Chapter 101: Time and the Pearl

Metaphors can pluck a string within us. This one will resonate with writers.

Only one in 10,000 oysters will produce a natural pearl. For the jewel to exist, that singular mollusk must suffer an unfortunate fate: a foreign body intrudes within its shell, say a grain of sand, lodged inside the tender center; at worse, a lesion and at best, an irritant. What follows is creation as self-protection: layers of nacre particles cover the ill to assuage the pain. Patience and resilience slowly transform the hurt.

A wound wrapped in time: that's the pearl.

You’ll have come across these pearls, wrapped around wounds, on the page, with the book as a shell and inside a passage that age molded into precise words, slowly matured, however quickly they are read. An itch never scratched until it is typed. Beauty crystallized around what marked us, if we can find a way to bring it out. A revealing example is that of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, during the filming of Mirror, his most personal work.

You could say Tarkovsky’s pearl was shaped like a house. The original childhood home was long destroyed: he erected it anew, using old photographs, on the same foundations, so he could interrogate what he remembered face to face. Once his memory was rebuilt from logs, he put it to the test.

“I took my mother who had spent her whole youth there. Her reaction surpassed my most optimistic hopes. She seemed to be reliving her past. I knew then that we were moving in the right direction: the house evoked in her the same emotions that we wanted the movie to express,” he says.

Yet something was missing, a layer that took the shine off his gem.

“A field of buckwheat once stood in front of the house. In bloom, it was all beauty and made you think of a snowy field. It had remained engraved in my memory like an essential detail of my childhood memories. But when we arrived to film the place, there was no buckwheat field. The farmers of a nearby kolkhoz had replaced it long ago with clover and oats. When we asked them to put buckwheat back, they tried to convince us that it would not grow because of the unfavorable soil.”

What follows seems an act of artistic madness: Tarkovsky leases the field and sows the buckwheat himself, against all better judgment. He is in the midst of making a film and yet he will let time run its course, let the grains sprout, and gamble that they’ll grow. What’s a harvest when you’ve carried and shaped a feeling for so long?

It pays off: The buckwheat blooms, the camera rolls.

“My childhood memories, which had pursued and haunted me for years disappeared in an instant, as if they had evaporated.” Once he could express it, he stopped dreaming about it. It was exorcized. What was left was a jewel in 35mm.

The book in which he describes this turning point in his vocation is titled Sculpting in Time, a revealing image he uses to define his craft. “It is a mistake to say that an artist ‘searches’ for his subject. It matures within him,” he writes.

A work develops like a living organism, upon which layer upon layer of time deposits itself like sediment. Parts of the past never quite pass, they flow into the present, and so in our minds we travel upriver to the source, not to undo but to see all that’s transpired, measure the distance, see it alter over time, and carry that change forward.

It’s also a house that serves as the anchor for former New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, where he rewinds in his 70s to the early loss and guilt that he’s carried throughout his life. It’s a house under construction, the one they remodeled to move into after his mother’s passing, where his youthful self would walk on scaffolding and see snow descend through the attic into rooms still bereft of furniture. The memory has haunted him and he haunts it in turn, as he writes, building a space to make amends and reconcile, to find closure for all that’s irreversible in life.

“You walk from one room to the next by going through the walls. You don't need to use the doorways,” he writes. “There is a door, but it is standing open, permanently. If you were to walk through it and didn't like what was on the other side you could turn and come back to the place you started from. What is done can be undone.”

For others, like Marguerite Duras, there might be no atonement, instead an eternal return to that other time and country: “Very early in my life it was too late.” Something happened to her then, early on, that dictated the words that lift her art to match her despair:

“That common family history of ruin and death which was ours whatever happened, in love or in hate, and which I still can’t understand however hard I try, which is still beyond my reach, hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a newborn child. It’s the area on whose brink silence begins. What happens there is silence, the slow travails of my whole life. I’m still there, watching those possessed children, as far away from the mystery now as then. I’ve never written, though I thought I wrote, never loved, though I thought I loved, never done anything but wait outside the closed door.”

For Duras, a string of paper pearls is the consequence and saving grace of that fate.

Some things we carry, not quite aware of when, why, or how long, their weight became a part of the baggage we drag to and fro. Until, maybe, with some work and luck, with sufficient sediments under the bridge, an old story set in nacre finds its shape in words to relieve the burden. Or make something of it.

A writer I’ve known all my life – whose name I’ll keep to myself – has a bad habit of terrible endings, with one notable exception. His life, mostly past, was a hard one, and without writing some wounds would surely have festered, and perhaps at various times they did. Closure has been elusive for him, yet a few pages in a book reveal he’d reached it at least once. It’s an ending worth reading, worth striving for and writing, a couple of paragraphs where words, said and omitted, carry the same weight, when all seem to fall into place, at least for a moment, for a page. A pearl in the maze.

Not that the novel is superb, nor do I know if I would have seen what I saw if I didn't know the author. Still, you intuit what has happened there, right at the book’s end, at the point when he crossed over to somewhere else. Something that he did not expect, that he could barely phrase in everyday strife, or throughout his life – in therapy perhaps – emerged: a fissure through which the sadness of a fatherless orphan seeped, transfigured in a scene where he was one and several, a father and a son, and also the old man that stands by their graves. Answers are withheld and yet life isn’t opaque, the image blooms, a window opens in a sealed room. Finally, there is nothing left unsaid.