Layer Cakes
That's what we are
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
—Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself (Leaves of Grass)
When I tried to come up with an appropriate metaphor for this week’s newsletter (there is such a lot to us, beneath our surfaces), I kept coming back to layer cakes, because…I’m a pushover for a delicious symbol, for one thing. But really, think about it: a layer cake is comprised of several levels, stacked on top of each other, bound together to create one entity. Chocolate, vanilla, spice, marble, on and on. Some are sweeter than others; some, like myself, are a little bit nutty. Some cakes are two-layer, some many more (I once made a Russian honey cake with eight layers for my book club gathering. Like I said, I’m a little nutty).
For a perfect illustration, here’s a TED talk by Sarah Jones. Sarah is a genius at transformation, digging deep within to create her wonderful array of characters…
TED TALK: Sarah Jones
ART: Pentimento
I first encountered the word “pentimento” when writer Lillian Hellman used it for the title of her memoir. It literally means painting over a painting—an artist “repents” what was painted earlier. There are many famous examples, including Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding, Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, and this Portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent. In the original painting, one of the straps had slid off the socialite’s shoulder. This caused a huge scandal, and eventually Sargent repainted, so that the dress strap was now more modestly placed.
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As we create our lives, I think we all use the pentimento technique at times, don’t we? We can’t fully erase bad things that happened yesterday, but we can use them, paint over them, to make a better today and tomorrow.
Back in the age of the dinosaurs, when I was first writing stories on my dad’s behemoth Royal typewriter, I made typos aplenty. I then had to either throw the page away and start over, or use Wite-Out, that goopy stuff that covered the mistakes (sorta). The day I could just delete my errors was Independence Day for me.
Yet sometimes I regret not having a record of the early stages of my work (some writers still do write drafts in longhand, which I might do if my script was remotely legible). Check out these corrections by James Joyce for a page of his Ulysses—clears everything up, doesn’t it?
MUSIC: “Like a Star” by Corrine Bailey Rae
British singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae’s first, self-titled record came out in 2006, and I loved it immediately. She has since recorded several more, award-winning albums. Her latest, Black Rainbows, is louder, more powerful, definitely more “rock” than the soothing, jazzy sound of her early career. I recommend listening to every step of her musical evolution, (Rae, like all of us, contains multitudes) but this beautiful song from album #1 remains my favorite.
SELF-DISCOVERY, WITH A LITTLE PROMPTING: I’ve learned so much about my own “layers” by responding to writing prompts. I’m challenged to go out of my comfort zone, and to explore subjects—and parts of me— I may never have considered before. As ever, writing is my way of making sense of my life…
A favorite Substack newsletter with writing prompts is The Isolation Journals by Suleika Jouhad. Jouhad is an amazing writer, who chronicled her first bout of leukemia in her early twenties, in real time, for The New York Times (“Life, Interrupted”). The cancer returned, and she underwent a second bone marrow transplant in 2021. In the midst of this, her husband, the musician Jon Batiste, was enjoying several career triumphs, including winning five Grammy awards. Their story became a touching documentary that can be seen on Netflix. I highly recommend it!
VIDEO: American Symphony
ESSAY: Writing in Ink
Here’s my recent piece published in the Delmarva Review, an ode to the “layer cake” that was my grandmother. I’m sure there were many things about her difficult life Nana wanted to forget, but what I remember is her brilliance, the incredible love she had for my sisters and me, and her victories on the crossword page…
BLOG PREVIEW: This week we’re learning about the The 5 Love Languages®—based on the bestselling book which describes the handful of (trademarked:-) ways we show love (Acts of Service, Words of Affirmation, etc.) I say—why just five? Join me over at Working Title tomorrow morning as we add to the list!
INSPIRATIONAL QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
I think we can all agree that the world is full of fault lines, and we don’t know for sure when/if the earthquakes will happen. But that’s the challenge of being alive, and I’m so glad we’re never doing life alone. I challenge you, my layer cake friends, to explore another facet of yourselves this week!