A Girl’s Voice From the Unconscious

Barbara (Prema) at her grandparents' farm

Pat Schneider, my writing mentor, taught me why writing in the form of the nursery rhyme is important; it is a form we learn in our early years, and when it appears, unasked for in our writing, it can surprise us with truth from our unconscious.

In “I Am From Childhood,” written in September 2017, each line followed the one before until all I finally added was an ellipsis.

      I am from childhood . . .

      I am from the grass.

      I know the insects’ paths.

      I am from the beech tree.

      I hang by one knee.

      I am from the sea.

      Waves carry me.

      I steer with my hands.

      My suit fills with sand.

      I am from the sky.

      My feet pump free.

      The swing lifts high.

      I am with the birds.

      I own the world.

     I am from my room.

      My door is closed.

      I read my book.

      I wriggle my toes.

      I am alone.

The poem was—a total surprise, unlike anything I had every written. I put it aside until June of this year when, remembering information I had read about nursery rhyme, I turned in Pat’s latest book to a page on her experience of a poem with a final line that had been a “fragment of memory . . . in and out of consciousness for more than forty years.”*How the Light Gets In is her autobiography written in the theme of “writing as a spiritual practice,” the second part of the book’s title. The event that I opened to is a night when Pat, sitting on the couch, makes an all-night-effort to understand why she can’t write about her father. At five-thirty in the morning, words finally come in the form of a nursery rhyme. About this night, she writes:

            Writing about deep memory can bring up from the unconscious seemingly random
            images and phrases. Writing them—slowing down and allowing the images to write           themselves . . . can bring about an amazing experience of personal revelation.”*

Daddy was a bad man.

He made Mama cry.

I love him, Mama said.

But love can die.

. . .

You look like your daddy—

Green, green of eye,

I love you, Mama said . . .*

Pat writes, “The silence of the final line that did not repeat itself was huge . . . It was perhaps the deepest fear possible, to a child: that love can die. And if it can die for my father, can it not also die for me?”*

Now I saw my last line in new recognition. My life has been lived with a thought that, “I am alone.” Physically this had not been true, but emotionally it was. Only in my mid-seventies can I speak of having lived on-and-off in aloneness, and loneliness, unable to discern why. When a healing reason came this year, I could now feel joy for the girl I was in every line of the poem.

My realization is, “By a willingness to write, and to keep on writing, healing truths may come.”

* Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In, Writing as a Spiritual Practice (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013).

* Schneider, How the Light Gets in, 38-39.

* Schneider, How the Light Gets in, 39.