153. Violation

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[Here's an interesting look at Tisdale and this collection. Edits and additional matterial from 4/29/17 in red.]

Violation

p155 Stephanie, gawky and disheveled, is easily the best writer in the class [Tisdale is teaching at a university]. After a few weeks I realize I'm half in love with her, with her scary ideas, her absolute fearlessness, and I come to class hungry and ashamed, wanting to hear her read, wanting her to ask me for advice. She is only dimly aware of her talent. She's not a writer, she tells me one day. She's a painter. She likes big canvases with solid blocks of color, and writes only "for fun." Her wild stories, her willingness to say anything, anything at all, are the blessings of not being a writer, of having nothing to lose. The other students, the rule-bound ones who want to be writers very much, are startled into attention.

This is from "Big Ideas," an essay about writing.

A few essays later, about the middle of the collection, we come to the title essay -- which I have been anticipating. This one is also about writing and specifically about writing memoir, which is Tisdale's specialty, it seems. She refers back to an earlier essay called "The Basement" which is about a family visit to her grandmother's when Sallie was a child. In particular, she refers to this passage where she describes her sister, "Susan, barely a year younger than me, isn't brave at all. She's squeamish, chubby, pale, and black haired -- she's the one left out, the baby." Reading this, I wondered if there might have been hurt feelings about this description. I know in my family the "baby" (my aunt who died a couple years ago at 94, still aggrieved by some slights from her youth) was not amused by accounts of her early lack of status in the family. And it turns out Susan was, in fact, offended and this essay is about truth and the writer's need to tell the truth. It is also about the subjective and ephemeral nature of truth.

Before admitting that her truth was not the whole truth, and possibly not the truth at all, except to her at the time, Tisdale insists the memoirist must not make stuff up or tell anything but the truth. That non-fiction must be factual. I'm not sure I agree with this. 

Mostly I'm thinking of the non-fiction of humorists like Calvin Trillin and Bill Bryson, who I expect to elaborate a bit. I can imagine James Thurber's grandfather reading Thurber's hilarious accounts of family life in Columbus, Ohio, waving his stick around and insisting that no such thing ever happened. And I would find that just as funny as the original story. 

Did Alice Trillin actually originate all the sayings or hold all the positions Calvin assigned to her? Maybe. Maybe not. But the "Theory of Compensatory Cash-flow" (that if you think you are going to spend $X on something and then don't, you now have $X you are free to spend on something else) or of "Enough" (that past a certain figure $1 million? $10 million? 100% of a wealthy person's income should be taxed, because it's just obscene for anyone to make that much money) derive a common sense quality from their association with Alice and not Calvin.

My point is that I'm willing to give a writer some leeway if it's going to payoff in the end.

But here's the thing, in "The Basement" this description of her little sister doesn't payoff. We see her as Sallie saw her, but the story is about Sallie's experience and perception of that experience and Susan barely appears. The description is true to the author's truth, but isn't crucial to the writer's aim in telling this story. 

Now if, after that description, Susan and led the way into the dark basement and fallen into a large heater vent left open by mistake -- as actually happened to my aunt when she was little -- you would have to include both the description and the pratfall. But in this case, I think Susan has a point.

But then we get to truth in general. What do we remember and how close are those memories to what actually happened? Everyone in the story holds different information about what is happening and what other people are dealing with, plus none of them see the same things from the same perspective.

Truth (and I think I may have said this before) is like spacetime: never absolute, always relative.


"Second Chair"

Another good essay. This is about growing up in a small town where you attend the school where both your parents work, so that the teachers are also people you know as your parent's friends. And it's about being in the school band, constantly challenging the first chair but never winning.

It's about a great deal else as well.

But what resonated with me was the knowing teachers -- in my case, professors -- outside school; and also band. I was lucky, I could completely avoid the department that my mother worked for, so I rarely bumped into professors I knew through my mother, though they were demystified for me which is why I probably socialized more with my own professors than most students did.

The band connection is more interesting. I, too, was second chair, though in the trumpet section instead of base clarinet. But while Tisdale continued to challenge the girl who held the first chair even past the point where she knew she would never win, I don't recall ever challenging. I knew the guy ahead of me was much better and I had no desire to replace him. I think someone once challenged me, and I was happy to hold my chair, but I didn't care in the way Tisdale seems to have cared. Also the third chair adored Donovan, who I loathed, so there was that.

Where we were most alike was in how we turned our backs on band and so much else when we transitioned into high school. In my case I can point to another round of disgust at having to leave another place behind and start over anew (and in Scottsdale of all God forsaken places), and later to the bad crowd I ran into working at YMCA camp, and the new drug culture of the time. But if it wasn't those things wouldn't it have been something else? Does anyone get through those adolescent years unashamed? Or at least without regrets? And if you do, is that really anything to be proud of? 

And, with "Violation" in mind, I can read a bit between the lines and guess at some of the alcoholic-father things she doesn't mention because they are boring and petty to repeat and -- like those wounds you sometimes read about that much later re-open and finally kill the apparent survivor -- you don't want to take a chance bringing that stuff to the surface again. Still, having spoken about truth and telling everything, it's a little surprising how much she leaves out here.


Also, thanks to this essay, I now see Tisdale as one of those bold high school girls who infested our shared apartment after we graduated from high school. Was that a quirk of the times? An aftereffect of the Summer of Love and all the related social quakes? Or is that just how some girls are at that age? I would guess that grandparents, raising their grandchildren, are disappointed to discover that all the lessons they thought they learned with their own children have been rendered moot by the changes of the times. They are probably just as lost and even further removed from the children they are trying to care for.

Land-poor

It turns out that one of the cons of owning an SF BMR (Below Market Rate) condo is that there is no way of accessing your equity short of selling the property. Reverse mortgages are generally considered to be a bad idea, but it would have been nice to have had the option. It would have at least bought me some time to stay in my unit if my finances fall apart. Now, a big part of my Plan C will be finding a new place to live. Mind you, I’m just doing worst-case financial planning here, but still.

(This is not the dictionary definition of “land-poor” but it comes down to the same thing. Your wealth is situated so as to do you no good. In my case, I don’t even own any actual “land” to speak of. What I own is the space inside the walls of a building. That part I’m not complaining about, having grown up in suburbia, owning yards and fences and driveways was never a goal of mine. How many people, I wonder, who long for a home with a white picket fence have built or even painted such a thing?)

Accessing your equity seems to be hard regardless. I know that in France (at least at one time) you could sell your place and continue to live in it until you died. If that’s an option at all here, it wouldn’t be an option for me because of the BMR restrictions.


Still, I’m better off than a friend who is poor while sitting on over a half million dollars in equity. Now that would be frustrating. 

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