The Nature of Dreams

This year I was only in Melbourne long enough to see three films at the Melbourne International Film Festival. I especially loved 'Unmade Beds', an English film made by Patagonian film maker, Alexis Dos Santos for its cheekiness, music and storytelling. And I loved 'Amos Oz, The Nature of Dreams' for its portrayal of Israeli writer Amos Oz (pictured).

Inspired by this second film, I have begun reading Oz's memoir of his childhood in Jerusalem, 'A Tale of Love and Darkness'. I'm about halfway through it now. Usually I'm a quick reader but this book demands to be read slowly and savoured. It's difficult to categorise really. It's autobiography, yes, but it's so much more: it's about the early years of the State of Israel and it's about writing, it's about those particular people and it's about all people, it's about Oz himself and it's about us.

Here, I'll show you what I mean. If this doesn't inspire you, nothing will.

Oz is writing of a particular evening in Jerusalem when he was a boy, of the electric light coming from a neighbour's window, 'pouring out like glue that's so thick it's hard to spill.' And then of how fifty-five years later as he wrote at his garden table in Arad the same thick light spilled from a neighbour's window, the same light breeze stirred.

He goes on to write about the process of writing memoir in a long and wonderful sentence that I will pick up halfway through and reproduce for you (and for me to reread after I have returned the book to the library).

That evening in Jerusalem is like a woman you have known for a long time who

reaches out now and strikes you like a harpoon and starts pulling and tearing you but actually she's not the one who's pulling, she just digs her claws in and you're the one who's pulling and writing, pulling and writing, like a dolphin with the barb of a harpoon caught in his flesh and he pulls as hard as he can, pulls the harpoon and the line attached to it and the harpoon gun that's attached to the line and the hunters' boat that the harpoon gun is fixed to, he pulls and struggles, pulls to escape, pulls and turns over and over in the sea, pulls and dives down into the dark depths, pulls and writes and pulls more; if he pulls one more time with all his desperate strength he may manage to free himself from the thing that is stuck in his flesh, the thing that is biting and digging into you and not letting go, you pull and you pull and it just bites into your flesh, the more you pull the deeper it digs in and you can never inflict a pain in return for this loss that is digging deeper and deeper, wounding you more and more because it is the catcher and you are the prey, it is the hunter and you are the harpooned dolphin, it gives and you have taken, it is that evening in Jerusalem and you are this evening here in Arad, it is your dead parents and you just pull and go on writing.

The I in Memoir

One of the good things about not working on my book is that I've been able to catch up on my reading. My current object of attention is Island, Tasmania's excellent literary journal. I always find its nonfiction strong and this issue (115), which came out in the summer and which has sat on my bedside table since then, is no exception. I'm especially enjoying the essays on memoir and autobiograpy writing. I suppose because this is what is on my mind at the moment.

Robert Dessaix in conversation with Danielle Wood says:

Anyone who talks to you - especially husbands and relatives - knows that you're a writer. They're going to pop up in your books and there you go. If feelings get dented from time to time, you're not responsible. Or only a bit. So long as you don't write out of malice, obviously. I admit there's a grey area - parents, people you knew before you began to write - but you're immortalising them, after all, and that should be worth something.

Now that my book is nearing publication (although not fast enough for my liking), I'm beginning to get nervous about the reactions of people who appear in it. Will my father find my depiction of my mother's behaviour too difficult to bear? Will the aunt with whom my mother feuded take offence at my account of their differences? Will my brothers feel I have misrepresented their roles?

I have done my best to be as honest as I can, but as Elisabeth Hanscome writes in another article in the same issue of Island:

The truth, the real, is fluid not static, though once written it can become static, and in this sense it can distort what really happened.

Hanscome also quotes Paul John Eakin, who has written extensively on memoir and autobiography:

The 'I' of the first person...papers over the fact that we are no longer who we were. Each day we wake up a different person. We constantly remodel the past to accommodate the needs of the person we become in the present.

The back story may well be the true story but its telling almost always involves a degree of interpretation and therefore to some extent the fictional uses of imagination.

Well, notwithstanding the difficulties of honesty and memory and of the writing process itself, I hope I have managed to tell a story that illuminates something true and real and that will resonate for the reader.