Writing is Daring to Remember

A couple of summers ago Richard Rodriguez spoke in Taos. We drove up for the day and he came out like a proper dandy with light linen trousers and a pastel coloured shirt. He began with writerly jokes and then like bread to flesh transmuted into some careful, sad sage.

What Richard had to say was:

He remembers going to the bedside of Tillie Olsen, who was slowly losing everything to Alzheimer's and yet lay in bed singing socialist revolutionary songs. He remembers what it felt like to first read D.H. Lawrence and recognize "the working class voice assuming a middle class accent." He remembers the writers who created him. For, writers create writers—D.H. and James Baldwin—saying that he writes for the dead, "For those authors who created me." Richard said "Writing is daring to remember." He spoke a gorgeous interwoven memory and story, the shaky yet sure timber of his voice, the call to write, the call to read, the assertion that "the subject of writing is what it means to be alive." There are only two things to write about afterall: life and death. The stakes seem truly high everyday; nothing to think about, write about, but life and death. Nothing but a focused intention to persist. And just like fear, there’s no discussing pain in the absence of it. The point is that we are all going to die, that we have these bodies that can breakdown, or rather, that tend toward breakdown. My reaction to treatment has been detached; I have yet to fall to my knees in thanks; instead, I have smiled up at the sun standing in the backyard, I have sung along full voice in the car, I have read any magazine with surprising appetite, I have hugged tightly to softness, I have marveled at common conversation and wished I were capable of it. Even through chemotherapy, which is like a hangover without the night before; I have spent entire days happy, still in pajamas, reading books in a sunny spot—a true day off of school fantasy. I have dozed in the afternoon knowing a friend comes at evening. All of these things you do between lives. I approach myself like I am peeking in on a sleeping child. I am standing in the doorway, careful not to rouse her, and by a faint stream of light from another room, I am smiling.