Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I want to talk to you about the relationship between art and life
and how they influence each other.
And starting with real life:
My friend Kitty and I used to hike up to Dante's peak,
which is up above the Griffith Park Observatory.
And from up there, on a smog-free day, you can see all the way
to the Angeles Crest on one side and to the Pacific Ocean on the other.
It is the most spectacular view;
it could give you religion.
It could.
However, it strikes me as an accident of nature;
a conspiracy on the part of geography and climate and time.
Whereas, for me, human beings reaching out to each other the way we do -
whining and moaning and wailing and sputtering -
to bring that view to words, or pictures, or music ...
that might be evidence of something really divine.
So, this is my way of admitting to you that I am spiritually challenged.
It's not that I don't appreciate the natural wonders of the world.
I do.
It's just that I'm looking to people - to art and not religion, that is -
to make sense of it for me.
So, for example, take the full moon. It's breathtaking, right?
And Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" brings it close, reveals that moon to me,
makes me think about it in ways that I wouldn't otherwise.
Or trees. If I were inclined to walk by a tree
and not notice how remarkable it is, I only have to look at a painting,
by Cezanne or Pissarro, and I remember how I feel about trees.
And, here's a good example for you:
middle age.
See, for those of you who don't know this yet,
middle age is a kick in the ass.
(Laughter)
But you read about it in Tolstoy or Virginia Woolf or Alice Munro,
and you're almost delighted to be a member of the club.
(Laughter)
The point is, it's the human urge to mark and share the moment,
via words and pictures and performance,
that for me, inspires awe,
and even faith.
The question is, where does this urge come from?
What's it all about?
And as a writer and a teacher of writing,
I'm inclined to try to figure it out from that angle.
Joan Didion famously said,
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
And I think it is true.
We love stories, don't we?
We crave beginnings and middles and ends.
We want to imagine that our lives have an arc and a shape
and that we can make sense of them as we live them.
See, I was one of those kids: my head, my whole self was always in a book.
I was Heidi. I was Peter Pan - and Wendy.
And Charlotte, and Fern, and Wilbur.
I was Robinson Crusoe and I was Holden Caulfield, too.
When I touched back down in real life, with my real family and my real house,
I wanted a story, naturally.
I wanted burning buildings and sinking ships.
And high stakes and romance.
I wanted to imagine my parents in love.
And in peril.
And so, one day, I walked into the master bedroom,
my mother was in there, filing her nails on the big bed,
and I asked her, "Mom, did Daddy save you?"
Well, she looked at me funny. She stopped filing her nails.
She said, "Did he save me?
Honey, what are you talking about? What do you mean?"
"When you met him, did he save your life?"
She went back to filing her nails.
"Certainly he did," she said, "I was starving; he took me to dinner."
(Laughter)
"That's all? That is all?"
How not to take ordinary life for granted,
how to give our experience weight and heft,
how to prove that it matters.
Well, Tolstoy wrote that art is a means of intercourse.
And he explained that it connects
the audience, the viewers and the listeners and the readers,
not only with the artist, but with each other,
with anyone and everyone who ever experienced that art,
whatever it is.
So, for me, the answer might have something to do with
the experience of art as a way of reaching out
and connecting with each other.
And what do we want?
Well, as with any relationship, we want to be known.
We want to see ourselves reflected.
We want answers, sure, but if we can't have answers,
at least we want to know that other people are asking the same questions, right?
We human beings, woe is us, we have this two-pronged problem:
One, we know we're not getting out of here alive.
(Laughter)
Two, we can remember.
That means we can track and account for every loss and failure
every step of the way to death.
But, memory and mortality turn out to be motivating, I think.
They make us want to pay attention.
They make us want to figure out why we're here
and how to live
and leave some evidence of that effort behind,
with the idea that redemption, if not immortality,
might be in the offing.
So, speaking of redemption -
about the same time that I asked my mother whether or not my dad had saved her,
I ran into a spot of trouble.
I was in third or fourth grade, so I was eight or nine years old,
and one day, I walked home from school with two terrible boys,
Howard and Doug.
As previously, and secretly, arranged,
we walked right by my front door on Fellsmere Road, up the hill,
across the street to Howard's house,
went down into his basement, which was remote and windowless,
and there I did as I promised
because those bad boys said they'd say I did it, if I didn't.
So, I lifted my polka dot sundress
and I showed them my underwear.
(Laughter)
Which, I must tell you, were not all that much to look at -
white, high-waisted, Carter's, full coverage.
(Laughter)
So then, said Doug - the real bad boy, the instigator - he said,
"If you don't show us everything, we're really going to tell."
And so I did.
I pulled down my panties and then I pulled them back up,
and I walked home all alone, and once there,
I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't read,
I couldn't do my homework.
I couldn't think of anything else.
The agony of that secret and the shame,
and the consequential urge to spill the beans and so be purged,
it was excruciating.
See, I intuited that my way to relief was to tell my story
in my own way and my own time.
So, knowing nothing of Catholicism, this was my first confession,
told to my mother, at bedtime,
with her cigarette doing loop de loops in the dark.
And wanting to keep her there, I told it in full and humiliating detail.
And when I was finished, she told me she loved me
and I was good.
And so I was able to sleep.
I've been confessing ever since.
(Laughter)
It should come as no surprise to anybody that eventually I wrote a memoir,
only that it took me so long.
My book is about my relationship with my dad,
and what you need to know is that fifteen years ago,
he was murdered in a robbery gone very wrong.
It was horror and grief that got me writing -
wanting to comprehend the incomprehensible.
But though the crime was the catalyst,
it turns out not to be the main event of the book,
which, like so many in this genre, is mostly about me -
my attempt to make an arc, to tell a true and meaningful story.
I'm, therefore, surprised, and a little embarrassed,
when people offer me condolences after they've read.
"But, did you like it?" I want to ask them,
"Did you like the writing?"
See, even though the book is mostly about me,
I'm dying to know that I created something that touches you.
And there's another question that gnaws, and I suppose it will gnaw for all time,
although I'm insisting on this relationship between art and life
and the notion that they illuminate each other.
Is it okay that I use the events of my father's life
to make sense of my own?
And, even more than that, is it okay that I've entirely reinvented myself
since his death?
Did my father have to be killed for me to become the person I am today?
And the really uncomfortable and difficult answer to that question is yes.
Yes, absolutely. You cannot have one without the other.
What choice do we have but to integrate our experiences into our stories?
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
So, I want to tell you just one more.
A few years ago, I took my daughter to a screening of "Atonement,"
with Vanessa Redgrave on board, for a Q & A afterwards.
Eliza was sixteen at the time, and she had a question.
She was a little bit too shy to ask it herself
so she scribbled it on a receipt I found in the bottom of my purse,
and I agreed to ask it for her.
Maybe some of you remember the movie -
it was quite faithful to the novel by Ian McEwen.
It begins with a little girl, Briony, and she's a storyteller.
She tells a whopper of a lie. It destroys a couple of lives.
She grows up to be a novelist - Vanessa Redgrave -
and in her effort to atone, she gives those people whose lives she ruined,
a fictional happy ending.
And Eliza's question - I memorized it,
I keep that little receipt tacked to the bulletin board above my desk at home -
she wanted to know, and I'm quoting her,
if Vanessa Redgrave had played Briony
as somebody who is redeemed by the writing,
or a coward for not telling the truth?
So, it was a gorgeous question.
Vanessa Redgrave was stumped in the moment. She couldn't answer.
I chalked it up to her profession.
It's very hard for us actors to judge the characters we play.
So, I tried to answer the question in the car on the way home.
And I told Eliza that confession and atonement, as far as I know,
are inventions of the human imagination
and that, therefore, there might come a time
when we have to accept that redemption might not be in the offing.
But now I wonder if Vanessa Redgrave's response wasn't more honest.
Because there aren't definitive answers to these questions, are there?
There's only that view from Dante's Peak,
and the moon and trees and middle age.
There's only what we make of personal triumph and tragedy.
We, who resolve to pay attention to each other's stories and visions
and songs and dreams, we are consequently connected.
And it's in that connection, in the listening and telling,
in the making and receiving,
in the folding life into art and art into life,
that we stand to find some solace and reward,
never mind immortality and redemption.
Our witnessing is an act of faith
by which we stand to be comforted
and inspired and transformed,
here and now.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)