Tag: confessional writing

Keeping secrets

My mantra: write without expectation of any
outcome.  Write into the
unknown.  
Grade two, 1960, seven years old, pen in hand.
And then I go into a
non-fiction class where the facilitator reckons that anyone who can’t write five
sentences on what her book is about is in trouble, or words to that
effect.  I challenged the
notion.  
We are talking about
different processes and perhaps even different times in the life of a
book.  I may well still be at the
beginning whereas she’s talking about the end phase when the book needs to come
together. 
I stood over the cats this morning
as the boy tried to pinch the last of his sister’s food before he had decided
to leave.  He’s a real standover
merchant and so I stood over him, ordering him out of the house until his
sister had finished.
I told the non-fiction writer that
I love to write.  That was a
mistake.  Besides it is not true,
not entirely true.  I write because
I need to write, because not to write would leave me feeling as if my life has
no purpose or meaning.  
I write to
find that meaning and to make sense of my life, but that is not something I
love, not really.  It’s more like
something I am compelled to do, for the pleasure it gives – and indeed it gives
me pleasure – and also for the need.
Hilary Mantel in her essay, ‘Diary’ writes about her experience of hospitalisation for surgery that went
wrong.  She describes her
hallucinations, her ‘hallies’ as she calls them, as if they are real and no
doubt they were real to her when they appeared to her mid fever and pain.  But towards the end of her essay she
talks about her reservations about this writing.  As if she is fearful of being included among the so-called ‘confessional writers’, those who, to use her words, ‘chase their own ambulances’. 
Is that what it’s all about, this
writing of mine?  
I asked a friend
to define the expression.  ‘Chasing
your own ambulance’, as he understands it, means to go looking for an accident,
to write about your trauma, as if to bear witness, thereby encouraging the
reader also to bear witness.  
While
the word ‘confessional’, despite its religious connotations of admitting to
sin, can also mean the notion of disclosing something that has hitherto
remained hidden.  It has perhaps a
more neutral tone, though the notion of sharing secrets to me does not.
For some reason secrets carry the
weight of sin.  Why else keep
something secret unless somewhere along the road there is some sense that
someone has done wrong?  That
someone has something to hide and that something stirs up anxiety or fear.  
We don’t keep unimportant things secret. 
Keeping things secret takes an
effort, which is not to say there aren’t many things we might repress, seemingly
without effort.  They slip out of consciousness and only crop up when the
pressures they exert for exposure rise to the surface.  How did Freud term it? ‘the return of the repressed.’  But that’s not the same as deliberately keeping a secret, one that refuses to leave your consciousness.  
I have long tried to understand my
inability to learn while I was first at university from eighteen years of age
till I was twenty two and went out into the world to take on my first job.  Certainly numbers had me
flummoxed.  
In places they talk of a
female phobia of mathematics and perhaps of the sciences generally, that goes back in
time.  Certainly in my family my father’s
conviction that girls were good for nothing apart from housework, child rearing and
sexual comfort held sway.  
Despite this, my
mother read all her life.  She
still does.  But in my father’s
mind her reading was limited to trashy romance or pot boilers and religious
propaganda like the Catholic Tribune and the Advocate.
The education system within the
Catholic schools I attended both in my primary years and at secondary level
added to this fantasy of female inferiority.  
The focus was on
memory, which we polished with rote learning. Understanding why people might
behave as they do, as explored through English literature and history books,  came through a thick layer of religious conviction. 
For instance, Attila the Hun was a barbarian
who sought to overthrow the Christians. We read and rote learned the lives of
the saints and were encouraged to practice with sincerity and devotion, and an eye to our
calling as dedicated to others.  
If
we were not called to follow God as priests and nuns, then marriage was
the only option, marriage to another Catholic with whom we would bring up
several children, as did my mother, but she had married a convert.  Mixed marriages were then frowned upon. 
There was a system of rules in place that barred deeper explorations of the
meaning of things and I did not come to understand the meaning of the words, concepts and theories until much later in life.  
There were facts and religious beliefs, faith and goodness.  Others practised evil and wrong doing. 
We should not and that was all.  A black and white world, and one which I now prefer to avoid, especially in my writing, other than to describe it.  

Autobiography is not Confession.

Recently at a seminar, after I had presented a paper on Straddling Two Worlds, about my difficulties of working both as a therapist and as an auto biographer, an audience member asked about the need to question the impact of autobiographical/confessional writing.

Initially I was flummoxed by her question, and disturbed by her insistence that we should interrogate the value, and the consequences of the impact of confessional writing on others who might also be involved and on readers.

I am hazy about the exact nature of her question and comments, only that they have continued to rankle over the past few days. They rattle around in my head like so many loose bullets about to explode.

And then it came to me. I object to her use of the word ‘confessional’. I object to people using the word ‘confessional’ as if it is synonymous with ‘autobiographical’.

I have made my confession many times in my early life, from the time I was seven years old when I went for my first holy confession, to the time I was nineteen years old when I gave it all away.

‘Bless me father for I have sinned. It is one month since my last confession. I accuse myself of…’ I then manufactured safe sins, sins like telling lies twice, stealing once, and disobedience.

The sin of disobedience sat uncomfortably. I was an obedient child. Other people disobeyed. Not me, not then. But in confession it seemed safer to admit to disobedience than to mention my real sins, my sins of impurity.

I convinced myself that ‘hell fire and damnation’ awaited me at the end because from the time I was twelve years old, from the time I noticed my body changing, from the time I felt the first rush of desire towards my own body and that of another, I was tortured. These were the sins to which I could not admit. If I were to admit such sins to the priest, questions would follow.

How did I know this? How did I know that the priest would ask questions about my impure thoughts and that he would not otherwise bother to inquire into my sins of theft, dishonesty and disobedience?

I learned early, the day I took hold of a man’s penis under the bridge that spanned Canterbury Road, after which the man gave me sixpence because I did as he had asked – I held his penis and watched the cream come out.

I have written long stories about this moment in my life, this moment when I first took hold of a man’s penis. I kept it secret at the time from my sister and my brother who had come along with me on this outing and who had wandered off when the man called me over. The next day I told my mother about it. My mother suggested I take the details to confession. It was then I decided my sin must be serious.

For the uninitiated, confessional boxes are like coffins standing on end, narrow dark closets, in which you are immediately faced with a wooden paneled wall after you walk through the door and there is room only for you to kneel. At eye height once on your knees, there is a grille that the priest slides open when it comes your turn to confess. There is a confessional box on either side of the central chamber in which the priest sits. You speak into the grille hot and breathless and the priest mumbles and murmurs.

The only time a priest ever questioned me about my sins was after I told him about the man whose penis I had held.
What did you do? What did the man do? The priest asked. He wanted all the details.

Usually after I had confessed to my sins, the priest offered easy absolution, a few Hail Mary’s, an Our Father. But this time, he ordered an entire decade of the rosary. I concluded my sin was enormous. And thereafter I shied off telling a priest in confession anything other than my rote learned mandatory sins.

This long digression into my early confessional experience is my attempt to tell you that confession is the place in which you admit to your sins. Autobiography is the place in which you write about your life. The two are not synonymous.

My life as I write it is not simply a list of my sins. I hope I have the courage to bear witness to my mistakes and misdemeanors in my writing if necessary but that is not all that I write. I do not confess my sins in my writing. I am not on the lookout for absolution or redemption. I do not want forgiveness.

If I were confessing my sins here on the page then I would turn my readers into my priest, the one who passes judgment on behalf of God, who can decide whether I am worthy of forgiveness and how I might go about gaining that forgiveness.

As William Michaelian says in a comment on Paul L. Martin’s post, Looking around the Blogosphere, on The Teacher’s View blog,
‘I want what all writers, artists, and human beings want, whether they publicly admit it or not: I want to be understood; I want to be appreciated; I want to be known and recognized in my lifetime…’

I do not want to confess my sins. I want to share my story.