"Authenticity" is bandied about everywhere. So too "transparency." There is a spectrum of authenticity that depends on where you are in the multifold layers of defense mechanisms, coping fortifications, and walls of armored facade. I'm drilling into one niche of authenticity.
In verifying how to spell the -ing form of niche, I find that niche primarily means:
- A recess in a wall, as for holding a statue or urn.
- A cranny, hollow, or crevice, as in rock.
Aha, yes, there are chinks in the armor. Crevices and cracks in the unscalable labyrinth wall. Yup, that's precisely the niche I care about.
Here are two versions of a story from Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life by Natalie Goldberg written by her friend Miriam Sagan. I say both stories are authentic. You won't see either in a press release or corporate marketing brochure anytime soon. Yet there is a big big difference between the two. (In the interest of time, I've only included the very beginning and ending of each.)
I am in the hospital room waiting for Fred too die so I could go to the Lexington Hotel with Larry and fuck my brains out.
Fred lay in a coma, he was dying of AIDS, he smelled like a waterbed with a leak, his black skin had turned to ash, his feet and his hands were curled like claws, and he weighed less than he had at puberty...
...When [Larry] thought they weren't listening, he whispered to me that the two psychic Pauls were faggots.
The second version goes:
This is how Jeff died. Patrick sat in the hospital room for almost forty-eight hours straight, watching Jeff in a coma...
Jeff was a doctor. The nurses stood crying at the nurses' station because they believed a thirty-three-year-old doctor should not die. Jeff was born Thomas Jefferson Able, but he never told his friends at Harvard this. It made him sound too black, in a country way. A skinny man, he mixed the purple ebony of West Africa with the reddish brown of the Algonquin people.
Before you read further...contemplate for yourself a second: What did you notice? This is what author Natalie Goldberg noticed:
[I] learned that there is a quiet place in us below our hip personality that is connected to our breath, our words, and our death. Miriam's second piece connected to that place, because she slowed down. In her first piece, she was scared, so the piece was glib. We are often funny too cover up fear, but this quiet place exists as we exist, here on the earth. It just is. That is where the best writing comes from and what we must connect with in order to write well. I could take Miriam's revised second piece to Asia, to a small village there, maybe a place that knew nothing of AIDS, and they would understand her writing, because it came from the place where we are not American, not gay, not a New Yorker.
But if we wipe out country, sex, religion - the things that form us - where does writing style come in? Style is all these things fully digested into our humanness, so the fact that Miriam was brought up in New York doesn't overrun the basic emotion of sorrow.
Katagiri Roshi said in his book Returning to Silence (Shambala, 1988) that it is not important whether a spiritual teacher has reached the peak or not; what is important is how he has digested the truth he has experienced and how much this truth is manifested in the teacher's life moment by moment. - Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind
This past Sunday at the Advance after we spent an entire day being present (the first day we spent cultivating presence), I woke up that morning and spontaneously changed the schedule to make day two a day in which we cultivated open-heartedness, or bodhichitta.
Bodhichitta is also equated, in part, with compassion - our ability to feel the pain that we share with others. Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and pride. But fortunately for us, the soft spot - our innate ability to love and to care about things - is like a crack in these walls we erect. It's a natural opening in the barriers we create when we're afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment - love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy - to awaken bodhichitta. - Pema Chodron, The Places That Scare You
After so many days of unguardedness, I bolted to the safe confines of my left brain, and that is the place I wrote my first post on my return from the Advance.
It is difficult (but immensely rewarding) work to stay open. To write and speak and act from the heart. It's not necessarily relevatory writing. I don't need to know your social security number or your girlfriend's quirks or what your nightmare last night was about. What is required is staying still when you want to bolt and then writing from that stillness.
While I was meditating on the West Coast, my friend Jerry was on his own meditative retreat on the opposite side of the country:
The topic was Daring; daring to be open to overcome the crusty old habits of behavior that lock us in and keep us from authentically connecting. In other words, "Aaaahhh. Just right for me." - Jerry Colonna, Madeleine's blog
Daring. Daring writing. Real stories. Real people. Real stories from people being real. Authentically connecting universally. Universal stories. Resonating stories. Writing that peeks out from behind that crack in the wall guarding our hearts, and turns from the hip, glib, scared fortification - whether that be in marketing stories or creative nonfiction or this burgeoning citizens media or whatever realm.
That's where I'm putting my energy.
Truth in writing is something more intuitive that has to do with a work's ability to become timeless in its timeliness and universal in its particularity. - Jeff Davis, The Journey from the Center to the Page
Evelyn
You just niched authenticity.
Thank you.
You´ve just helped me over my blockage. You just helped me to see that I need to write from the 'heart' rather than what I feel people want to hear.
Graham
Posted by: graham | Apr 16, 2005 at 08:45 AM
Evelyn, Do you think is time to organize a "Latina bloggers" group? I do, it'd be nice to have @ least one aggregator page with the links a todas.
Posted by: FrancesM | Apr 18, 2005 at 01:03 PM