I’m nervous about writing, and perhaps I should be.
Growing up I never liked to read. Neither of my parents went to college. Neither of them took the time to peruse much more than a copy of Popular Mechanics, or maybe, the Readers Digest abridged version of Alex Haley’s Roots, which they would watch on television anyway… But I can’t blame my anxiety about reading and writing well on them.
All I can say is that I love the capacity of words to inject emotional energy into a Tuesday afternoon with the drive-through traffic at Starbucks swirling around me. I grew to love novels, short stories and poems, but first and foremost, I was impressed with the miracle of a well-chosen word. And sometimes, even an poorly-chosen word would suffice and set me off. Just the sheer effort of an individual to articulate his or her experience–that’s enough to make my hair stand on end. Hence: my apprehension!
What if I fuck it up?
Today I heard on National Public Radio a segment with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It dealt with “Roots Envy,” or the inability of some folks to trace their family ancestry back generation after generation like the legendary figure of the 1970′s best-seller. Gates, around that time, became enamored with the possibility and discovered some things about his mother and father that were remarkable. For example, evidently one of Gates’ kin had marshaled in and out of a Revolutionary War militia between the years 1777 and 1784. For an African-American that’s especially intriguing. Also, during the broadcast, Neil Conan asked the author of the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader to revisit what he had written about his mother’s funeral. (The audio of this reading, available today at 6 p.m., is worth listening to.) He actually didn’t appreciate the stale, blue-blood service that they had back in 1997. And so, with nothing more than a few words, he described the rowdy sermon and the swaying hymn-sings and the falling-down-in-the-aisle catharsis that would have been preferred. It would have been a funeral like they had had for this uncle or for that aunt. It would have been hot. It would have gone on for hours. It would have included those paper-fans, by which the mourners move the air about in vain…
I tell you, when I heard Gates read about this re-cast episode of his life, I wept like she were my own mother. While driving through road construction barriers on I-90, I nearly couldn’t see that I’d be losing the left lane. And I realized, while putting my foot on the brake, that I don’t have to be so nervous, that I’m not so much searching for that perfect word as I am searching for that intuitive trigger or that trap door that allows me to plunge into humanity’s collective subconscious. Is there such a thing… such an ocean of dreams?
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