible trail. I need to dig up the photos, but I'm sure we are in shirtsleeves and sun in some and cowering in jackets while the wind and rain came down. But I get you and water, my cool friend, I get the contradiction of wanting to be safely moored while at the same time longing for an open sea, an open road, an open mind and imagination which are both exhilarating and frightening. And as I write that sentence, I understand why you've chosen to write a few letters to me. We are, in that loose sense of the word, brothers. Brothers born of a time and place in our lives where we could most be ourselves, because we didn't really know to be otherwise. I remember laughing to the point of crying sometimes in our little office nook with our friend Holly, sharing poetry and crazy art made of the office dross of paperclips and mailing labels and tape. Our little ships were just setting sail. Thanks Brother, Joe
Very evocative. Thank you. It makes me want to take a deep breath and steady myself. I feel a little seasick.