Great topic humanodon. In Paul Auster's recent memoir Winter Journal, he begins a section like this: Wonderful writing, no? - and then he does take an inventory of scars. This particular memoir begins with his attempt to This book may not speak to everyone, but I took idea after idea from it and turned them into writing activities. I've written about Auster in previous Hubski discussions.The inventory of your scars, in particular the ones on your face, which are visible to you each morning . . . You seldom think about them, but whenever you do, you understand that they are marks of life, that the assorted jagged lines etched into the skin of your face are letters from the secret alphabet that tells the story of who you are, for each scar is the trace of a healed wound, and each would was caused by an unexpected collision with the world
try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one. A catalogue of sensory data. What one might call a phenoenology of breathing.
I took this idea from Paul Auster and turned it into an activity for the writing workshops I teach -- beginning with, make an inventory of your scars BOTH INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL. -- then pick one and turn it into a poem or short story.
That really is some beautiful writing. The part about facial scars rings true for me. Every morning I look at my forehead, where my helmet prevented some serious damage after a serious nightcap, and the faint line left under my lip when I did a swan dive into the shallow end of a pool. I like the idea of internal (non-physical scarring) because it makes me wonder what kinds of shapes they'd take. For example, we all know what kind of scar a cut, a burn or a broken bone leaves, but what is the shape of the scar left by getting jilted? Your writing exercise reminds me of one I used to conduct with my own classes. It's a fairly well-known exercise, though for the life of me, I can't recall whose it is. It begins by looking at one's own hands in detail and imagining them as they were when one was a child, then when one is very, very old. The next part of the exercise is to do this for someone one knows very well, filling in all the details of the changes and their backstories. The final part is doing the same again for a character of one's own creation. It's a bit involved, but doable over three class periods with homework assignments.