'Do a
timed writing for ten minutes. Begin with “I remember” and keep going. Every time you get stuck and feel you have
nothing to say, write “I remember” again and keep going. To begin with “I
remember” does not mean you have to write only about your past. Once you get
going, you can follow your own mind where it takes you. You can fall into a
memory of your mother’s teeth for ten minutes of writing or you can list lots
of short memories. The memory can be something that happened five seconds ago.
When you write a memory, it isn’t in the past anyway. It’s alive right now.
Okay,
after the ten minutes, stop. Walk around your kitchen table or get a piece of
leftover fish from last night’s dinner to nibble on, but don’t talk. Now go for
another ten minutes. This time, begin with “I don’t remember” and keep going.
This is good. It gets to the underbelly of your mind, the blank, dark spaces of
your thoughts.
Sometimes we write along one
highway of “I remember,” seat-belt ourselves in and drive. Using the negative, “I
don’t remember,” allows us to make a U-turn and see how things look in the
night. What are the things you don’t care to remember, have repressed, but
remember underneath all the same?
Now try “I’m thinking of” for ten
minutes. Then, “I’m not thinking of” for ten minutes. Write, beginning with “I
know,” then “I don’t know,” for ten minutes. The list is endless: “I am, I’m
not”; “I want, I don’t want”; “I feel, I don’t feel.”
I use these for warm-ups. It
stretches my mind in positive and negative directions, in obvious and in hidden
places, in the conscious and the unconscious. It is also a chance to survey my
mind and limber me up before I direct my thoughts to whatever I am working on.'
