A BRIEF HISTORY OF AN IMAGINATION by Leslie Ullman
The “you” in the poem is not me. My friend Susan, her dark eyes flashing with anger, recounted the experience one day over coffee at the Nelson Museum in Kansas City. She gave me few details, noting mainly how odd the group of children with Down syndrome looked in their verdant setting, and that she seemed to be the only one in the car who saw them. But the energy of her feeling spoke to me at other levels. The fact that her marriage lately had been floundering no doubt colored my experience of her story. More to the point, however, she was the first truly close woman friend I had as an adult, a sister whose life inspired my heartfelt interest.
In Barcelona You Tried to Scream
to Susan
You had spent the day looking at paintings.
The real park was too green, still dappled
at twilight. The crippled children sat
too quietly. Someone had dressed them
in lace and gabardine, like the antique
figures you’d seen through a haze of fatigue.
You covered your daughter’s eyes.
You stared at the children under the trees
who stared at nothing, their incurable lives.
Their deaths seemed to rise inside them
like the sleep of the newly born.
Their nurse gazed over the pond.
Your husband said just drive
and you held the wheel like a pair of shoulders.
Tonight you dine in Paris. Without turning
you know the street outside glitters,
that people speak cheerfully into the wind.
If you close your eyes, you can see the women’s
faces floating like orchids. Your husband
offers you a light, and you lean forward
in your fragile chair, in the middle of Paris.
In an invisible France, people you’ll never meet
are lighting lamps for their frightened children,
or driving too fast, or selling everything.
In Barcelona you tried to scream.
In Paris, your husband offers you a light
and his hands carve themselves in one motion
behind your eyes.
(Natural Histories, Yale University Press, 1979)
I had just emerged from graduate school and embarked on marriage, part-time teaching, and serious writing. I often felt tentative and untried, an empty vessel, and I wanted this not to show in my poems. Looking back, I see I addressed my doubts partly by cultivating an ability to step into another’s skin. Whenever I did so, I seemed to have something to say. And what I said always surprised me, as though it had been living in me all along. So I sought to educate myself, to fill in the gaps I perceived in my own experience, by paying attention to others’ stories and then taking them a little farther through the work of imagination. As I fleshed out Susan’s story, I drew from my own experience of the fatigued, hallucinatory state of mind one can feel as a stranger in a foreign city, especially after a day of looking intently at painted landscapes and then stepping into real ones.
Many of my early poems looked through the eyes of several “others,” including a weary, Jean Rhys sort of woman with a history of “bad nights,” a repressed woman with a desk job who “has put her breasts to sleep,” a small boy hiding in a tree and becoming part bird and part furred creature, and a voyeur furnishing his life with incidental aspects of the observed lives of others. That last one sounds rather transparent as I write it now, but even then I understood I wasn’t appropriating other lives so much as using them to find a back door into aspects of myself. Often I felt I was something of a hotel, a hive of rooms whose inhabitants seemed to have gotten in there by all kinds of means – books, films, conversations and, especially, friendships. I began to wonder just where experience and invention part company.
Fifteen years later, in El Paso, Texas, I found myself sitting in a black, imitation-leather recliner nervously awaiting a guided meditation that was supposed to lead me into an encounter with someone I had been in the past. I was single again, teaching full-time, and had acquired a circle of friends who had me caught up in several New-Age explorations, including past-life regressions. Now, as I sat across from Joe, a slight, elderly man, I feared I would either lose control or fail altogether to make the journey. He assured me I would simply experience a light trance during which he would guide me through a tunnel and then ask me a series of objective questions about what I encountered on the other side. “Don’t worry if you feel like you’re making up the answers,” he said. “Who’s to say where the things we imagine really come from?” I was so struck by that thought that I forgot my qualms.
The thought sustained me as I closed my eyes and groped for answers to Joe’s questions, all the while noting the sounds of traffic on Yandell Street outside and an itch under my nose. Was I really in a trance? I wondered if it would be impolitic to scratch the itch and decided I’d better not. What are you wearing on your feet? What kind of scenery do you see? What is your name? What year is it? Who is the person you’re closest to as a child? What is the happiest moment of your life before the age of twenty-five?
At the end of the twenty-minute session, I retained a few answers that felt too fragmentary to make much sense. I had glimpsed a young Native American man with blue eyes, and an office with Venetian blinds. When I had to come up with a year, the numbers 1922 surfaced like numbers on an eight-ball.
Joe gave me a tape to take home so I could do the guided meditation on my own. A few days later I tried it, and again I came up with a handful of answers that made little sense. But this time I decided to write them down and then to see if I could use my notes at least for a writing exercise. So I turned on my computer and gave myself license to make up all that seemed missing. At that point I stepped into my imagination in a way that felt both familiar and revelatory.
In those days my computer was a Kaypro 16 that hummed like an ancient refrigerator determined to do its job. I hadn’t had it long, and I was still surprised at how much I could accomplish in its aura – the white noise of its hum and the green dot-matrix letters that lulled me, then pulled me right into the screen as they appeared instantly at my touch. Now a half-glimpsed image of a young boy, walking through a forest beside a man mounted on a horse, flared gently into narrative. The man seemed to be kind, the forest may have been a medieval one, the horse may have been white, the boy seemed to love the man. . . . I found other details coming easily, as though film had begun to unwind slowly in my head. Who’s to say where imagination really comes from?
The poem I wrote revealed a comprehensible life. I have no way of knowing if we literally do live other lives, though for many reasons I would like to think we do – but this experience made me trust all the more the mystery of imagination itself, and the mystery it makes of the so‑called boundary between invention and reality. It reminded me, too, of my early speculations that the imagination can enlarge us just as literal experience does.
As for the hypnotic trance I feared would either overwhelm me or not happen at all while I sat in Joe’s vinyl recliner, I have come to realize that I’m probably in a trance a great deal of the time. Certainly when I’m engaged with a page in my notebook or my computer screen. I suspect that most of us go in and out of such trances naturally and without the aid of a professional. They feel like nothing more than that alert, focused state, the province of the right brain, sometimes heralded by a humming computer or a blank canvas or a wisp of musical phrasing in concert with one’s own thoughts. I have come to trust those inner spaces when they open into exploration and then yield a wash of revelation. Empathy. Certainty. I’m inclined to leave the supernatural out of all this and just receive it as a gift of the human heart and brain in dialogue with the world around them. Like those dry, crimped bits of colored paper some of us as children used to drop into a glass of water so we could watch them float, then settle, then open into flowers.
The Friar’s Apprentice
He rode the shaggy pony
and I walked, my brow by his knee.
We traveled through the darkest
parts of the forest, where the wild dreams
of forest folk in their timber houses
swelled each season of thaw
into dreads and fevers.
His stories bore me along,
and his chuckle that came from the belly
like spring water moving underground.
I was not any man’s son
by then, but not yet a man.
I didn’t know that what I felt with him
was joy – I had no words for
anything that happened inside.
He gathered people to the largest hearth
in each village, making the forest
smaller. After dark, my eyes held trails
weaving through ravines, gray mist, green leaves
and the river, wide and silver as a lake.
Beyond it, in a land we rarely entered,
the landowners lived among turrets and armor,
dosed themselves with blood-colored wine
and brought down hinds with practiced violence.
When they brought him down, I didn’t know
I was broken. I found myself tramping
through the woods half-blind,
half of the gentleness he had given me
emptying for months like a long, keening cry.
That was the half he left me
to fill. The gift. The hunger
that fed me with ashes. The hunger
that fed me for years. The hunger that fed me
until I lost all fear, like the flesh
that melted off as I grew tall.
So I took up the shield.
So I came to know every inch of the forest
as though it were mine.
So I came to know the heft of blade,
the gathered blood of a good horse
charging, and men’s blood cooling
at my feet, until the hunger fed me
one story at a time to carry
to each waiting hearth.
That was when I found the words.
That was when I put down the sword
and stepped before the people,
my face strong in its bones.
Leslie Ullman is the author of the poetry collections Natural Histories (Yale University Press, 1979), Dreams by No One’s Daughter (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), and Slow Work Through Sand (University of Iowa Press, 1998). Her poems have appeared in New Letters, The New Yorker, Poet Lore, Poetry Magazine, and Kenyon Review.