Two principal themes of Ann Elizabeth Carson's life and writing have been the importance of story, and a pattern of broad-based and intense questioning developed in a childhood where family problems were dealt with in silence. Her poems are filled with questions. She perceptively observes, “there are no one-answer questions.” Central to Ann Elizabeth’s personal life story has been the story of her grandmother's hair. This particular story reflects her culture and times, and also has a more universal resonance. Harvesting its lessons has yielded a rich set of prose writings and poems, including three published books: Shadows Light, My Grandmother's Hair and The Risks of Remembrance. In this way Ms. Carson's writing life has been about creating community. Here, in her own words, is Ann Elizabeth Carson's story: |
I have chosen to read a series of poems, and briefly comment on them, that I wrote about a family story that impacted every aspect of my life—although I certainly did not realize that it had, or the ways that it had done so, when I began to think about the story and to write about the process of discovering it, and its importance in my life. These poems speak about my life—and my writing life, because they are inseparable. We tell stories to find out about ourselves. In general, there are two ways to tell and explore stories. In those societies where the interests of the group trump those of the individual, stories are told about groups of people (Cultural Anthropology). For example the Odyssey is about a nations interests. In Gilgamesh, the oldest recorded story, the interests of his kingdom eventually trump his own. Most western cultures, especially North American, are oriented to the individual. Take for instance, Don Quixote and his struggle to find his way. Or the work of Freud, Jung and others who focused on the innerness of the individual journey. As a child of my culture, and trained as a psychotherapist before post-modernism became widely popular in psychology circles, my journey began as an inner, individual one,
and grew outward to become a group story as well. A family story and its echoes: All families have stories. I never really heard the family story I am going to read about “in so many words” as the saying goes, until I was an adult. I didn’t pay any attention to it—at least I thought I wasn’t—until my life’s circumstances and an awareness of repeating patterns in my responses to them, almost forced me to think about it. The layers of the story, and the way it fanned out to include the culture I grew up in, emerged, over many years, in a reciprocal dance among my at first dominant mind, and my physical, emotional, spiritual and social selves. How to cohere what at first seemed like so many separate and often conflicting aspects of me and my many contexts? Writing, especially poetry, had been a passion of mine since childhood and so finding “not in the usual words” began with poems. Then came movement (Tai chi, Yoga, Dance) and finally art work, which broke one cultural spell and cast another. I carried quite a lot on this journey, some jettisoned along the way, others kept, and still others acquired. One of the kept ones is this quote from Adrienne Rich:
“The detail outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves, was here before us, knew we would come, and sees beyond us.” |
BEGINNINGS My grandfather made my grandmother Our family was never the same. I don't know Or how she knew But she heard and she knew. There was no speaking, I don't remember when except that I was a woman then, Did she tell me Why do I think she would think I should hear it? I don't know whether my sister heard |
Although I grew up in what was seen and assumed to be—by me as well—a happy, “normal” middle class family there was always a sense of something underneath. |
SILENCE |
A Habit of Questioning: My mother was a voracious reader and a natural academic and researcher at heart. She instilled in us the importance of questioning. I began asking questions, even about family matters, early in my life and have never stopped –as my now middle-aged children remind me. I looked for answers in familiar places, challenging the ground rules in academia. Looking for understanding, I also shared my story with other women: |
MY WOMEN'S GROUP I cried when I told them. They did too. "Oh, oh in the garbage!" wailed the women, I dared tell more. How handsome he was with his white hair And then they were sorry for him! "How that man must have suffered, When my grandmother's pain had shocked them I was sure the But in foregrounding him, Her hair stayed in the garbage. |
The women’s orientation to “looking after” men, to deferring to them, drew my attention to how I had/and still can.
I realized how that perspective sidelined my feelings and my thinking, drove them underground- again and again. Slowly and relentlessly I could not avoid or deny this,
and this understanding had profound and wide-ranging effects on my academic and professional lives. The effects of silence are not just in mind and social memory but in body memory as well. As I explored the ways in which I was enmeshed
in our family story, memory held in the body became obvious: |
TAI CHI I remember Tai Chi in early morning, in my body. Forgetting her, |
Experiences like this highlighted the taboo about all references to the body that I grew up with. In my family and social milieu—no body, or, for that matter emotions.
Nor, were woman of my generation thought to have much in the way of a mind—they were dominated by unruly emotions which made their thinking unreliable. |
THE RISKS OF REMEMBRANCE Death is nosing around, sliding in and out Now, I can go back behind what I think I know. As long as I can still hear waves curling in on themselves, |
Remembering: Ms. Carson discussed different ways of seeking, first quoting Abu Yazid al-Bistami: The last three stanzas from HER STORY IN MINE reflect a more intellectual way of thinking about the process of remembering: |
. . . Maybe remembered solidly, maybe not all by tomorrow, until I can believe, somewhere in grateful muscles and eased mind, |
I began to dance with a Sacred Circle Dance Group when I was recuperating from a long illness, and found memory in the dance: |
DANCE So like an eagle she sits, Distant Now she sits, an old eagle, from Shadows Light |
Painting, working with colour, helps me with my seemingly ceaseless questioning because it gets to the root of the questions—emotions. In Rudolph Steiner’s philosophy
and practice it is colour that holds our emotions. Exploring colour means exploring ones emotions, seeing how different colours evoke different emotions. I was brought up never
to talk about emotions. That meant that somehow I was not “allowed” to feel them. It also meant that I would accept—at first without question—that emotions were irrelevant to serious academic inquiry.
And I certainly wanted to be taken seriously in that world. |
SOMETHING WILL COME OF THIS Before words, before layered stories, Here are singing veils sweeping in green grief, Finding what is hidden – Do I use all my fears? One fierce question at a time. |
Painting helped me to SEE my emotions—in front of my eyes on the canvas—and so to acknowledge their right to exist “in the open”. Of course that got me into trouble when I began to question the “dominant” academic discourse that outlawed emotions. Such “impertinent” questioning had disastrous consequences for several years and later became one of those “it changed my life” moments. And now, a poem to express the importance of "staying with it":
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REMEMBERING Naked in the sun from The Risks of Remembrance |
For me clay is about the body, is about immediacy. You cannot sculpt something that isn't you. Clay slows me down, gets me through the stuck places: |
. . . Not yet. I talk to people – on and on. Until Why do I keep putting it off until I start to ache thick and thin, pinched and curling over (I have been cut), Questions roll out of me like a cash register slip Questions ground me in my clay body where all the answers |
BEING HERE Curled petals edging veiled overlapping layers of yellow Just so, my hovering shell politely shields me from The Risks of Remembrance |