A Speech At Shipley

On Friday I was given the Distinguished Alumni Award from The Shipley School, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. I am posting my speech, a request from some of my classmates who weren't able to be there. We had a very happy time seeing each other. We were at school during the hippie era and during the Vietnam War, the Civil and Women's Rights movements. We were all girls, a situation not as given to pschosexual violence as movies would have you believe. Everyone has had rough moments since, and everyone is incredibly distinguished, with jawdropping jobs. I will write my Shipley book one of these days.

Thank you so much for this honor. It means a lot coming from Shipley, because Shipley is where I was formed, and Shipley has formed hundreds of other distinguished alumni as well. The girls in my class alone are extraordinarily accomplished: I have never again met a group of people as smart and focused. So that this year this distinction comes to me is necessarily something I have to think about and learn to accept over time. I deeply appreciate it.

I arrived at Shipley as a kindergartner in the spring of 1958. My mother and aunt are Shipley alumnae, so it was natural that my sister and I should go here as well. Since that first day at Beechwood House, I haven’t really ever left. Thirteen years of childhood and youth in an institution with a strong philosophy cannot be separated from who you are.

Some of you may have literary aspirations, so I’m going to cite four ways--out of many--that Shipley helped me become a writer.

The first is friends. I still know a lot of my Shipley classmates—some are here today. I knew them when they were five and all the way through until they were 18. Not only that, we knew each other’s families. That gave us an intimacy that doesn’t happen later in life, except with one’s spouse.  I spent so much time at their houses, and they mine, that there were no secrets between us. We still can pick up where we left off, even after years pass without talking. We spent dozens of nights staying up, telling each other stories. I was known to stay awake talking even after friends had fallen asleep. I tried to be interesting enough to keep sleepy girls awake. This was a lesson in the importance of dramatic tension and suspense; it is important to keep the reader awake.

The second is the teachers. One expects a high level of teacher from college, but I only had two professors at Penn who were the equal of the teachers I had here. We are in the Reilly theater, and I find it no wonder Mrs. Reilly has been honored with an auditorium. She took me in hand when I most needed it. I was a very rebellious girl and never wrote the assignment she asked. She would literally hunt me down in the school to hand me back whatever version of the assignment I had done for her, which she took seriously, and commented on as if I’d followed instructions. At the end of these chats, she’d always stand up straight, give me a stern stare, and say. “Now, Alice, go home and do it my way.” I owe Mrs. Reilly my revision skills.

The third debt I owe to Shipley comes of the honor system. Does that still exist? (No, it doesn't.) It held a huge place in my imagination when I was here, and I spent many hours in discernment figuring out what to report myself for, what to say when I was caught in a wrong doing, and what to write in the school newspaper that might change some of the rules. It was a great source of pressure and soul searching to have to live up to an honor system, and it helped form some of my ideas about theme, and about the existence of a parallel universe where everyone behaves as she should.

The fourth lasting influence I will mention is the two great headmistresses who ran the school during my years, Miss Speer and Mrs. Epes, both true intellectuals. Mrs. Epes shared her love of poetry in assemblies such as this, and her poetic sensibility allowed her to see potential in me that would have been overlooked in many other schools.  She let me stay in school when my behavior really warranted a different outcome. These women did not have easy personal lives, but they set a high standard for scholarship and independence. Mrs. Epes encouraged me far more than I deserved, but it took. She told me I was a good poet, and I believed her. Not many people have that kind of power, and both these headmistresses did. Miss Speer’s stories of her girlhood in China, which I heard before I was even ten, surely influenced me to become a Chinese major in college.

I hope that you all appreciate being students at Shipley. I don’t think what college you go to matters nearly as much as having spent your early years in a great school. Shipley was a great school, and from everything I hear it still is--although I am a little bummed out to have just heard it is a better school now than it was when I was here. In any case, I am glad I ended up doing a few things to repay what I got from being here. I wouldn’t say that my ending up being distinguished was entirely predictable—but you are all being prepared for the unknown. I was.

Anglophilia

I don't know why England has sent into the world these major gay male pop stars and we haven't. This seems to be largely about the '70s and '80s, too. I miss the whole feeling of that era and of these people being the big stars. It was such a time of hope for new and wild ways of being. I can still work up some exhilaration when I remember. The images these people brought into the world were saucy and free. I doubt the royal wedding will be as inspiring.

An Indelible Tribute

How do people choose the words they tattoo onto their bodies? I know one answer. In 2009 Tobias Wolff read his great story, Bullet In the Brain, at The Story Prize reading. My son, Asher, who was in 11th grade at the time, was so moved and surprised by the beauty of the ending--the improper colloquial poetry of a phrase repeated three times, they is, they is, they is--that he told me right then he was going to have it tattooed on his arm. It took two years for the plan to come together but today I saw the result.

Below is a link to Tobias Wolff reading Bullet In The Brain, beginning at 1:16.
http://fora.tv/2009/03/04/The_Story_Prize_Awards_Ceremony_2009

Of Inevitable Endings

I saw such a beautiful film last night, called Of Gods and Men. It did what I love in a story, binding a deeply understood character to an exactly matched situation.

In this case the character is a group of monks living in a monastery in Algeria. They are each drawn individually, yet they also function as a single character by nature of their bond of community. The coming war threatens to break them apart, as they disagree about whether or not to stay or to leave.
A good story! Simple and engaging. Should one face danger if he doesn't have to?
It depends. The conditional nature of the answer invites the dramatist to enter and explore how this one group of people made the decision they did.

The filmmaker, Xavier Beauvois, has a truly beautiful and penetrating vision, a moral vision. When an artist sees so clearly, he or she arrives at an ending that is inevitable.
I have been thinking all day about this--how surprising the inevitable is, compared to how dull the predictable. And how the two may be exactly the same on the surface--the same ending. The climax of this film wasn't a surprise in the sense of not being able to see it coming. It was foreseeable from way off. Yet it still upset me. I knew, but I didn't really know. The fullness of the end was made known to me in the gestures and feints of the film.

The inevitable surprises because it isn't a straight shot. A character takes an action or arrives at a decision not just according to the facts--neither in the world, nor in what he knows of himself. He acts or decides based as much on what he doesn't know as on what he does. He has to move forward, and the movement connects him with all of the unknown. He is walking into the dark. He is uneven--we all are. Smart in some ways, dense in others.

The author penetrates this jumble. Careful, sensitive discernment perceives inevitability rather than predictability. This thinking can take a very long time, as Edith Wharton, Scott Fitzgerald, and Henry James have all noted in writing about their work. A character may seem real to an author because thinking about his creature--really thinking and asking--makes the author more real to himself. It is hard work, and demanding, because to make up a creature who is other than oneself you have to be able to see beyond yourself. Most of us have such conflicted feelings about ourselves that we are blocked from true insight.

If we can see, if we can create an other as complex as a living person, if we can portray a constellation and connect the stars, the energy of creation communicates to the reader--the character comes alive.

Inevitability is surprising, because it contains the whole mystery of a human being. Predictability is unmoving, because there are no distant notes being struck inside a soul as it struggles to decide.

The film was a portrayal of an artist in this process of a deep discernment of his subject. What happened in that monastery? Why did the monks do what they did? It was its own story, and also a metaphor for a mind torn different ways, even in full faith.

Spring Break, non-Ft. Lauderdale version

I lost my timelines; or more accurately, I misplaced them. They were here somewhere, in this small grey room. I knew I hadn't left them on a train or in a taxi. There would be no breathcatching writerly anecdote attendant to the loss. I had hidden them from myself.

This week I was alone, completely. My mind was my own. All the pages I have written for my book got portage from the drawers and shelves, down the stairs to the dining room table. Each stapled section or lone scribbled sheet had its moment, its own vetting, and then a fresh placement in a new folder.

This took time; breaks were necessary. So I walked. For the first time this week since last June, I was able to walk without pain. I hate even writing that down, because having lost my walking, one of the central habits of my life, I have become intensely sensitive to people who cannot walk, or do so with great difficulty. I believed I would be able to again; my physical therapist said it would happen; and it came true.

I took several walks, each one with trepidation. What if I foundered again? I had that locked in sensation of being on my own with a memory of pain that was mine and mine alone. The evil twin.

I walked up in Mills Reservation with my dogs, twice around each time. Three miles. A month ago I couldn't go around the block without severe pain.

Back to work. I hadn't only written beginnings. There were pages and pages of scenes and events. Each of the major characters had been given his or her due. I began to see shapes, I began to move the pieces around. I had written scenes starring one character that might better serve for another.

I frowned. Last summer I wrote over 100 useless pages that barely sounded like me.

I walked this week in Asbury Park and Ocean Grove, very favorite places. Had the ocean really been so kind as to wait for my return?

It was a hard hard week, too. The new spring break.

I don't know anyone who had a parent die when she was young who doesn't viscerally feel time passing. Today is the first day of the rest day of your life? Okay. But it might also be the last day of the life of someone you love and depend on. Lose a mother or a father and you lose the irreplacable. Neural pathways. Opportunities. Taking for granted isn't an option.

The wound isn't jagged or complicated. It is a simple lop. The simplicity seems so clear from the inside, but can appear confounding from the outside.

How does that figure in to what I'm talking about here?

Where the hell could I have put my timelines?

I needed them for the stitching, the closing of the gaps, the fractures in the book. I could make new ones, but they would be extrapolated, backwards work. Not the hopeful feelers, the daydreams.

What is the worst thing that can happen to a person? Is that an easy question to answer or not?

I look ahead now, not back. I look at the time I have, and it is conceivable. The illusion of eons left has been pricked. I can wrap my mind around what remains, and death, too. I want to spend the coming scant time with who I love most, doing what I like best. Writing, walking, gazing, knowing. End of story.

I actually have written a book. Who knew? It isn't finished by any means, but it is a creature napping on the dining room table. Next break I will give it a shake, wake it up to play.

When I am alone I go off the clock completely. I am blind to the telling of time and only pass through it with a sense of its strangeness, its dominance and its passivity, its twinship with my being. Time, c'est moi. I can't ignore it even when I do.

It was a good week, it was a terrible week.

I found the timelines tonight in the way things are usually found. I suddenly went across the room and laid my hands on them. They were buried. Had I done that, or was it the mischievous days?

There are entries for what each character is doing in each year, from 1930 on. Very little of it will be in the book. It is a dream of order, of congruence.

The book is on the table, and I can walk again. Yet there is another level of being that isn't movement, or words. I lived there this week, too. In the real. In waves.