Thirteen years ago this coming July, I jotted notes while reading Susan Tiberghien’s One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer’s Art and Craft. In my notes, I included a quotation from Robert Atwan cited by Tiberghien:
What essays give you is a mind at work. — Robert Atwan (“Return of the Essay“)
This possibility provides the seed for today’s consideration.
Observing a Mind at Work
Imagine being able to observe the inner workings of a person’s mind while they compose an essay. While they try to compose an essay. Essaying is, after all, a trial. An attempt. An endeavoring toward some coalescence of idea(s) and words capable of infecting a reader with the same wonder and possibly even the same conclusion(s) as the author.
Imagine being able to eavesdrop in the mind of an essayist sifting memories and sorting experiences; distilling spirits from the fruits of life; alchemizing diverse inputs in the hopes of discerning a cohesive structure; deciphering data to reveal a design; disentangling a narrative from the muddled mess.
Although my notes didn’t wander into the realm of “voyeurism”, it comes to mind. Let’s conveniently sidestep the unseemly side of voyeurism (ie. sexual connotations) that definitely does NOT apply in the present context, but let’s preserve the notion of observing. The voyeurism of a mind at work. Interpolation into the curiosity and yearning; the mixology of memory or massaging of notions; the eureka arrivals and the labyrinthine dead-ends; an intimate perspective on the sculpting of ideas, the attempt at synthesizing and conjoining and creating a mental map that guides us to the hidden treasure.
There is nothing more exciting than to follow a live, candid mind thinking on the page, exploring uncharted waters. — Phillip Lopate, “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story” in To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (New York: Free Press, 2013), p. 43.
At the time as I was reading Tiberghien I wrote in my notes, “This memoir really involves an opening up of my skull…” A touch melodramatic in retrospect. I went on to extend this metaphorical laying open with an introspective inventory and assessment of the previous four years which we’d poured into rehabilitating Rosslyn. My decision-making, Susan’s decision-making, our collective decision-making. The way that we were living, adjusting to a more-or-less completed home revitalization. An internal dialogue and a revisiting of conversations spanning about four times longer than we’d allotted at the outset, running dialogues with contractors, family, and friends about the outsized project we’d undertaken (and at last survived!) Contemplating a landscape of memories, considering how our quest to catalyze this adventure from beginning to end had become a journey that neither of us really had anticipated.
I’m still — thirteen years after first wrestling with the idea of essaying — relying on the navigational tools of essay to help me sort through this Rosslyn chapter. “A mind at work”… “exploring uncharted waters.” Again. For the first time. A mind endeavoring to make sense of circumstance. Trying to connect the dots, to find meaning in a catalogue of events, victories, disasters,…
What began with restoring a house into a home as a way to reboot our lives became a collective journey shared by many, not just Susan and me. Everyone that worked on this +/-4 year long adventure. And our families. Our friends. Our neighbors.
And although this project long since evolved beyond the capacity of an essay, many of the blog posts are composed as essays. It’s an intertwined collection of essays and poems and field notes nominally held together by a central subject, Rosslyn, but really sprawling into something else, a sort of three dimensional mosaic. A mind at work. The story of a house, yes, but more so, the story of our relationship with home.
What do you think?