Flesh Made Word

WRITING AS AN ACT OF INCARNATION

by Tonia Colleen Martin

Tonia Colleen Martin is an author, painter, and poet. She refers to her art making as Mining With A Feather, and believes writing to be an act of incarnation. What she reveals through her written work she has also explored in the medium of watercolor and ink. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and now lives in Roseville, California. Her first two novels, Blood Exodus and The Frankincense Tree are complete. Her third is in progress.

As a child, I feared rolling through the wall beside my bed, into a secret region, forgotten and unretrieved. I was prone to high fevers during which clocks and newspapers flew untethered around the room. I was an avid sleep walker and once explained myself in a mid-sleep stroll as “looking for my legs.” As I got older, I learned to dissociate in libraries and invent convincing stories.

A few years ago, I found myself in a private outpatient recovery home on Bainbridge Island, not knowing my ends from my beginnings. The program was facilitated by Dan Allender, who received his M.Div. from Westminster Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Michigan State University. In his book, To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future, Allender contends that we can co-author our lives with God.1

On Bainbridge Island, my process of recovery, which means quite literally “to regain consciousness,” was to tell my story—which included divorce, suicide, addiction, abuse, and recurring night terrors. The dreams had a common theme that featured a young child, often a child in deep water; a child at the bottom of a pool; an abandoned child standing on the sidewalk evading my reach; a precarious child perched at the edge of a cliff; a frightened child harassed by dogs; a hungry, frightened, lost child. My story also included protection, abundance, freedom, and joy, but I was not feeling any of those things at that moment. And so I left them out of my narrative.

Among the most inexplicable pieces of the story to me was the suicide. My cousin John was 33 when he shot himself. We grew up close, and were the same age. Before one half of his mind vilified the other, John professed a deep love for Jesus. Malfunctioning with a warring mind, he thought he was Jesus. Because Jesus was 33 when he was crucified, my cousin spent the 33rd year of his life looking for ways to die, until he found a gun. I loved my cousin John. I saw God in him, but I also saw the devil and I also saw myself. Like John, I took what was meant to be the good news of the gospel and translated it to a moralistic ideology of people--

pleasing that kept me swinging from self-importance to despair on a pendulum of fear. At John’s funeral, I sang, “Victory in Jesus, our Savior forever,” and I meant it. But it never dawned on me how selectively I lived those words.

So what does this all have to do with the art of writing as an act of incarnation? For me: everything.

But first, what do I mean by incarnation? By “act of incarnation,” I mean to make something live inside something that was formerly dead; to shrink something enormous, out of bounds, and untenable into something small and embraceable; to take the nowhere and put it into the somewhere of a story. My experiences as a writer have convinced me that writing is a kind of joining between the profane and the sacred. The resulting story relegated to fluttering paper echoes that of the human soul consigned to an existence within scaffolds of bone hung with sinew and flesh.

On the last night of my stay on Bainbridge Island, more than 800 miles away from where I lived, I met the owner of the establishment who had no part of facilitating any therapeutic process. He and his wife simply provided a sacred space and prepared meals. They came and went unobtrusively without conversation or interference. But somehow, his name came up and I recognized it as that of a young man who had worked for my grandfather and father during the summer of 1962.

Dennis was between high school and college, working as hod-carrier for my father and my grandfather who had teamed up to add a fireplace to our house and also to put a stone facade on a local church. It was the last summer my grandfather was alive. Midday at our house, Dennis would extract from his brown lunch bag what seemed to me to be a feast: cookies, fruit, potato chips, and a sandwich. After eating his sandwich, he stuffed the goodies back into the bag and tossed it into the garbage. The minute he left, I emerged, smacked my bare feet across the cool linoleum floor, culled the trash, and ate the untainted remains.

Barely able to comprehend the complexity of circumstances that brought me to this meeting some forty years later, with no contact in between, I told Dennis my story while he stood with gaping tongs over a sizzling barbeque. Afterwards I asked, “Did you know that you were feeding me way back then?”

“No,” he said.

He went on to elaborate about the last summer of my grandfather’s life, capping it off with his experience of my father. “That summer with your dad made a man out of me,” he said.

I was utterly baffled. In just a few words, Dennis turned an almost unbearably mysterious light on. I had been grieving monumental losses and now this man was forcing me to embrace gratitude as well. In that moment, I felt something of the infinite—although I did not yet know how to name it.

When I got home, I pulled out an old manuscript I had written and shelved, and which I named The Topography of the Soul—Probing the Sacred Unknown. The story involved a visual artist’s fight with God about her father’s abandonment, and her brother’s schizophrenia. In its final chapter, the artist reconciles her faith and doubt by embracing her ambivalence about God through a redemptive conversation with a man she formerly blamed for taking her father’s time, attention, and love. My fictionalized protagonist also traveled to Bainbridge Island, but what took her there was not the need for recovery. She had gone there on a romantic excursion after exhibiting her art at a conference in Seattle. Although the inspiration for that part of the novel came from a trip to Seattle during which I had attended a literary conference put on by Image: Journal of Arts and Religion called “Habitations of the Word: Art and the Spirituality of Place,” I had written it years before I knew anything about recovery or my need for it.

I felt like Ungit, the old woman in the C. S. Lewis novel Til We Have Faces, who spends her life writing a protest to present to the gods.2 Ignorant of the divine, she writes out her argument in the form of a book to set the record straight. At length, she is allowed a hearing in the court of the divine.

‘Read your complaint,’ said the judge.

I looked at the roll in my hand and saw at once that it was not the book I had written. It couldn’t be; it was far too small. And too old—a little, shabby, crumpled thing, nothing like any great book that I had worked on all day, day after day, while Bardia was dying. I thought I would fling it down and trample on it. I’d tell them someone had stolen my complaint and slipped this thing into my hand instead. Yet I found myself unrolling it. It was written all over inside, but the hand was not like mine. It was all a vile scribble—each stroke mean and yet savage, like the snarl in my father’s voice, like the ruinous faces one could make out in the Ungit stone. A great terror and loathing came over me. I said to myself, ‘whatever they do to me, I will never read out this stuff. Give me back my Book.’ But already I heard myself reading it.3

And then Ungit begins reading her diatribe, where she essentially accuses the gods of taking her sister to a place where she, herself, could not go. Before she could finish, she is mercifully interrupted by the judge.

There was utter silence all round me. And now for the first time I knew what I had been doing. While I was reading, it had, once and again, seemed strange to me that the reading took so long; for the book was a small one. Now I knew that I had been reading it over and over—perhaps a dozen times. I would have read it forever, quick as I could, starting the first word again almost before the last was out of my mouth, if the judge had not stopped me. And the voice I read it in was strange to my ears. There was given to me a certainty that this, at last, was my real voice.4

It was the same with me. I had written a novel as a means of protest. But for the most part, I had been its only reader. Regardless of its literary condition, it seemed as if I had somehow, unbeknownst to myself, taken bits of the past and collected bits from the future, reassembled them in a story that had taken my life by the reins and moved me in a different direction.

In The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, a Spanish novelist who has won many international awards, ushers his character, Daniel, into manhood by placing him in a basement of forgotten books.5 Daniel’s father, a bookseller, takes him there and explains it like this:

This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul; the soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.6

In my case, it didn’t seem to matter that I was the most consistent “someone” who had run her eyes down the pages of my book. Or that it was the same book. Each time I had re-written it, I had changed. My spirit had grown and been strengthened in the process. The book was still lacking—what, I didn’t know. I tried to abandon it, but it seemed not to let me.

I might have never returned to rework the shelved manuscript. The story had gone as far as I knew to take it. I tried to move on to other things. But I found myself on a broken-down subway train in New York City a few years later. It was my first time in New York, my first time on the subway. When it broke down, I turned to the woman beside me and had the pleasure of meeting XuXi who told me about Vermont College of Fine Arts. She had just arrived from New Zealand. I was coming from California on my way to France. I paid attention.

In his book, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, Robert Olen Butler writes,

Artists are intensely aware of the chaos implied by the moment-to-moment sensual experience of human beings on this planet. But they also, paradoxically, have an intuition that behind the chaos there is meaning; behind the flux of moment-to-moment experience there is a deep and abiding order.7

Butler then articulates the artist’s unique process of making sense of the chaos.

The artist is comfortable only with going back to the way in which the chaos is first encountered—that is, moment by moment through the senses. Then selecting from that sensual moment-to-moment experience, picking out bits and pieces of it, reshaping it, she recombines it into an object that a reader in turn encounters as if it were experience itself. Only in this way, by shaping and ordering experience into an art object, is the artist able to express her deep intuition of order. . . . Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from the unconscious; it comes from the white hot center of you.8

Butler goes on to explain how we get to this white hot center, emphatically restating that we must enter through our senses.9 Butler describes steps to shift the writer out of her conscious mind and into the landscape of emotions which are the primary point of contact for the reader. For example, in a scene where a character is entering a room, the succession of questions the writer can ask might go like this: Where am I? What do I see? Then the writer describes a specific spot or face in the room or place. What is the temperature? What are the smells? The sounds? Shapes and colors in the room? What is the texture of the floor beneath my feet? Carpet? Wood? Tile? Each question should be answered with specific details. Capturing colors, sounds, smells, and textures moves the writer from a judgmental mind through the senses and emotions and eventually to the reader. Clinging to the texture of what is described, the reader finds purchase to join the author. As textures and temperatures are felt, colors seen, scents remembered, the writer’s physical body bears the brunt of this gathered world. The evidence of the weight is experienced by the writer’s own muscle reaction, heartbeat, temperature, posture, movement, and language.

Butler says, “We have as an experience of emotion, flashes of the past.”10 And those flashes of the past come back to us as images. There are also images that we fear or anticipate about the future. They erupt quickly like bits of a dream bursting into our waking hours and we must be quick to catch them. We are being exposed to hundreds of sensual cues and our emotions choose which ones belong to our story. Judgment has no place in this process. Judgment is what estranges us from our stories, thus ourselves, in the first place. By judgment, I mean assigning blame, not choosing details.

After reading From Where We Dream more than once and obsessing about my own story and its meaning, I sent Butler an email, doubting whether it would even get to him and not really expecting to hear back. I asked him what he thought about the idea of writing being an act of incarnation. To my surprise, Butler responded:

I believe that all the religions of the world are best understood as massive objects of performance art, that their deep and abiding truths are the truths of metaphor, not dogma. One of those great religions says two things that are crucial: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ And then ‘The Word was made flesh.’ The literary artist enacts this similar sacred thing, but flowing in the other direction: the flesh is made word; the moment-to-moment sensual experience of life—our life incarnate, our life in our bodies—is rendered in words as the metaphor of story so that we can experience the infinite. Yes. Fiction is an act of incarnation.11

To see this transformation of what is imaginary becoming real, let us consider the first few pages of Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s 1974 novel, The Memoirs of a Survivor.12 This book took me on an astonishing journey which included a foray behind a similar kind of wall through which I had feared falling as a child. The fact that this mysterious but undeniable wall remains inexplicable to the very end of the book was not an irritation to me but a comfort. I had at last been joined in the place of unknowing signified by Lessing’s wall. The novel begins with an elaborate discussion of the “it” of life. This term remains obscure until the end, when she explicitly names it. “‘It’, in short, is the word for helpless ignorance, or helpless awareness. It is a word for man’s [sic] inadequacy.”13

In the following passage, Lessing’s narrator begins with something utterly ethereal and gives it a solid shape right before our eyes, moving from the obscure to the particular and bringing alive a sensation of recognition and discomfort before we even understand why. In the first sentence, we are thrown out of our present surroundings, suspended elsewhere without knowing where.

We all remember that time. It was no different for me than for others. Yet we do tell each other over and over again the particularities of the events we shared, and the repetition, the listening, is as if we are saying, ‘It was like that for you, too?’ Then that confirms it, yes, it was so, it must have been, I wasn’t imagining things.14

We are engaged. Still, we don’t know whether to be curious or alarmed; we are suspended in between. But before we get too lost in our own fogs, the narrator offers stingy but concrete details.

We match or dispute like people who have seen remarkable creatures on a journey: ‘Did you see that big blue fish? Oh, the one you saw was yellow!’15

Here is something we recognize. We picture a fish. We are still in a known world. And then the narrator moves away from the concrete back into the mysterious--

‘But the sea we travelled over was the same, the protracted period of unease and tension before the end was the same for everybody, everywhere; in the smaller units of our cities—streets, a cluster of tall blocks of flats, a hotel—as in cities, nations, a continent . . . ’16

The narrator rambles. It is both hard to read and difficult to understand. The reader is about to get lost. The narrator seems to read our minds.

Yes, I agree that this is pretty high-flown imagery considering the nature of the events in question: bizarre fish, oceans and so forth. . . . Attitudes towards Them and They were increasingly contradictory and we all believed we were living in a peculiarly anarchistic community. Of course not. Everywhere was the same.17

We are still wobbly. We see the fish, understand the oceans, but the them and the they are up for grabs. Still there is something familiar about this opposing them and they. Written over forty years ago, it has a contemporary ring. The reader’s own fear-based prejudices come to mind. Whom do we exclude? Whom do we embrace? We are perplexed and uneasy but not enough to shut the book. We want to know what is raising our hair and then the narrator seems to reach off the page and console us with these words.

But perhaps it would be better to develop this later, stopping only to remark that the use of the word ‘it’ is always a sign of crisis, of public anxiety. . . . I shall begin this account at a time before we were talking about ‘it.’ We were still in the stage of generalized unease. Things weren’t too good, they were even pretty bad. A great many things were bad, breaking down, giving up, or ‘giving cause for alarm,’ as the newscasts might put it. But ‘it’ in the sense of something felt as an immediate threat which could not be averted, no.18

The next seven pages vacillate from the obscure and to the concrete largely in stream-of-consciousness, lofting readers into the air and dropping them down. We probably couldn’t go on much further and finally an actual person shows up. The introduction of a child is abrupt, a child of mundane solidity despite the curious environment. A real world with real people is established. Without any prior mention of a child or expectation, this story is safe enough for a child to enter. A child arrives.

The child was left with me in this way. I was in the kitchen, and, hearing a sound, went into the living room, and saw a man and a half-grown girl standing there. I did not know either of them, and advanced with the intention of clearing up a mistake. The thought in my mind was that I must have left my front door open. They turned to face me. I remember how I was even then, and at once, struck by the bright, hard, nervous smile on the girl’s face. The man—middle-aged, ordinarily dressed, quite unremarkable in every way— said, ‘This is the child.’ He was already on the way out. He had laid his hand on her shoulder, had smiled and nodded to her, was turning away.

I said, ‘But surely . . . ’

‘No, there’s no mistake. She’s your responsibility.’

He was at the door.

‘But wait a minute. . . . ’

‘She is Emily Cartright. Look after her.’ And he had gone. I remember the room had a wash of sun: it was morning. I was wondering how the two had got in, but this already seemed irrelevant, since the man had gone. I now ran to the window: a street with a few trees along the pavement; a bus stop with its familiar queue of people waiting; and on that wide pavement opposite, underneath the trees there, some children from the Mehtas’ flat upstairs playing with the ball—dark-skinned boys and girls, all dazzling white shirts, crisp pink and blue dresses, white teeth, gleaming hair. But the man I was looking for—not a sign.19

Good, we think; this is a reasonable woman. She is appropriately alarmed and apparently fit to handle what follows. We entered this unordered world of a forty-year-old book as the child’s quasi-guardians. The words and the story have not aged.

As another example of how the imaginary becomes real is in Lynda Sexson’s short story, “Margaret of the Imperfections.” She writes about the act of writing in her book called Ordinarily Sacred:

The power of text persists through memory and imagination through telling the story. Text, etymologically refers to weaving; and it is the weaving of imagination and discovery, of the divine and the human, of the past and the present that creates the fabric of our existence. We all have bits and scraps of experience, dream and thought of which we weave the texture, the story of our lives. The metaphors within which we reside link us to the symbolic quality of the divine.20

Sexson demonstrates this exquisite weaving in the short story “Margaret of the Imperfections”—one of ten stories featured in her 1988 collection by the same name. Within the first three paragraphs, readers are coaxed out of objective reality and firmly entrenched in a world of plausible magic.

Margaret favored her left foot as she walked up the hill toward her house, which from some angles looked like it was about to collapse into accordion pleats down the hill and into the sea, but from other angles, appeared to be squatting ready to leap into the sky. Left by her grandfather’s death, the house and Margaret protected each other from abandonment. Margaret had become a woman there, but like her house, seemed precariously perched between disengaging herself from the world or disassembling herself in it. Her sudden limping set the rhythm of her return, the curves of her body gave in to angular notions of pain, all counterpointed by the wind in the waves of her hair.

She opened the door of her house, the late yellow light on the pink walls resembled the interior of an illuminated shell: and like a simple organism of mere panicked flesh, she retreated into it. She took off her shoe and discovered a small white growth on the side of her little toe. Before she went to sleep she wondered if it was an irritation to the surface of the skin or a more ominous eruption from within.

That night she dreamed the rose vines on the pink wallpaper in the hall crawled out into all the rooms and exploded into blossom. The people from the town were at the windows reaching for the roses. The vines were tearing at Margaret’s clothes; the sweet scent was suffocating her when she escaped back into wakefulness. Her toe was throbbing and the little growth enlarged to the size of a blackberry, looked exactly like a pearl. Margaret touched it; it was cool. She tugged at it and the pearly knob fell into her hand. An iridescent circle like a fish scale remained on her toe and Margaret wept.21

As the story goes on, Margaret, whose name means pearl, begins to harvest wealth from her own body and discovers it is not what she lives in but what lives in her that matters. We believe the pearls erupting from her body because we have seen the way her house sits so precariously on the side of the hill. We know the color of the inside of a shell and we have felt the rose bushes pricking our clothes. Sexson has taken words and meticulously laid them together to give us the body and desires of a living creature.

This spring, my two-year-old granddaughter fell asleep at the beginning of a two-hour car trip. Her four-year-old brother sat beside her and remained alert and transfixed for the entire ride. When Bailey woke up, she looked out the window, recognized nothing, and turned to her brother. “Logan,” she asked. “Where is our world?” Without hesitation, her brother pointed behind him and said, “Way, way, w-a-y, back there.”

There is nothing wrong with Bailey’s eyes; she just had them shut on the journey. Somehow, this exploration led me to the topic of children. At first I wondered if it was an appropriate way to end the discussion of so lofty an idea as writing as an act of incarnation. And yet, the more I tried to steer myself back to presumably more sophisticated ground, the more I circled back to here. Stopping to think about it, I realized that it does, after all, make sense. History’s most celebrated story of incarnation is about that capitalized Word, at whose echoing command chaos was ordered, showing up in the flesh of a baby and seemingly self-delivered into a story that would clear things up. Whether or not we believe the story is not my point. Becoming children is.

Going to the white hot center of ourselves requires the faith of a child. It does not necessarily clear things up but further complicates our stories, and puts me in the company of all the theys and thems I have labeled to excuse my flawed humanity. And it is that complication—my unending need—that brings me face to face with God and to my knees, which, now that I stop and think about it, seems like a pretty safe place to be.

NOTES

Dan Allender, To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future (West Columbia: WestBrook, 2006).
C. S. Lewis, Til We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (New York: Harcourt, 1980).
Ibid., 289-290.
Ibid., 292-294.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind (New York: Penguin, 2004).
Ibid., 5-6.
Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 11.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 15.
Private correspondence with Butler.
Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (New York: Vintage, 1988), 10.
Ibid.
Ibid., 3-4.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 14-15.
Lynda Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 34.
Lynda Sexson, Margaret of the Imperfections: Stories (New York: Persea Books, 1988), 199-200.

CAPTION

Tonia Colleen Martin
New Birth
7 1/2” x 28-1/4”
Watercolor & Ink|
For Sale: $1,000.00