Scribbling in the Sand 5 comments

By Jessica Mesman Griffith

Faulkner famously said that a real writer would rob his mother for his art: “the Ode on a Grecian Urn is worth any number of old ladies.” I have to admit I’m not willing to go to such lengths. I suppose Ode on a Grecian Urn may well be worth a number of old ladies. But it’s hard to believe that something that I might write could be worth sacrificing the feelings of even a stranger.

This is just one of the things I tell myself when I’m wondering if what I do as a writer—and specifically, as a memoirist who examines the minutiae of her daily life and tries to shape it into something like art—is really worth anything. Particularly since I had a baby, there’s not a lot I do without thinking, “is this really the best use of my time?”

A yoga class, for example, seems like an extravagant self-indulgence. It’s not just missing my daughter; if the hour of judgment arrived while I was downward-facing dog, I’d feel pretty foolish.

If it seems facetious to parallel a yoga class with writing, consider the disregard I’ve often encountered for my chosen form as mere “journaling.” The personal essay, though elevated in esteem among literary types since the days before I went to graduate school in creative writing, is still perceived as a lesser form than fiction or poetry. Maybe it’s the taint of the self-help section.

Yoga or journaling; either way I’m contemplating my navel. All is vanity.

Philip Yancey, in the current issue of First Things, addresses this very same Ecclesiastes-haunted self-consciousness. What is writing—and not the lasting Grecian Urn variety but what Yancey describes as your average ephemeral scribbling in the sand—say, this blog post—really worth?

I’ve often rested on Augustine in these arguments with myself—specifically, on the spiritual benefit of self-examination. Written self-examination. And not just for the writer, but for the reader. All memoir is spiritual in this way, whether acknowledged or not. That’s a drum we beat when I was a fellow in the Erasmus Institute at Notre Dame, justifying our immersion in numerous texts that were not explicitly spiritual in any other way, much to my disappointment.

In fact, as Alan Jacobs reminds in the introduction to his book Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life, generations of sober Christians, from Augustine to the Puritans, would have warmly endorsed the idea that each of has a unique personal narrative, one that could offer good spiritual counsel to a reader. Antony had desert monks keep diaries to track the stirrings of their souls; puritans developed a theory of personal spiritual record-keeping with the journal as the key instrument.

If for no other reason, the writing of memoir is valuable for just this sort of spiritual monitoring. The same could be said for the making of any art form: It leaves you alone with your soul.

Jacobs writes that the diary has, perhaps, replaced the ancient Catholic practice of auricular confession. In my case, at least, he’s right; I gave up on confession when I couldn’t find a priest to take me seriously. This is vanity too. There’s nothing like having your closely-guarded sins disregarded to make you feel inconsequential. In response to a laundry list of greed, sloth, covetousness, and acedia, one priest told my friend that it was useless to confess her humanity. He meant well, but his shoulder shrugging not only deflated her sense of contrition and self-correction, it took the power from his absolution. He may as well have looked at his watch and said, our time is up. Next.

There is, of course, real danger of narcissism and sentimentality in memoir, of self-aggrandizement and self-invention rather than discernment and self-correction. Not every life is like a work of art, and there’s a real temptation to order and structure it to make it seem more so. But that sort of structuring misses the point all together. The value of memoir is in treating our individual humanity with the seriousness it deserves. There’s plenty of room for self-deprecation, but we should also value individual experience as instructive, both for our own spiritual development and for what that experience might offer another, for the value of our testimony.

Rather than a story structured to literary convention, we should contemplate the subtle indications of the peculiar structure implicit, which is nothing less than the story of God in the world. As artists we can offer a space for that kind of contemplation, a space that’s sorely lacking in our culture, even in our confessionals.

Jacobs believes that Christians are, in fact, obliged to make their lives into stories, to self-narrate. Yancey echoes him. “The world today contains no subtlety,” he writes, and he quotes Michelangelo near the time of his death “the world’s frivolities have robbed me of the time that I was given for reflecting upon God.” Yancey concludes: “For those of us who labor in the arts and who believe in transcendence, here is a place to start.”