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woolymonkeyBy way of a break from writing up my final TMA for the Unreal University's creative writing course, here's one I wrote earlier, the 'life writing' assignment.
Lessons learned:
1. Life writing is not biography. Anything that looks even a bit like an essay will get a fail. (A pity, because I can turn out essays in my sleep.) What's wanted is lots of vivid, present tense, wow!, in-teh-moment stuff.
2. Monkey does not like life writing.
3. But at least you don't have to write about yourself.
This one is too much like fiction. But I've been let off with a warning as long as I don't do it again. I could object that it's based on real historical research, and all the incidents actually happened. But then someone might notice that there's no hard evidence that my narrator actually existed.
TMA 4: Life Writing
The Blacksmith’s Wife and the Miracle
Louis we call him now, but he didn’t used to have a name. We’d call him the deaf boy, or tap him on the shoulder. What’s the sense in a name if you can’t hear people call nor tell one sound from another?
Afterwards, Gauchier, my husband, said he ought to be Louis after the old king, the saint, because it was him that worked the miracle. They like that, the inquisitors. I can tell by the way they nod and scribble.
Some folks might ask for money just now, but not me. We didn’t name him Louis to please anyone but him, ourselves and the saint. The king, I should say, because the inquisitors say not call him a saint until the Pope makes it official. But if you ask me, saints is as saints does. Someone who heals a deaf mute for miming prayers at his funeral don’t need a Pope to write his name in a book.
With all respect, it’s a funny name, Louis. I’ve never heard of a Louis in the Bible, and what does it mean? Gauchier got his because he’s left handed. You don’t get many left-handed blacksmiths. He had to make new tools to suit his way of working, but he’s done the forge proud. We picked Gospel names for our children, or colours like Blondet—though his hair’s turning dark so maybe we’ll find something better. But where does Louis come from?
I could ask the inquisitors, I suppose, but I don’t like to be disrespectful and they’re doing all the asking. When was he found? How old was he? Where was he born?
Well, I tell them how he turned up in the castle, shivering on the steps of the bakehouse, and nobody knew how he’d got there or why he didn’t answer. It was the year Robert and Joie had the twins and we finished the new granary for the castle. He seemed about the same age as our Anne—eight winters.
The inquisitors huddle together and mutter with old Joseph, the sacristan.
'Twenty-five years,' they decide, nodding and scribbling. 'He’ll be thirty-three now, so twenty-two when he was healed.'
They never ask why we took him in. Other questions, though, they keep bothering at. How did we know he was deaf and mute? Could he hear anything at all? Had anyone heard him speak? Ever? Could he scream? Groan? Cry? Shed tears? Were we sure? You’d think they didn’t want a miracle.
'People hit him with sticks, that first day,' I tell them, 'but it didn’t make him talk. Children pinched him. We used to pretend he’d get no food if he didn’t ask for it. Tears ran down his face, but he never made a sound except his breath whooshing in and out.'
You’d think that’d be enough, wouldn’t you? I mean, why in Heaven would he keep silent all those years if he could’ve opened his mouth and talked? Boys clam up in a strop because mum says there’s no bread, or dad beats ’em, but they don’t stick to it through fourteen years and three homes. I know priests aren’t supposed to have families, but you’d think they’d remember their own growing up.
They keep on until I tell them about that time the children were mucking around while Louis was heating strips to make barrel hoops.
'Oi, deaf boy,' said Mark scooping a shovel of hot coals, all calm and smiley. 'If you don’t stop me, I’ll tip this lot down your shirt.'
Of course, Louis worked on like nothing had been said.
Mark waved the coals under his nose till he looked.
'See these? You better talk right now or I’m going to tip them down you, you hear?'
Louis pointed to where the iron was a duller red, smiled. He thought Mark was asking where the coals were needed.
We all laughed. Mark rolled his eyes and piled the coals where Louis’d pointed, but little Luke picked up one ember in some tongs and waved it around.
Louis shook his head and signed to put the tongs back, but Luke kept on, giggling and chanting, 'Talk or burn, talk or burn.' He was just fooling around.
Louis bent over his work. So he didn’t see when Luke’s hand slipped and he dropped tongs and coal right over his back.
Even if he’d heard us yelling, he couldn’t’ve dodged quick enough. As it was, he never knew a thing until it hit him. The tongs clanged to the floor, but the coal had burnt right through his shirt and into his skin so he had to pull it off with his gloved hand.
A lot of folk would’ve chucked it right back at Luke, but not our Louis. He just lobbed it as far away as he could, which was a good way, for he was a strong lad by then. I can still see it skittering over the dirt and bouncing out the door, trailing smoke and sparks.
'And he never made a sound?'
'No. Not then, not ever.'
His breath caught while I was rubbing grease onto the burn. Later, while I was mending the hole in his shirt, he came and put a hand on my shoulder and looked at me like he was maybe saying thank you, or maybe just checking if he was in trouble again. Either way, I ruffled his hair and patted the bench for him to sit beside me. He snuggled up close like a little child, but he never made a sound.
The one doing the writing reads it back to the others.
'And the children of the said blacksmith cast burning coals on the boy’s belly to try whether he would speak, yet still he spake no word, but made signs only and threw the coals far away.'
It sounds like we tormented him on purpose. It was just one coal, one time, and by accident. I try to tell them, but they’ve moved on.
'So, he was with you twelve years, then he joined the Countess’s household and went to Lyons?'
I nod.
'The lady in waiting wouldn’t give him a pair of shoes, so he attached himself to the court of King Philip, which was in Lyons taking the bones of Saint… er, King Louis to Paris. Is that what he told you?'
'I know he lived off alms from courtiers.'
I’d not heard about the shoes though.
'Then he returned to the forge and spoke to you?'
'Not spoke. He’d not learned how yet, but he made signs to let us know he could hear us.'
I grin and point at my ears, just like he did that day. Not that I took notice then, for I was too busy hugging him. There was a lot more to hug than when he’d left, and a beard that mopped up the tears on my cheek.
'He couldn’t speak, but he could hear and understand?'
'He could hear, but he’d not learned words.'
You’d think it’d be plain enough, wouldn’t you? Babies hear, but they have to learn what words mean before they can talk.
'When we saw he could hear us, we taught him words like you would a child. Bread, wine, fire, water.'
'What has he told you of the miracle?'
It’s hard to piece it together, for he still talks like a small child, and his memories from before are like muddy pond water.
'He was with the men praying by the king’s tomb when he heard the bells ringing and people’s voices. He was scared, so he ran away.'
'Did he know the men were praying? Was he praying?'
Myself, I’d’ve asked why he came all the way back to the forge at Orgelet before he tried to tell anyone about it—hundreds of leagues through Paris and Lyons to get here because that was the route he remembered and he’d no way to know Lyons was even further from Paris than home was.
'Gauchier’d taught him to put his hands together and bow his head, but he didn’t know why. He just saw us doing it and knew we liked him to join in. But he knows now. The bailiff taught him his paternoster and he says it pretty as anything.'
They stop scribbling for a while, and just mutter.
'So he didn’t know they were praying for King Louis’ soul. But can a saint hear a prayer that isn’t made?'
'By joining in, he showed pious intent, if not understanding.'
'But only to please men. He’d never heard of God.'
I keep mum, of course, but I’m thinking it’d be a sorry kind of a God who refused to heal the deaf for not hearing.
The inquisitors thank me politely enough and tell my they’re going to put Louis’ story in a big book with all the old king’s other miracles and give it to the Pope so King Louis can be properly made a saint and have windows and churches in his name.
Our whole village can be proud, they say, because its name will be set down for the Pope to read and for people to remember forever. Gauchier’s name’s in the book too.
I haven’t told them my name. They never asked.
(1,548 words)
Commentary
Obviously, this isn’t autobiography, though I put a certain amount of myself in it as I needed to give the blacksmith’s wife more personality and detail than comes through in the historical account of the Miracles of Saint Louis, which were collected by a team of inquisitors in the twelfth century and set down in a book as part of the process of canonisation.
The book is valued by modern historians because it records rare details of everyday lives, especially of the poor and the disabled. But it makes for frustrating reading nowadays, since the things that interest us most are included more or less by accident, as tantalisingly incomplete glimpses. The inquisitors were interested in one thing only: demonstrating the occurrence of miracles.
Life writing seems to offer a way to fill these frustrating gaps while still keeping as sense of how much is left out. So all the facts are true to the original, but I’ve tried to bring the family to life around these details. For instance, the words one of the inquisitors reads back, about the coals, are my translation of the medieval text (and the only quotation from it), but the wife’s account is entirely imagined.
The casual cruelty towards the deaf boy is quite shocking in the text, but I wanted to reconstruct how it might fit with gentler facts: that the family took the boy in at all, and taught him to join in work and prayer. Without sentimentalising what must have been a tough environment, I was struck that, after he was healed, Louis made the long, difficult journey back to Orgelet before trying to tell anyone what had happened. He clearly felt the forge was home. I wanted to suggest some of what made him feel that way, but without pretending to know everything, or that things weren’t also pretty brutal and alien. (They really beat him to make him speak and didn’t name him until he could hear.)
I chose first person because it allowed me to give the narrator a personality while still keeping a sense of enigma about her life, and even her name. I based the story, in present tense, at the point where she was interviewed by the inquisitors, because that’s the moment in sharpest focus, the window through which we see the rest. Within that, much of the story is past tense, either in her thoughts and memories, or in direct speech.
It seemed a good idea to use lots of dialogue to provide more immediacy, and I deliberately tried to blur the line between direct speech and the narrator’s account by letting her report some of the conversation without quotation marks.
I also tried to keep her language simple to reflect that she couldn’t read or write, and so was cut off from the world of the inquisitors (and of modern readers) much as Louis was cut off from the world of speech.
(490 words)
Bibliography
Guillaume de Saint-Pathus, <i>Les Miracles de Saint Louis</i>, edited by Percival B. Fay, Paris 1932 (Louis, the deaf boy, is miracle XV, pages 50-57)
Sharon Farmer, <i>Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology and the Daily Lives of the Poor</i>, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2002
Like the rest so far, this scored within 2% of the 80% mark. So someone is being consistent, but I'm not sure if it's me or my tutor.
Lessons learned:
1. Life writing is not biography. Anything that looks even a bit like an essay will get a fail. (A pity, because I can turn out essays in my sleep.) What's wanted is lots of vivid, present tense, wow!, in-teh-moment stuff.
2. Monkey does not like life writing.
3. But at least you don't have to write about yourself.
This one is too much like fiction. But I've been let off with a warning as long as I don't do it again. I could object that it's based on real historical research, and all the incidents actually happened. But then someone might notice that there's no hard evidence that my narrator actually existed.
TMA 4: Life Writing
The Blacksmith’s Wife and the Miracle
Louis we call him now, but he didn’t used to have a name. We’d call him the deaf boy, or tap him on the shoulder. What’s the sense in a name if you can’t hear people call nor tell one sound from another?
Afterwards, Gauchier, my husband, said he ought to be Louis after the old king, the saint, because it was him that worked the miracle. They like that, the inquisitors. I can tell by the way they nod and scribble.
Some folks might ask for money just now, but not me. We didn’t name him Louis to please anyone but him, ourselves and the saint. The king, I should say, because the inquisitors say not call him a saint until the Pope makes it official. But if you ask me, saints is as saints does. Someone who heals a deaf mute for miming prayers at his funeral don’t need a Pope to write his name in a book.
With all respect, it’s a funny name, Louis. I’ve never heard of a Louis in the Bible, and what does it mean? Gauchier got his because he’s left handed. You don’t get many left-handed blacksmiths. He had to make new tools to suit his way of working, but he’s done the forge proud. We picked Gospel names for our children, or colours like Blondet—though his hair’s turning dark so maybe we’ll find something better. But where does Louis come from?
I could ask the inquisitors, I suppose, but I don’t like to be disrespectful and they’re doing all the asking. When was he found? How old was he? Where was he born?
Well, I tell them how he turned up in the castle, shivering on the steps of the bakehouse, and nobody knew how he’d got there or why he didn’t answer. It was the year Robert and Joie had the twins and we finished the new granary for the castle. He seemed about the same age as our Anne—eight winters.
The inquisitors huddle together and mutter with old Joseph, the sacristan.
'Twenty-five years,' they decide, nodding and scribbling. 'He’ll be thirty-three now, so twenty-two when he was healed.'
They never ask why we took him in. Other questions, though, they keep bothering at. How did we know he was deaf and mute? Could he hear anything at all? Had anyone heard him speak? Ever? Could he scream? Groan? Cry? Shed tears? Were we sure? You’d think they didn’t want a miracle.
'People hit him with sticks, that first day,' I tell them, 'but it didn’t make him talk. Children pinched him. We used to pretend he’d get no food if he didn’t ask for it. Tears ran down his face, but he never made a sound except his breath whooshing in and out.'
You’d think that’d be enough, wouldn’t you? I mean, why in Heaven would he keep silent all those years if he could’ve opened his mouth and talked? Boys clam up in a strop because mum says there’s no bread, or dad beats ’em, but they don’t stick to it through fourteen years and three homes. I know priests aren’t supposed to have families, but you’d think they’d remember their own growing up.
They keep on until I tell them about that time the children were mucking around while Louis was heating strips to make barrel hoops.
'Oi, deaf boy,' said Mark scooping a shovel of hot coals, all calm and smiley. 'If you don’t stop me, I’ll tip this lot down your shirt.'
Of course, Louis worked on like nothing had been said.
Mark waved the coals under his nose till he looked.
'See these? You better talk right now or I’m going to tip them down you, you hear?'
Louis pointed to where the iron was a duller red, smiled. He thought Mark was asking where the coals were needed.
We all laughed. Mark rolled his eyes and piled the coals where Louis’d pointed, but little Luke picked up one ember in some tongs and waved it around.
Louis shook his head and signed to put the tongs back, but Luke kept on, giggling and chanting, 'Talk or burn, talk or burn.' He was just fooling around.
Louis bent over his work. So he didn’t see when Luke’s hand slipped and he dropped tongs and coal right over his back.
Even if he’d heard us yelling, he couldn’t’ve dodged quick enough. As it was, he never knew a thing until it hit him. The tongs clanged to the floor, but the coal had burnt right through his shirt and into his skin so he had to pull it off with his gloved hand.
A lot of folk would’ve chucked it right back at Luke, but not our Louis. He just lobbed it as far away as he could, which was a good way, for he was a strong lad by then. I can still see it skittering over the dirt and bouncing out the door, trailing smoke and sparks.
'And he never made a sound?'
'No. Not then, not ever.'
His breath caught while I was rubbing grease onto the burn. Later, while I was mending the hole in his shirt, he came and put a hand on my shoulder and looked at me like he was maybe saying thank you, or maybe just checking if he was in trouble again. Either way, I ruffled his hair and patted the bench for him to sit beside me. He snuggled up close like a little child, but he never made a sound.
The one doing the writing reads it back to the others.
'And the children of the said blacksmith cast burning coals on the boy’s belly to try whether he would speak, yet still he spake no word, but made signs only and threw the coals far away.'
It sounds like we tormented him on purpose. It was just one coal, one time, and by accident. I try to tell them, but they’ve moved on.
'So, he was with you twelve years, then he joined the Countess’s household and went to Lyons?'
I nod.
'The lady in waiting wouldn’t give him a pair of shoes, so he attached himself to the court of King Philip, which was in Lyons taking the bones of Saint… er, King Louis to Paris. Is that what he told you?'
'I know he lived off alms from courtiers.'
I’d not heard about the shoes though.
'Then he returned to the forge and spoke to you?'
'Not spoke. He’d not learned how yet, but he made signs to let us know he could hear us.'
I grin and point at my ears, just like he did that day. Not that I took notice then, for I was too busy hugging him. There was a lot more to hug than when he’d left, and a beard that mopped up the tears on my cheek.
'He couldn’t speak, but he could hear and understand?'
'He could hear, but he’d not learned words.'
You’d think it’d be plain enough, wouldn’t you? Babies hear, but they have to learn what words mean before they can talk.
'When we saw he could hear us, we taught him words like you would a child. Bread, wine, fire, water.'
'What has he told you of the miracle?'
It’s hard to piece it together, for he still talks like a small child, and his memories from before are like muddy pond water.
'He was with the men praying by the king’s tomb when he heard the bells ringing and people’s voices. He was scared, so he ran away.'
'Did he know the men were praying? Was he praying?'
Myself, I’d’ve asked why he came all the way back to the forge at Orgelet before he tried to tell anyone about it—hundreds of leagues through Paris and Lyons to get here because that was the route he remembered and he’d no way to know Lyons was even further from Paris than home was.
'Gauchier’d taught him to put his hands together and bow his head, but he didn’t know why. He just saw us doing it and knew we liked him to join in. But he knows now. The bailiff taught him his paternoster and he says it pretty as anything.'
They stop scribbling for a while, and just mutter.
'So he didn’t know they were praying for King Louis’ soul. But can a saint hear a prayer that isn’t made?'
'By joining in, he showed pious intent, if not understanding.'
'But only to please men. He’d never heard of God.'
I keep mum, of course, but I’m thinking it’d be a sorry kind of a God who refused to heal the deaf for not hearing.
The inquisitors thank me politely enough and tell my they’re going to put Louis’ story in a big book with all the old king’s other miracles and give it to the Pope so King Louis can be properly made a saint and have windows and churches in his name.
Our whole village can be proud, they say, because its name will be set down for the Pope to read and for people to remember forever. Gauchier’s name’s in the book too.
I haven’t told them my name. They never asked.
(1,548 words)
Commentary
Obviously, this isn’t autobiography, though I put a certain amount of myself in it as I needed to give the blacksmith’s wife more personality and detail than comes through in the historical account of the Miracles of Saint Louis, which were collected by a team of inquisitors in the twelfth century and set down in a book as part of the process of canonisation.
The book is valued by modern historians because it records rare details of everyday lives, especially of the poor and the disabled. But it makes for frustrating reading nowadays, since the things that interest us most are included more or less by accident, as tantalisingly incomplete glimpses. The inquisitors were interested in one thing only: demonstrating the occurrence of miracles.
Life writing seems to offer a way to fill these frustrating gaps while still keeping as sense of how much is left out. So all the facts are true to the original, but I’ve tried to bring the family to life around these details. For instance, the words one of the inquisitors reads back, about the coals, are my translation of the medieval text (and the only quotation from it), but the wife’s account is entirely imagined.
The casual cruelty towards the deaf boy is quite shocking in the text, but I wanted to reconstruct how it might fit with gentler facts: that the family took the boy in at all, and taught him to join in work and prayer. Without sentimentalising what must have been a tough environment, I was struck that, after he was healed, Louis made the long, difficult journey back to Orgelet before trying to tell anyone what had happened. He clearly felt the forge was home. I wanted to suggest some of what made him feel that way, but without pretending to know everything, or that things weren’t also pretty brutal and alien. (They really beat him to make him speak and didn’t name him until he could hear.)
I chose first person because it allowed me to give the narrator a personality while still keeping a sense of enigma about her life, and even her name. I based the story, in present tense, at the point where she was interviewed by the inquisitors, because that’s the moment in sharpest focus, the window through which we see the rest. Within that, much of the story is past tense, either in her thoughts and memories, or in direct speech.
It seemed a good idea to use lots of dialogue to provide more immediacy, and I deliberately tried to blur the line between direct speech and the narrator’s account by letting her report some of the conversation without quotation marks.
I also tried to keep her language simple to reflect that she couldn’t read or write, and so was cut off from the world of the inquisitors (and of modern readers) much as Louis was cut off from the world of speech.
(490 words)
Bibliography
Guillaume de Saint-Pathus, <i>Les Miracles de Saint Louis</i>, edited by Percival B. Fay, Paris 1932 (Louis, the deaf boy, is miracle XV, pages 50-57)
Sharon Farmer, <i>Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology and the Daily Lives of the Poor</i>, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2002
Like the rest so far, this scored within 2% of the 80% mark. So someone is being consistent, but I'm not sure if it's me or my tutor.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 10:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 10:55 am (UTC)I'm not sure what the tutor minded. I think she felt I was making stuff up, which I was, but not the facts, so she couldn't fault me on that. And we're supposed to make up the characters so they come to life. My best guess is that she wanted something about myself or a family member or, failing that, somebody famous enough that she'd know what was true or not. (The example they give us in the instructions is that the right approach to Kurt Vonnegut, would be to start with the moment he first crawls out of the cellar in Dresden.)
no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 11:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-18 09:39 am (UTC)But that's what you sign up for when you take a creative writing course. It's not like she's failing me or anything--just I don't always find her feedback as useful as I hoped I would.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-23 04:41 pm (UTC)I really loved this story, the way you reveal the characters, the scene, the time period. But your writing always fascinates me. It's like watching someone who's mastered a sport or some other skill: you make it look easy. And it's not. You always manage to hit the precise balance of detail, simplicity, fact, and emotional resonance needed to convey those layers upon layers of life in a way that grabs me.
Looking forward to more of your stories, as always.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-23 07:39 pm (UTC)The creative writing course is mostly good, though I think I've been a bit unlucky in that my tutor and I have very different tastes. The marks are OK, but I don't find her feedback as useful as I probably should. It's also not the course I'd have chosen if I was paying with my own money--I'd prefer one on fiction only--but it's a good course and I get if for free with my job. So can't complain.
I probably wouldn't have written anything at all this year if I hadn't had to do it for this, so that has to be a plus!