I have not wanted to write on the Topic of Scars. Why? All the more reason to dig in. I see the tiny nicks on my hands and wrists every day. They remind me of what I was doing when I got them. Pulling the stainless steel blade across a grinding wheel when the dental tool shot into the air, gravity intervened, it landed on top of my hand. Lathering dark brown bees wax across handmade paper and birch bark, drips of scalding wax on my wrists.
The next thing I think about is the stage of life I was in when those things happened. My twenties in Montana. I went from moving cross country and having no job, to working at a gas station for a while, then went to the job center, took a dexterity test, and landed at a dental tool sharpening company on Reserve Street. Looking back, it was a crazy time in my life. The second scar, art school, late nights, living on fumes. I felt alive, on the edge of something.
Last night on the news, there was a woman being interviewed about her daughter. She is a few days away from giving birth and in a burn unit. She was sitting around the fire ring with some teenage friends when a couple of the boys threw bottles filled with gas into the flames. She got up to leave, turned to look back, and that’s when the bottle exploded. She still has not looked at the scars on her face. Scarred for life. Holding on to a past that is not there anymore. Maybe that is what a scar indicates — change. A past event, no longer the present, still impacting our bodies and minds in some unexplainable way.
Scars represent choices we made along the way. More so if they were obtained as adults, while we were undertaking a task that might have been unfamiliar to us. Or maybe we were tired and running a chainsaw, or working around chemicals, machinery, fire. There are deeper scars, emotional, that grip like the vise, unless we work to let go of them. Feelings of abandonment, abuse, uncertainty. Maybe a close loved one died when we were young. Our parents were divorced or in an accident. We moved from California to North Dakota, Georgia to Pennsylvania, where cultures are polar opposites. I learned to run from scars when I was a young adult. Dug in my heels. At some point, I just dug in, and did the work. The work of transforming those experiences into fuel for the future.
That’s the part I like to see in the novels I read. I like to notice where the person took the wisdom of age and transmuted some horrific event in their lives into a spark of passion, into something better. Maybe they became a doctor or nurse and gave back to others. Maybe they raised their children to have a different life than the one they led. I am noticing when I listen to The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich, noticing how she wraps the characters’ lives around them at the end of the book, like a woven sheep blanket, one with an uneven stitch, a place of imperfection where Spirit can enter. I want to study the structure of the book, look for places in her life that might have contributed to the details she writes about.
I do that with fiction. I scour the novel for tidbits of truth, something that relates to the writer’s own life, the scars they may have endured. If I know the writer well, have read their life story, or they have written a memoir, I can get under the surface, read between the lines. Of course, it’s only my take on things. Every reader has her own version of the same story. That’s the deliciousness of writing. And reading. And of living. None of my five siblings ever remember my stories, the narrative of our growing up, the way I remember them. And neither do my parents.
When I went to see The Scottsboro Boys at the Guthrie a few weeks ago, that is what I noticed. That we bring to a piece of art or writing, our own age, history, and experience. And our baggage. We attended the after-play discussion and listened to members of the audience talk about race, prejudice in the North and the South, about the minstrel shows and what they represented, about scars our country has left behind. Scars that slowly heal. And become transformed.
It is slow. And each time we take a giant step, everything splashes back in our faces, knocking the breath out of us. There is a backlash that becomes tempered with time. America is a country of extremes. We elect a black President yet have a hard time looking at the legacy leading up to the moment in time when we elected him. History is behind us, yes. But not really. If you had seen The Scottsboro Boys, you would know what I mean. I was pushed to laughter and tears from the scars. Yet, it opened me. That is what good art does. It opens us. If you can’t look back, you can’t really go forward. At least, that is what I believe. Scars are teachers. What have I learned?
-Related to Topic post: WRITING TOPIC – SCARS, and Guest practice, PRACTICE – SCARS – 15min by Louis Robertson
NOTE: Scars is a Writing Topic on red Ravine. Guest writer Louis Robertson was inspired to join QuoinMonkey and ybonesy in doing a Writing Practice on the topic.
redravine.wordpress.com 
Your reflections remind me of a quote by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “What matters in life is not what happened to you but what you remember and how you remember it”. Scars are evidence (physical or emotional) that we have been impacted by life and yet, the associations, memories, stories we tell are different from the scar itself. Scars have taught me how resilient we are and also about our limitations.
I appreciate your comments about the potential for transformation and change through art. Some works of art may actually be the visual representation of the artist’s scar, the illusion of it at least, made beautiful or more comprehensible through the creative process.
LikeLike
Teresa, that quote really rings true for me. What you remember, and how you remember it. And I like what you’re saying about how the stories and memories of what happened when we got the scar are completely different than the experience of the scar. We project all kinds of things on to scars. They represent imperfection. And I suppose, to those who try their hardest to get rid of them, a strive for perfection.
One of the things the audience and panel talked about at The Scottsboro Boys was the structure of the play itself. How the writers intentionally used the minstrel form because it was so loaded, and because of the emotions they knew it would bring up. There was a way that using the minstrel form perpetuated racism. And also a way that using it today for this play, opens up a new debate about race. In that way, the art form itself is transformed. In the play, black actors played all of the parts. It really was a heavy experience. Also enlightening.
I do think art and writing can take difficult subjects and inspire us to look at them again. It can be uncomfortable, too. I haven’t stopped thinking about the play since I saw it. Perhaps part of it is that I grew up in the South until I was 12, then moved to the North where there was just as much racism, though it took a slightly different form. And my age has an impact as well. I was listening to an MPR show yesterday on the Little Rock, Arkansas 9 which really set the ground work for the Civil Rights movement in the 60’s. The person being interviewed was talking about how there are people today that can’t believe that happened only a little over 50 years ago. There are some who have forgotten and think this is ancient history. I’m a believer in the need to remember. Thanks for stopping by.
LikeLike
Adding those MPR Juan Williams links on the Little Rock 9 for anyone who is interested. I also remember a teacher standing up in the audience of The Scottsboro Boys and saying that kids weren’t interested in this history. I don’t understand how people could not be interested in the history that makes us who we are. But maybe not everyone wants to look back.
Desegregation history-maker Jefferson Thomas dies on MPR Midday (LINK)
A Little Rock Reminder by Juan Williams – Washington Post (LINK)
Little Rock 9 Member Jefferson Thomas Dies on NPR (LINK)
LikeLike
This was a profound insight from your piece, QM:
Maybe that is what a scar indicates — change. A past event, no longer the present, still impacting our bodies and minds in some unexplainable way.
I think of the scars I wrote about and what was happening to me during those times, and yes, profound change. I like that I have my scars. They make me who I am.
LikeLike
Thinking about my scars I can only find two of the five I remember. The others have disappeared or become so faint as to require effort to locate; yet, the circumstances around them remain vivid. I think of how the events of the past can continue to impact us without our consciously knowing we are affected by them.
I worked with a woman born in the 1930’s who grew up in a segregated society. She remembers not being able to sit anywhere except the balcony in a movie theater. She remembers “Colored Only” drinking fountains.
One day her grandchildren told her about a teacher who told them stories about segregation and what it meant. The boy looked at his grandmother and said, “That’s a lie. That never happened.” She told them of the discrimination she had suffered in her life.
When she told us the story, she said, “I now understand how important it is for us to tell our stories to anyone who will listen. For my grandchildren not to know that segregation happened scares me.”
Another reason to tell our stories.
LikeLike
Thanks, ybonesy. They do remind us of who we are. What we have been through. Some scars are random; sometimes we make choices that lead to somehow being scarred. I always cringe when children become scarred by something. A medical practice or something that’s invisible to the eye like abuse or abandonment.
Bob, that’s an amazing story about segregation. Until that teacher stood up at the Guthrie and said that her kids didn’t want to know the history, I had no idea that young people felt that way. I know some would rather just forget the past, and move on. But it makes it too easy to repeat our mistakes.
The other thing that strikes me about Scars is how they can haunt us, especially the emotional scars. I was at a Taos writing workshop with Natalie Goldberg a few weeks after 9/11. She had thought about cancelling it but decided not to. Everyone came. Over 50 of us in a talking/writing workshop. Emotions were raw. Some people were from New York, had people that were directly impacted. Emotions ran high. We got them down on paper. Here we are 9 years later. I remember.
LikeLike
Bob, I wanted to say one other thing about your insight:
“I think of how the events of the past can continue to impact us without our consciously knowing we are affected by them.”
This became very clear to me when I saw The Scottsboro Boys. Every person in that room was carrying something about race related to the past. And I’m always surprised about how few people talk about it out in the open, the way we were able to do at this discussion.
There are times when we can rant to our personal friends about everything that is wrong with the world. But rarely do we get a chance to discuss what haunts us with the world at large. Perhaps the media used to be a place that we could do that. But, in my opinion, that has changed. The ARTS is one of the few venues left where People can have honest discussion. Uncomfortable, yes. But that’s how change happens.
LikeLike