evidentiary:alchemy

Fragment from my final manuscript for Antioch/unpublish book, Last Seen:

When archaeologists excavated the Sutton Hoo burial mounds near Suffolk, England, they started with the smaller barrows. Though they predicted the biggest mound was most important – and likely contained the most valuable artifacts – they dug the smaller ones first as a way to figure out the structures; to find an excavation process that would minimize damage and mistakes. Inside the small mounds they found bone fragments, the decayed remains of a coffin, and corroded pieces of metal with the imprints of tapestries long since rotted away.

Imagine the pressure of the soil, the weight of time, that it can push fabric into metal, like a stamp.

Before digging into the large mound, they built timber terracing to keep it from collapsing, and each layer was worked by hand, the soil brushed gently away. Deep inside – just deep enough so robbers missed the treasure more than once – they found clench nails held still for hundreds of years, and surrounding the nails, a black dust. Nails and black dust were all the archaeologists needed. When the sand was completely removed, the imprint of an entire ship was revealed, as individual as a fingerprint. From this, they drew plans and reconstructed the ship.

- Fragment from my unpublished book, Last Seen

Writers - especially creative nonfiction writers - sometimes need to excavate the smaller barrows first.  And in this sense, context becomes a kind of strategy - something we use to reimagine meaning and restructure narrative arcs. 

For example, I once wrote an essay about a lover who overdosed on heroin.  I knew he was shooting up when we were dating, but I had never really dealt with my feelings surrounding his abuse - his reasons for doing it, the way it tore us apart, my own complicity.  Where to begin? 

I did not begin with the quality and character of our relationship.  I did not begin with my grief.  Or my guilt.  Or the heroin.  I began with sweet, sensual details, the things that made me smile when I remembered him.  And when I was ready, I moved into the sensuality of the heroin.  And then the grief.  Later, my complicity and guilt.  As I moved through these emotional contexts, the narrative changed - structurally, emotionally, psychologically.  The context was quite literally changing the facts. 

In other words, context is not something that exists permanently or statically.  It shifts and settles like sediment.  And when it shifts, your memories shift along with it.   

But unlike a document, the soil of an archaeological site can be interpreted only once in the state in which it is found. The very process of excavation destroys a site forever ... - from the Smithsonian (click text to visit site)

Recently, a friend confessed that her memoirs had replaced her actual memories - her original impressions, images, interpretations, and emotions overwritten by the revisions stored on her laptop hard drive.  Notebook scribbles, structured paragraphs, aestheticized dialogue. These are her reality now. 

"I will be telling a story," she said. "And my husband will stop me.  That is not what happened, he will say.  That is what you wrote."

This is not to say her memoirs lie.  Rather, it points to the ways in which essays are shaped - formally, aesthetically, emotionally, and otherwise.  Creative nonfiction writers do not merely retrieve and record the artifacts of their lives, digging them out from the sediment and arranging them for display.  They imbue them with meaning.  In order to create that meaning, they reshape the emotional, psychological, or temporal contexts.  Subtle as this process may be, it is also extremely powerful. 

But something even more fundamental - more powerful - is revealed by my friend's story.  When original memories are replaced by our crafted ones, what does this mean?  Just like in archaeology, the site is destroyed by our own digging.  Forever altered. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Even without writing, our memories are reshaped all the time.  As we change and mature, our memories change, too - in nuance, emotional tenor, intensity.  But the fact that we can destroy our own dig sites does imply a certain ethical responsibility - to both ourselves and others.  Dig sites must be destroyed for some purpose - to ask important questions or discover a long-hidden truth (whether that be personal, social, political, historical, or aesthetic.)   

If we can do this, then all our lost memories will be worth it.

Although most mainstream nonfiction writers do not stray from the territory of personal experience, many have made leaps into a more speculative realm - weaving historical, social, and scientific research into the text.  Albert Goldbarth, Luc Sante, and David Ulin come immediately to mind.

This is different from personal research - when writers read old diary entries or ask their mothers about childhood memories.  Here, meaning is not located solely within the personal, but in the nexus between scientific and personal truth, memory and forensic examination.  I aspire to this in my own work, often reading medical textbooks, corresponding with scientists, or looking at crime scene photographs.  It is surprising how everything connects, how much richer experience becomes when examined in this speculative mode.

For the next series of posts, I want to focus on this process.  Expect a post tomorrow about expert witnesses in criminal trials, creative writing, and the poetic imagination.

In criminal trials, expert witnesses provide scientific, medical, or other opinions based on the available evidence.  For example, the defense might retain a forensic pathologist to review state autopsy findings and formulate an alternative - and credible - theory for cause of death.   

In the case of Nathaniel Abraham, defense attorneys used a forensic psychiatrist to prove that Abraham (only 11 at the time of his crime) could not have appreciated the consequences of his actions:

Defense psychiatrist Gerald Shiener ... testified that children — particularly Abraham — are not small adults and cannot fully appreciate the consequences of their actions and unanticipated results. In other words, Shiener said, Abraham could not have intended to shoot Greene because, as the boy said in his statement to police, he was shooting at trees and did not realize that others could still be hit with a bullet. Shiener maintained that 11-year-olds like Abraham cannot form the intent for an adult crime because they because they cannot plan for the future the way adults can. (Robinson, Court TV)

This makes sense.  It is difficult to imagine any child mature enough to consider all possible consequences.   

On the other hand, specific evidence from the Abraham case seemed to indicate the opposite.  The prosecution presented a tough cross-examination:

... prosecutor Lisa Halushka confronted Shiener with a state psychiatrist's report on Abraham. According to this expert, Abraham said his family had told him not to play with guns because someone could get hurt. However, Abraham allegedly told this psychiatrist, he didn't listen to his relatives because he didn't want to.

Halushka also pointed out to Shiener that Abraham indicated in his police statement that he ran away after firing the gun and hid it, suggesting that he knew he had done something wrong and was attempting a cover-up. (Robinson, Court TV)

Shiener countered that any child would attempt to stay out of trouble.  According to him, it is inherently childish to run away and hide the gun.  Avoiding punishment is not the same thing as understanding consequences.

And so the case went.  Everything turned on subtle, psychological distinctions, the line between childhood and adulthood, the question of whether children can - or do - ever think like adults.  It was a kind of poetry - a refusal to accept facts at face value, a blurring of lines, a constant re-interpretation (and recontextualization) of evidence.

I love the way facts can be twisted and turned just by asking different questions or focusing on different details.  As Henry David Thoreau wrote, It is not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. 

The expert witness in creative nonfiction is different in at least one important sense. She is not present and usually does not speak in her own voice (except for direct quotations).  There is no opposing legal team to cross-examine the witnesses we choose.  No questioning.  Or is there?  The next post will discuss research and the poetic imagination - how a dialogic, adversarial process, combined with expert testimony, can create richly nuanced texts.   I will wrestle with questions such as how do we know when to use research? and how can we cross-examine our witnesses?

References:

Robinson, B. Psychiatrist's analysis of 13-year-old murder defendant challenged. CourtTV Online.  Retrieved April 11, 2004, from http://www.courttv.com/archive/trials/abraham/110599_am_ctv.html.

How do you know when you need research?

Memoirs (and often, personal essays) use the same techniques as fiction and poetry  - dialogue, metaphor, musicality, characterization, objective correlative, narrative arc, etc.   And since memoirs and essays are often based on personal experiences, they use familiar settings and characters. For these and other reasons, it can sometimes seem strange to use research as part of the writing process.  Maybe even stranger to include it in the final product.

For me, research is not only essential, it is my inspiration.  It fuels my work, ignites my curiosity, and helps me reach out beyond my private experiences.  Once, while writing an essay about wireless technology, I became interested in the effect of remote controls, cell phones, and RFID on my sense of touch.  I wondered if senses could fade without use, and if intimacy might mean something else in the brave new world around the corner.  I began to research experiments on touch, as well as new developments in RFID.  This led to a deeper interest in the overall implications of RFID on privacy, architecture, and the urban experience.  Which led to an interest in security architectures.  The research has led me to new and unfamiliar terrain, and yet, I remain grounded in personal experience.  As I research, I write down intuitive connections between abstract questions and concrete memories and details.  It is as if my left and right brain are whispering back and forth, and I am listening in.  So in my case, the answer is that I always need research.  My process would not be the same without it.

But what about when you start with experience?  When your process is not initially inspired by research? 

When I was a kid, I watched my grandmother die slowly from eight tumors in her brain.  At night, she would scream about the window above her bed, demanding to know whether the latch was locked.  She believed her spirit could not escape through a sealed window, that her ghost would be trapped here on earth for all eternity.  She swatted invisible insects, yelled names, then gagged on her own spit.  Her jaw twisted as she lost control of her facial muscles.  Later, she was forced into the hospital, where nurses used a small vacuum to clean spit from her mouth and throat.

I wanted to tell her story, but cancer had become the ultimate cliche.  How could I find a way to make the experience meaningful?  How could I relate it to something outside our family?  Research.  I learned about the areas of the brain her tumors destroyed - their functions and pathologies, what happens when they fail.  These biological processes led to questions about nerves and cells, which led me to nutrition, and back to the strange foods grandma cooked in her rural house - right on the edge of several farms.  Suddenly, everything connected.  Probably only half of this research made it into the essay, but I needed it all for the process. 

So how do you know when to do this?  When your story is too insular or familiar. When you want it to mean more than it already does.  When you want it to expand.  When you suspect the story points somewhere else - somewhere unexpected. When you have questions that are not answered by just the facts. 

But using research is not the same as using an expert witness.  The expert witness actually appears in the writing - not just in the process.  This will be the subject for the next post.

I want to apologize for the silence this past week. I am deep into research for a new essay and lost in thought. But you can look for expert witness part three later this evening.

One of the most fascinating aspects of criminal trials is that - with the exception of opening and closing arguments - lawyers do not create narrative arcs.  Connections and threads must be brought out through questions - not through expository speeches or explanations.  Lawyers are not allowed to turn to the jury and say, See how this testimony relates to the medical evidence?  At least not during the trial.  They can make connections during closing arguments, but even those are very limited in scope.  It is the jury that writes the narrative - figuring out how all the forensic evidence, witness testimony, and documents connect. 

Writers can invite a similar transaction from their readers, by creating implicit rather than explicit connections.

The most obvious example is the collage or snapshot essay, in which sections or fragments are arranged in order to create surprising juxtapositions.  In my own work, I have been known to quote fragments (with proper citation, of course) from my medical charts, news stories, letters, and scientific papers with no exposition or explanation at all.  I like to allow the juxtaposition to do the work, to allow the reader to say, oh, I see how this connects ... This also allows the expert witness to speak for herself, in her own voice (although, one could argue that context and juxtaposition change the voice, too.)

But these kinds of implicit connections can be made in traditional, linear essays as well.  In his book, American Ground, William Langewiesche presents evidence from various expert witnesses while still leaving room for readers to transact.  He does not write long passages of exposition interpreting all the facts or telling readers how to react.  Low Life by Luc Sante achieves something similar.  (And by the way, there are many examples where exactly the opposite approach is absolutely stunning - such as John Berger's The Shape of a Pocket.  This web site is simply exploring an approach that has been ignored or poorly defined by critics and academics.)

Writers walk a fine line, though, when they allow readers to create the story.  On the one hand, everything - every image, every detail, every bit of research - must be exquisitely ordered and controlled, in order to create a cohesive whole.  On the other, enough space must be left for speculation - for the reader to be complicit in the creation of the story.   The writer must be willing to let go once the essay or book is released into the world.  And this is what the next post will explore - along with some examples of ideas mentioned above.