The Six Word-Memoirs

Smith magazine published a book of six-word memoirs a la Ernest Hemingway ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.")

Here's mine: Sometimes she took the long way.

What that leaves out is this: that sometimes she took the long way on purpose, simply to put off whatever was next. The fact that this is in the third person is not lost on me, and I promise to discuss it with whatever therapist I eventually hire.

The economy of language in six-word memoirs comes easy to me because I've been writing economically for years now. In fact, I've been in a prose straitjacket on account of my job, which is to write marketing stuff for technology companies, and to help others do the same. This stuff that I (and they) write must be very specific. The words we use are very specific, and the order in which they are arranged next to each other must also be very specific. And of course, the sentences that form must be nestled together without any chinks so that no light can get through.

The end result of all of this is, of course, a life-threatening lack of circulation. Interestingly (or not; I really don't know), my massage therapist pointed out yesterday that my hands and feet also have a serious lack of circulation.

Now that I sit at my table to write fiction, I'm finding that I do not know what to do with all the extra space that possibility affords me. I stretch for elusive adjectives; I delete helping verbs; I write sentence fragments on purpose just because I can. More often than not I stare dumbly at the screen wondering, "What do I want to say?" rather than "How do I say what Client X wants me to say?"

I think about the immigrant who, when faced with the vast choices in an American supermarket, passes out and then leaves with nothing.

That comparison may be a bit over on the dramatic side. But still I can't seem to reach what's up on the top shelves here.

Soon this space will be too small.

Sometimes the lessons I receive at Esalen wallop me over the head while I'm there, staring at the ocean from a cliffside hot spring. Sometimes they sneak up when I shuffle along a path or stop on the wooden bridge to listen to the river. Sometimes they gently nudge me after I've arrived back home.

Used to be that time would slow down at Esalen. That everything, including my digestion, would take a long, peaceful, relaxed journey into a state where hours and minutes barely existed as measures of how many breaths I've taken or dances I've melted into. Maybe it's because my experience there is so incredibly precious to me that it seems to slip through my fingers.

The five days I spent in Big Sur were gone in the blink of an eye, in the time it takes for a sea otter to deep dive into the kelp. I feel like I arrived, got my room key and massage and then got burped up onto Highway One northbound, unable to stop the forward velocity until I was sitting at Filorio in San Francisco, sharing the bone-in ribeye for two and a bottle of wine with Jennifer. And then some Frenet. And bourbon. My friend JJ, who lives at Esalen, told me this week that "vegan" is Indian for "bad hunter."

Anyway, my teacher took me by the hands somewhere in the vicinity of Wednesday and looked me in the eyes and said, over the microphone so really to everyone there, "Look into the eyes of who you perceive to be doing you wrong. Remember that we share the same condition." Or something like that. I may have the words wrong, but I believe I got the meaning right.

It kind of sounds trite when I type those words here, but for me it was a profound, "Lordy shit, I've been doing it all wrong." Yeah. And now that I spent a few hours pondering the human-ness of my comrades that I perceive to be doing me wrong, they are suddenly doing me right, acting with integrity and kindness instead of fear and anger. Like my grandma says, go know.

Soon This Space Will Be Too Small is the title of a song. I don't know who sings it. But the title was pointed out to me by my teacher while the song was playing and I can tell you this: this place, this body will one day be too small to contain my spirit. So will yours be. And the other temporary housing we erect for ourselves -- our jobs, our homes, our relationships -- well, sometimes they get too small too. And we turn in on ourselves when we choose to have no where else to go, when we're trapped in a glass bottle without an opening. It's the outward turning we need to follow.