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Excerpts from Three Tides: Writing at the Edge of Being
By Cecile Pineda
Cecile Pineda will read from Three Tides in a pre-publication launch of the book, Saturday, September 24, 2016, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. in the Main Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge Street, Berkeley. A Q&A session is planned. The event is free and wheel chair accessible.
INTRODUCTION
Three Tideswas conceived with the writer in mind—someone, you perhaps—who may find craft manuals ultimately unsatisfying because none of them ever seems to address the matter of origination, the mysterious how of Making Something Out of Nothing. Three Tides aims to fill that gap.
That said, although there are probably as many ways to read a book as there are readers, before starting out I would like to share— with you, the reader—a simple map, a navigational chart if you will. There is a fundamental reason this work is presented to you in three sections. Each subtitle draws on the unifying water image of the title, and each section develops the underlying theme, namely, how does a work come to be made? (At this point you might ask: why water?)
This writer’s process suggests a cycle in three stages: Emptying (“Watershed”); Gathering (“Out of the Whirlwind”); and Making Something (“Like Snow Melting in Water”).
A word about “Making Something.” I prefer explicitly avoiding words like “create” or “creativity” because they seem hollow to me, overused and overrated. I prefer the expression “Making Something.” It’s a word choice favored by six-year-olds. Its full expression might go: “Don’t bother me. I am making something.” It carries with it the full assurance of mystery, surprise, and above all of commitment, of uncompromising non-negotiability. It is that level of commitment that distinguishes both the six-year–old and the true artist, including the artist-of-words, the writer. You.
I began life as a theater maker, the director/founder of an experimental theater company whose performance works originated in collective (through the medium of improvisation) creation. Or collective Making Something, the expression I prefer. The theater taught me everything I know about the art of words. The wellsprings of our theater practice was the impulse, allowing risk to flow uncensored from bodily sound and movement. Above all else, the theater (similarly to film) privileges the visual over the verbal. Primarily, mine is a right-brain, visual imagination. There are no craft manuals that I know of that outline a program for freeing the visual imagination. I know only of theater exercises designed to awaken and free sense memory. As Clarice Lispector and Luisa Valenzuela urged (see Bibliography), I write with the body. Just about everything I write originates in visceral sensation, exactly like the sound and movement impulse which lay at the root of the style of theater I once practiced.Three Tidesis designed to offer a pathway. It is a pathway you the writer are invited to follow—as you might follow a trail of bread crumbs in the great forest of possibility—only one modest path. I offer it as one casts bread on the water, hoping it may return the riches of reward to your own shores.
FOREWORD
On memoirs in general and this one in particular
“Watershed,” which occupies the following pages, presumes to be something of a memoir: a memoir of war, lost years, and national catastrophe, a memoir of a period in this writer’s life. To imagine a memoir has much resemblance to the truth, at least in the way truth is understood, probably amounts to a sort of delusion. Memoir may be no more reliable than autobiography, which undoubtedly shares with it some equally fictional characteristics. But this short memoir concerns itself less with questions of truth. Rather its intent is to raise questions having to do with the play of forces at work in the life of a writer, and to examine some of their unforeseen results.
On the 800th anniversary year of Beckett’s martyrdom at Canterbury Cathedral, my experimental theater company staged its debut performance in the sanctuary of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral with a production score based on the words of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. At the conclusion of one performance, a member of the audience approached me. He posed a question, which has intrigued me ever since: “How did you do that?” he wanted to know.
The how of what artists do is never easily explained. Even artists themselves find the alchemy of their art inexplicable. We live a little, things happen to us and to those about us for whom we deeply care, but the how and why of what emerges remains a mystery.
This work is intended to present a period in a life, a watershed if you will, where out of a crucible of personal challenge and under the pall of my own country’s McPolitics, something emerged which I could neither plan nor foresee.
CecilePineda, born in New York City’s Harlem to a Mexican professor of languages and a French-Swiss artist and teacher, moved to San Francisco in 1961, where from 1969 to 1981 she produced and directed her own experimental theatercompany. Her debut novel, Face, won wide acclaim as have her other works. Her previous book, Apology to a Whale: Words to Mend a World, is based on her growing awareness of the interconnectedness of all things on Earth. Three Tides is available from the publisher, Wingspress.com. Her website is at cecilepineda.com.