Common Senses

 In the fall of 1962, Mrs. Grove pulled my essay from a pile and read it without preamble to the senior class. She seemed to indicate it was unusual, interesting. She was probably in her 50’s, with a grey updo and shirtwaist dresses, a no-nonsense sort of person. She commanded our respect with a slightly world-weary presence and a dramatic flair which suggested she had led a life more interesting at an earlier time and was now inured to the life of a high school English teacher. 

I, of course, knew who had written the paper and was fascinated by how others listened. The world stopped for a moment and I realized that, yes, writing was a thing I could do. Mrs. Grove was one of several fine teachers at Valley High School in northern Iowa and I was thrilled by her favor, though no one else remarked on my work.

I did not keep in touch with Mrs. Grove, as my family moved that year to another small town. Even if I had, I had no further results to show her for many, many years. She was not “one of us” (I.e. Scandinavian Lutheran), and I am sure she knew that most of her students went on to be solid citizens. Certainly not writers. But I had an inner ambition that wanted to do something of note. I bored my mother daily with high-flown fantasies until her cynicism made me keep them to myself and my notebooks.

One other thing happened in that English class. A sentence in one of our texts jumped out at me, stating that one should write from one’s five senses. “Write what you see, what you hear, what things feel like to the touch, how they taste and smell.” That resonated with my desire to work with what I felt to be true. I had no idea how to write and it didn’t seem that anyone was going to tell me. But it was a place to start. That, and my voracious reading. I found Chinese poetry, so sensual and direct,  about this time too.

I have already noted here that among all the things that lie deep in one’s inmost life and have the potential to rouse the sleeping spirit, words do it for me. For me, writing comes from a deep place and, beyond reading things aloud to see how they sound, I do not apply a lot of analysis to what I am doing. MFA students may flirt with words, tumble and play with sentences and paragraphs, but that isn’t my style. I only write from hard-won certainty, from the interplay of my perceptions and the world as I experience it.

The world as we know it is wrung from infinite quantum possibilities, but its hard-edged feel, its three-dimensionality, its color, weight and smell are the best of the choices and we generally experience it in common. Art represents this commonality, framing it so that a piece of the world becomes more visible, more meaningful. Each of us has within us the power to discern which representations are most useful and will still be alive hundreds of years from now.

Thus a thread of common sense makes certain characters appear to us as “the salt of the earth.” It is what makes Pierre learn from the peasant Platonov in War and Peace; what makes the modest John Ridd so attractive in Blackmore’s Lorna Doone; and what makes Elizabeth Bennett’s intelligence, portrayed in Austen's Pride and Prejudice, abidingly useful.

It’s the thread of the common, the shared senses and perceptions which we recognize in these characters, but also their deep authenticity. We sense their wholeness, their completeness. They are humanity at its finest, the moral answers they construct often more attuned to what the natural world would do than the civilized one. Humanity, humility and humor all have their root words in the earth, the Latin ‘humus’ meaning earth or ground.

This commonality is, in fact, what makes literature. Inventive and frothy plots just do not stand up to works which try to grapple with the real as found in classic stories. For this reason I have increasingly turned to biography and history, where the story attempts to get at the truth of what actually happened. Truth takes time, however. The way one cultural era looks at a person or event may vary from what the next era makes of it. 

Perhaps because I am a woman, I am always looking for the small domestic happenings, which often aren’t very dramatic. As here, when Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking, describes how she felt while living at the edge of the Pacific, where she was always prepared for earthquakes and wildfires:

“I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots.”

When Joan Didion moved to New York, she tool her hurricane lamps with her. Los Angeles is full of murals, often containing words in typewriter font. I have spent my time writing, making a friend of my notebooks, which provide the through line of a peripatetic life. Once, watching me making notes during a family meeting, my sister thought to herself, “She has to do that.” Yes, she does.