Writing and Healing: Year 2

The Cure by Andrea Barrett: A Cure Cottage Come to Life

Healing Library Entry #1
The Cure:  A novella by Andrea Barrett.  The final story in her collection, Servants of the Map.

I have found a cure cottage come to life in a piece of fiction.  Not merely a cottage but an entire world in the Adirondacks which centers around healing.  Making this novella, I think, a perfect first entry into the healing library.

Here is how Ms. Barrett begins:

Everything, thinks Elizabeth, is in order.

Everything is as it should be, exactly as she would wish it: nine o’clock, on this December day in 1905, and already breakfast has been cooked and served and cleared, Livvie and Rosellen are at the dishes, and all nine of her boarders are resting, wrapped in blankets and robes, on the lower veranda or the private porches of the upstairs rooms.  In the light, airy dining room, the new napkins look well in their rings and the cloth is crisp on the table.  In the kitchen—the girls look up as she walks by, smiling without interrupting the dance of dishes passing from basin to basin and hand to hand—and also in the mudroom, the woodshed, the smaller shed where the laundry is stored in enormous lidded crates until the boilers are fired up twice each week, everything is as it should be for this hour and minute of the day.

There’s a sense of healing place.  A sense of order.  And a sense that Andrea Barrett has all the time in the world in which to tell us about it.  Because of the sensory detail, the rhythm of the prose, I feel my mind slowing down as I read.  I feel myself drawn into this world, imagining it. 

Beginning in the Adirondacks, the story moves back and forth in place, and time, tracing the lives of two women as they come together to run this boardinghouse.  Elizabeth is the house-keeper.  Nora the nurse. 

Nora begins her training in Detroit with a root-and-herb healer Fannie, first living in her spare room, going out with her to collect herbs and roots, drying the herbs and roots in her kitchen, making house calls to the sick, then working for a time in a Soldier’s Home with civil war veterans, before making her way to the Adirondacks, her brother’s inn, and beginning to “doctor” the consumptives who have come there to stay.  She tries to explain to her brother about this work she’s found:

‘This is what I’m meant to do,” she said—although the swiftness with which it came about had taken her by surprise.  ‘It’s what I learned while we were apart, it’s how I make use of myself.’

Elizabeth first makes her way to the Adirondacks with her mother, Clara, arriving that first summer at the inn where Nora lives with her brother.

In the summer of 1882 a group of poplars stood, shivering their leaves, where the cottage next to the inn is now.  Near them was the landing where the afternoon stage set down Clara Vigne’s family, along with seven other guests anxious to settle into their rooms and start their holidays.

Over time, Elizabeth, still a young woman, attaches herself to Nora, and the two women eventually create together the cure cottage, working together for seven years before Nora dies and Elizabeth continues to carry on the work in her absence.    

The story opens with the cottage.  It also closes with it.  There’s a nice sense of symmetry—and of culmination.  Elizabeth’s point of view.  Elizabeth’s discovery.  What the cure cottage has meant to her.

Here is her house.  Not a duty, but her living self.  It is as if, she thinks, as she moves toward Martin and Andrew and all the others up the walk and the clean brick steps, her hand reaching of its own accord for the polished brass knob in the four-paneled door, as if, in the order and precarious harmony of this house and those it shelters she might, for all that gets lost in this life, at last have found a cure.

(That sense of harmony again.  Like in Olive Kittredge.)

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See also:
Profile of Andrea Barrett in Ploughshares
An interview with Andrea Barrett at Identity Theory
An interview with Andrea Barrett at Salon

And from this site:
Cure Cottage: A Medicine for [Postpartum] Depression?
The Woman Who Meets the Train
Reading as Map-Making (concerning the title story in Servants of the Map)

How Might Reading Be Healing? (w/ Olive Kittredge)

Reading and Healing as a Riddle?

At the close of her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes offers an extensive and diverse bibliography.  It’s from here, for instance, that I first found my way, several years ago now, to Elaine Pagels’ work, and Judy Chicago’s work, and James Hillman’s.

I like the way Estes introduces her bibliography:

A bibliography is not meant to be a tiresome list.  It is not intended to teach a person what to think, but strives to give a body rich things to think about, to expose a person to as many ideas, therefore choices and chances as possible.

I like what she says about poets:

There are many poets represented here [in the bibliography], for they are the visionaries and historians of psychic life.  In many cases their observations and insights cut so close to the bone that they supersede the suppositions of academic psychology in both accuracy and depth.

And I especially like an idea she suggests for reading, one that I remembered from some years ago and went looking for, and found, in a footnote at the end of her bibliography:

Usually I proceed something like this; asking my students to choose three books at a time from this list and to consider them as a puzzle or riddle. . .  How do they go together?  What can one lend the other?  Compare, see what happens.  Some combinations are bomb materials.  Some create seed stock.

Reading and healing as a riddle then?  Looking for threads of connection?

Reading as seed stock?

Reading As Map-Making?

One way to look at reading: as the lifelong construction of a map by which to trace and plumb what it has ever meant to be in the world, and by which to gain perspective on that other, ongoing map—the one that marks our own passage through the world as we both find and make it.

This is Carl Phillips, a poet, writing in an essay, Another and Another Before That: Some Thoughts on Reading.

Two maps then that can be drawn from reading?  (Or drawn in part from one’s reading.)  Two maps to make?
1.    A map of the world—or a map of others being in the world
2.    A map of one’s own passage through the world

And then all the ways these two maps might intertwine and intersect?

I seem to be reading a lot of stories these days.  Along with Elizabeth Strout’s stories in Olive Kitteredge, I’ve been reading Andrea Barrett’s stories in Servants of the Map.  I just finished reading the first story in the collection, the title story.  Max, the central character is a young man, working in the Himalayas in the 1860's on the Grand Trigonometrical Survey of India.  (Who knew there was such a thing?)

Max is part of a grand project.  A grand adventure.  And, among other things, he offers one response to the question of how high school math—well, trigonometry that is—might be used in the world.

Triangulation.  This, apparently, along with something called plane-tabling, was the method used for surveying and making maps in the Himalayas in the 1800’s.  I find it kind of fascinating.  (Bear with me.  Or maybe skim over this part if you’re not crazy about math.)  The method involved, first, measuring the distance between two vantage points: the base of a triangle.  Then, measuring the angles from these two vantage points to a higher point selected in the distance.  Then calculating the distance to the higher point using right triangles and trigonometry.

Here’s a diagram of triangulation via Wikipedia:

And here's how Andrea Barrett invites us to participate in triangulation in the Himalayas, this in a letter from Max back home to his wife, Clara:

Imagine a cold, weary man on top of a mountain, bent over his theodolite and waiting for a splash of light.  Far from him, on another peak, a signal squad manipulates a heliotrope (which is a circular mirror, my dear, mounted on a staff so it may be turned in any direction).  On a clear day it flashes bright with reflected sunlight.  At night it beams back the rays of a blue-burning lamp.

“Servants of the Map,” a long story which is actually a novella, consists of a collage of Max’s adventures in India alternating with letters that he writes back home to Clara.  Letters in which much is left out.  In fact, the first line of the story concerns this leaving out—these gaps in Max’s writing: “He does not write to his wife about the body found on a mountain that is numbered but still to be named: not about the bones, the shreds of tent, the fragile, browning skull.”

The story culminates in a final letter to Clara, a letter in which he needs to tell her that he has changed his mind, that instead of coming home when he planned he has decided to stay in India another year.  Ms. Barrett introduces this last letter with Max’s thoughts:

If his letters were meant to be a map of his mind, a way for her to follow his trail, then he has failed her.  Somehow, as summer comes to these peaks and he does his job for the last time, he must find a way to let her share in his journey.  But for now all he can do is triangulate the first few points.

Well, I love this—the rich and elaborate metaphor she manages to create here with triangulation.
A metaphor for writing.
And reading.
A matter of beginning with the first few points.
And then?

Here’s one more piece from Max’s letter, how the process of triangulation proceeds after the first triangle has been measured:

One of the sides of that triangle then becomes the base for a new triangle—and so the chain slowly grows, easy enough to see on paper but dearly won in life.

How Might Reading Be Healing?

First Thoughts

I received some nice responses to my questions last week about a healing library—all are appreciated.  One comment in particular seems to point to a next step: “Perhaps the question of how reading is healing might itself be the guide to sorting.”  It's a good idea I think--a place to start.

So----some first thoughts then on how reading might be healing.
Which have turned into a list:

15 Ways of Looking at Reading and Healing:

1. Reading as Entrance into a Healing Place
2. Reading as a Teacher—a source of information—the book itself, the process of reading as a teacher.
3. Reading as Company
4. Reading as Solace
5. Reading as Necessary Escape—or Respite—Reprieve
6. Reading as Discovery
7. Reading as a Form of Meditation—quieting the body and the mind—certain books and poems can do this I think—and it wouldn’t be the same of course for each person.
8. Reading as Food for the Imagination
9. Reading as a Source of Healing Images
10. Reading as a Source of Humor—and Joy
11. Reading as Connection
12. Reading as a Glimpse at a New Story—pointing to new possibilities—perhaps leading to reframing one’s own story
13. Reading as a Catalyst for Healing
14. Reading as a Catalyst for Writing
15. Reading as a Catalyst for a Healing Conversation
16. Reading as Restoring Harmony—as “an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself.”  What Plato said about the arts.  Quoted in that excellent article in The Guardian by Blake Morrison, The Reading Cure, which I wrote about briefly a few weeks back.

I’m now in the middle of reading Olive Kitteredge, a book of interconnected stories by Elizabeth Strout.  I chose her book out of the library because of a quote on the back cover by Richard Bausch, a fiction writer who was one of my teachers several years ago now.  He writes: “Elizabeth Strout restores my faith in the word, in the quality of fiction to shine light on even the dark and still make us feel refreshed and cleansed and glad.”

Make us feel refreshed and cleansed and glad.

Can reading do that?
Can it do that sometimes?

It doesn’t hurt that Ms. Strout’s book takes place on the coast of Maine.  Place is part of it.  But not all of it.  There’s also a skill, a nuance, an attention to the details and foibles of her characters—and a kindness.  Just a deep kindness and generosity toward her characters.

And now I realize—it doesn’t surprise me that Richard Bausch likes Elizabeth Strout as a writer.  I think he was the teacher who told us that you have to find a way to love your characters in order to write fiction.  You have to love your characters.

That’s what I feel when I sit down to read Olive Kittredge—that Ms. Strout loves this collection of characters she’s assembled in this small town on the Maine coast.  Not love in a cloying or sentimental way.  But in a clear-eyed way.  And she’s doing something very interesting in these stories with the connections and inter-connections between and among these characters.  And, because of a way that she writes, leaving some things out—gaps—spaces—and doing this so skillfully—I find myself at moments participating in her town as I read.  I find myself participating in this sense of connection.  All the time carried by her prose.

I wonder if this has something to do with what Plato called harmony.