18. Description: An Art Nowadays Neglected
The Imagination Is a Place in Which it Rains
Those drums, my God.
Lynda Barry, Italo Calvino, and William Carlos Williams, among others covered in this space, stress the importance of images. Barry asks,
What is an image? At the center of everything we call “the arts” and children call “play” is something which seems somehow alive. It’s not alive in the way you and I are alive, but it’s certainly not dead. It’s alive in the way our memory is alive. Alive in the way the ocean is alive and able to transport us. Alive in the way thinking is not but experiencing is.
Images, says Barry, are the realm where ideas come from. Barry has a comic book panel where she depicts herself thinking, but she’s getting nowhere. Then she writes “START WITH AN IMAGE (Uncle Raymond’s station wagon).”
When you are playing around with images and the words associated with those images, things come to life. One example I’ve used in class is an essay called “Beer Can” written by Arquely Burgos in the book I Want You to Have This, a collection of essays written by immigrant high school students from Boston. The premise for the collection was to have each writer focus on an object that they brought with them when they left home. Burgos begins his essay with an image and short description of an open refrigerator.
Open the fridge in my house back in Puerto Rico and what would you find? Milk, water, and a slot full of beer cans. Why didn’t we have money for candy, but we did for beer?
The image of the beer cans in the open fridge accompanied by the question, gives readers a sense of foreboding about where this essay is headed. As we read along, we discover that we weren’t mistaken, that the dad is a bad dude and that the writer was lucky to escape him. Burgos has written a memorable essay that helps readers to be there with him as he recounts a violent incident involving his father—all described in a way that helps readers feel what it’s like to live under such a shadow.
Though his subject is important and powerful in itself, that doesn’t mean the writing will be powerful. You can easily imagine writing that would have let the air right out of it, something like, “Domestic violence is a major problem in society” or “We must provide the resources victims need to help them begin new lives away from their abusers.”
Those sentences, though true, are “not alive in the way our memory is alive,” as Barry says. In fact, Barry gives us an image for such sentences. She draws them as birds lying belly up with their feet stiff and upright and with X’s in place of eyes. Those sentences? They’re dead birds. However much we agree with the previous generic statements about domestic violence, we’ve heard it all before. What we haven’t done is looked inside an abuser’s fridge and seen those beer cans through the eyes of his eight-year-old son. Unlike those forgettable, blah, blah, blah sentences about violent homes, the image Burgos has given us is hard to shake. It is alive in the way experiencing is but thinking (or explaining) is not.
Esmeralda Santiago’s opening chapter in her novel When I was Puerto Rican, called “How to Eat a Guava,” provides another example of description’s power. In the opening paragraph, the narrator describes guavas in a supermarket in New York and recalls eating the ripe and unripe guavas of her youth in Puerto Rico. The image of the guava represents how her life circumstances have changed and how she has changed since the days when she picked fresh fruit off the trees as a child. The chapter is a rarity—almost pure sense detail description:
A green guava is sour and hard. You bite into it at its widest point because it is easier to grasp with your teeth. You hear the skin, meat, and seeds crunching inside your head, while the inside of your mouth explodes in little spurts of sour.
There is little commentary in the piece, but the images of guavas and the memories associated with those images, which are described in detail, allow Santiago to say without saying. It’s not a lecture about the complexities of the immigrant experience—yet that comes across without mentioning it. She’s not telling us that moving from one culture to another can cause you to feel alienated from both—yet, somehow, she is, but in a much more powerful way. Because of this, readers get to feel what the narrator feels. The ideas about what is lost and what is gained or about living in a kind of limbo, they are there, but wrapped up in images and sense details—or in “things,” as Williams would say. The sense detail description does all the heavy lifting.
Your description, if you’re doing it right, is smarter than you are. Poets and fiction writers know this. Why shouldn’t students be given more opportunity to learn this too, and to discover how it can enrich their essay writing?
For your next assignment, no matter the topic, why not start the project by describing an image the way Santiago and Burgos did? It’s better than an outline. Even if you don’t end up using it in the essay, still, it will allow you to discover and say things you otherwise may have missed. If you do this, you will experience what one of my students called “idea rain,” the moment in the writing process when you notice something you hadn’t before and then all hell breaks loose, but in a good way.
Like my “idea rain” student, Dante writes, “it rained into my imagination.” Commenting on this, Calvino says, “We live beneath a continuous rain of images.” The imagination, he says, “is a place in which it rains.”
Ann Berthoff says,
We let students of composition do a lot of looking—not because we want detail for detail’s sake, not because we are committed to ‘show, don’t tell,’ but because looking, seeing, turns on the mind.
Or opens up the heavens.
Like Calvino, Berthoff ties this to the imagination, saying that if we encourage this kind of looking, “we can teach our students to find perception an ever-present model for the composing process” that will allow them to understand how “visualizing, making meaning by means of mental images,” will improve their writing, “reclaiming” for them their writerly imagination.
As we saw with Burgos and Santiago, images lead to memories, associations, and connections. Barry calls a memory “an image which travels through time” and needs “a place to land.” A good place for your image-inspired memory to land, Barry suggests, is on that piece of paper right in front of you where you can show us what Uncle Raymond’s station wagon looked like.
I teach my students how to describe because most of them have forgotten. Somewhere, they learned about sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste, but such things haven’t come up in recent years because in high school and college, the emphasis is almost entirely on expository writing. Description is for creative writing, not academic writing, they (and too often their teachers) think.
Well, I beg to differ, and I’m not alone. Berthoff says, “all writing courses are creative writing courses.” Calvino who calls description “an art nowadays neglected” says, “Writing prose should be no different from writing poetry.” He argues, “The image comes first” before ideas can rain in. Williams, given his principle of “no ideas but in things” and his images of red wheelbarrows and white chickens would concur. So I have my students begin the semester describing objects and experiences using the five senses to create a collection of images that will connect with issues in the course readings that they will encounter later in the sequence.
One semester, the first assignment asked students to respond to Henry David Thoreau’s definition of extravagance in Walden.
Describe a moment when you were extravagant in the way Thoreau means or a time when you just followed what he calls the “beaten track” instead. Help your readers to see what you saw, hear what you heard and more.
Here are the excerpts from Thoreau that I asked my students to respond to (parts of which appeared in previous newsletters):
It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not been [at Walden Pond] a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pondside; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths that the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense . . .
It is a ridiculous demand that England and America make, that you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and whoa, which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! It depends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cowyard fence, and runs after her calf in milking time. I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.
One student told a story of his experience with the caste system in India. Lower-class or “Shudra” children were to be avoided. G had heard this many times from the adults. As he writes about this, his lovely description transports us to his lost childhood town on a “cloudy day with a little bit of drizzling,” where birds are flying “into little mists of clouds,” where it smells as if “wet soil had been mixed with the air.” In this town, there are upper-class people in marble houses. The scent of roses comes through the window. Also, there are lower-class people in houses with dripping roofs and the scent of garbage wafting indoors. We are there with G, lost in this world, until suddenly, inexplicably, we find ourselves transported to a university in the United States reading incomprehensible passages by someone named Thoreau.
Somehow, G must make sense of Thoreau’s antiquated and idiosyncratic English and make some connection to his own experience. He takes stabs at it: Shudra children belong to a lower-caste. G was friends with a lower-caste child. Thoreau would call this “extravagant,” he says, since it goes against the “common mode of living.” It’s going on the “deck of the world” instead of taking a “cabin passage.”
Once the connection is made to Thoreau’s metaphorical concepts, G is off and running. Those birds he mentioned earlier? They were “followers” since they always flew the same migratory routes season after season, generation after generation. They were like Thoreau’s “migratory buffalo.” His own coming to America? That was straying from Thoreau’s “common mode of living.” It was kicking the pail and leaping the fence like Thoreau’s extravagant cow. It shows initiative and “leadership” qualities.
Curiously, the description in G’s paper now disappears. There is no more mist, no wet soil, no more scents of garbage or roses. English papers are serious business, after all. Once you’ve found your “thesis,” (leaders—good, followers—bad) you must stick to it like Velcro. G now sees himself as the archetypal Thoreauvian hero. No worn paths for this guy!
Thoreau never mentioned leaders or followers in those excerpts, but never mind.
What if we saw G playing with his lower-caste friend and heard what his parents and others said about it? Then maybe we would feel the pressure of the system, rather than just have heard about it. The injustice would no longer be theoretical.
Instead, what we get is the dreaded English paper “examples” chock full of binaries. This is a cabin passage/This is the deck of the world. This is leadership/This is being a follower. Each example “supports” the thesis. The examples are then strung together until the paper is long enough. It’s all very matter-of-fact. Open and shut.
What does he tell his readers about the caste system? Well, it’s unjust. But we knew that already.
And what does he teach his readers about Thoreau? Well, he must have liked leaders. Huh?
Meanwhile, some readers may long for that lost place in India, long to meet that lower-caste child, to be there while he and G are playing together. The hope of that vanished quickly, however. Why? There was an English paper to write, that’s why. So now we will never know something we could have known, and we are led to think something about Thoreau that’s off-base. But there is a thesis! I saw one! There it is, right there! And supporting examples from the text for the win!
Very good!
The essay as it stands is a misinterpretation. As a final paper, this would be a lost opportunity. Luckily, he will write it again. If he describes more, the way he did in his opening, and if he double checks Thoreau for evidence that would verify his interpretation or not, who knows what might happen?
More description like those mists of clouds will allow G to write something that isn’t a generic piece on injustice. It will free him to write an essay about a common subject that no one else could write about in exactly the same way. This essay will be no dead bird, but instead will be specific to his experience and observation, to what he knows.
Later, it will be connected to course readings and his eventual research. It will allow him to speak with his own voice from a precise viewpoint and in a way that’s not the same old thing. When he brings in researchers, he will already be part of a conversation that his contributions helped shape. He’s already proven he can do it with his powerful beginning. Now, through the revision changes inspired by his classmates’ comments, he has a chance to let ideas rain down on him and to help him finish something he didn’t even know he’d started.
Notes
Next, we’ll continue with description and I will encourage you to stray from the thesis because I’m all about that.