Malinda Words: Write for Pete’s sake

Around six or seven years ago, a first year student of the Faculty of Art, University of Peradeniya, wrote to me seeking some advice on writing poetry. It so happened that I was planning to visit Kandy and therefore I arranged to meet him.

It was late one evening when I got to Peradeniya. He was waiting for me on the parapet wall outside the Arts Theatre. We talked about all kinds of things, but what I remember most is what he told me about writing poetry. Something along the following lines:

‘I want to write everything, every little thing.’

In poetic form, of course.

He was referring to someone who had captured his fancy. Claimed he was in love. If I remember right his love was not reciprocated. I could relate to the sentiments and the desire to write. It would be cathartic, I felt, but didn’t tell him that. He wouldn’t have thought of the exercise in those terms, I felt. I did tell him that he wouldn’t have any time left to do anything else if he wanted to jot down each and every moment, in poetic or other form. I may have suggested a slightly different course of action, but if I did I just cannot remember it now.

I remembered this young man a few days ago when I was speaking with a friend, Pete Meyers, his work, his accomplishments, the people he has inspired and so on at the intersection of North Cayuga Street and East Seneca Street in Ithaca, NY.

People in Ithaca, especially those who have lived there for a long time, know Pete. I am sure almost all workers in all establishments who feel they’ve got a raw deal have heard of him considering the hours and years he’s put into the Tompkins County Workers’ Center, the organisation he helped set up in 2003. Indeed, his work in Ithaca and neighbouring towns has inspired others to replicate such initiatives in other parts of the USA and probably take these to a different level altogether.

Bits and pieces of his bio can be found on the internet. Obviously they can’t be pieced together and the aggregated expected to give even a halfway decent picture of the man. Doesn’t happen that way. Not in Pete’s case and not in anyone else’s either.

I’ve always felt that every life is an epic. Not all epics get written. Not everyone writes or expresses in other forms the chapters that make up their lives. Some write, some sing. Others dance, paint, sculpt, design cities, maintain the peace, sweep the streets and are silent. In vocations, lifestyles, life choices and being do their epics find expression. All, without exception, excellent reads, I’m sure.

It’s just that I had a long conversation with Pete and was fascinated by the stories he had to tell. So naturally I told him, ‘write.’ Write, because there are things that don’t get written by others; write because there are always back stories that preamble, back stories that precipitate certain choices and produce certain results. Back stories inspire.

‘Not necessarily a chronology,’ I told him. It is of course possible to break down a life into decades or phases (for example, Maxim Gorky sliced his as ‘My Childhood,’ ‘My Apprenticeship’ and ‘My Universities’). There are other ways of cutting it. Turning points came to mind — ‘something you saw, something you heard, something you read, an event, some thought that crossed your mind.’

The things that informed certain decisions and made certain actions non-negotiable aren’t always written into outcome-story. Indeed, one can even forget what really prompted a stand, a turn previously not considered, a journey along a path whose existence wasn’t even known or noted.

‘You don’t have to sit down and write your biography; just jot down critical points and after a while you’ll get used to writing down things you remember from other times,’ I told Pete. We do remember but memory has a way of rising and then disappearing; writing little notes to oneself helps trap remembrance strains.

‘After a while you’ll have 250 “points” which you can elaborate,’ I told him. ‘Writing also helps you clarify things, make sense of what would otherwise seem to be a series of disjointed incidents and it can tell you how threads are made, how threads come together to make tapestries,’ I didn’t tell him.

Now, thinking of Pete and the matter of writing memoirs, it occurs to me that many people who’ve left their mark in fields of their choosing were probably inspired by those who came before. Biographies teach people so much.

Maybe that’s how ancestor worship began; how people whose footprints came to define ways of being in particular societies were deified. It’s not just veneration, which would be at the low end of engagement, but being inspired to emulate and go further.

Biographies can teach, but before learning can happen, biographies have to be written. You can’t write everything down, like that young poet wanted to do, but there’s ample time to sift through moments, phases, people, encounters etc and obtain a handful of salience. Whether or not you transcribe it all, it’s probably going to be insights which are less vague for having been coated with words and therefore eminently usable.

As for the first year student, by the time he was a final year student, he had developed into a rather diffident poet who was wont to preamble at length the poems he read (good ones, I must add) and a couple of years later published a good collection. Not ‘every moment of every single day and every thought about everything,’ but a salience-capture certainly.

I wouldn’t know the names of anyone who happens to read this, but there’s a Pete Meyers in all of them, an epic that can be written.

malindadocs@gmail.com

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is 195th article in the new series. Links to previous articles are given below]

14 August 2023

Write for Pete’s sake

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