Threads

Writing Prompt: Create a believable narrative weaving together the following elements: Harvard, CeeLo Green, the history of psychology, and towers in the woods that may or may not resemble phalluses.

1

Begin with your usual trick. Tell yourself that you don’t have to write this. (You don’t have to write anything, ever.)

But then remind yourself: Only you can write this. Only you have this unique lens on the story.

Spend a few days convinced that instead of writing this narrative as an essay, you will write a novel.

Gaze out windows a fair bit, dreamily twirling an expensive pen between your fingers … me … a novel … after years of writing essays …

Feel the realization land in your gut, like a thud, that this novel would really be all about you, just with some lies sprinkled in, maybe a tad more hyperbole than usual.

2

Describe your reaction, 11 years ago, to the Boston Globe announcement of the exhibit.

Revisit your eyes widening with the news that Harvard was hosting an exhibit about the history of the Rorschach inkblot test and other “projective measures.”

Establish your surprise then not-surprise that Harvard houses a collection of historical scientific instruments.

Position yourself as a PhD-level psychologist, so of course you care about this stuff.

Write and then delete the phrase, “The doctor is in, y’all.”

3

Set the scene that the curator appeared when you and your daughter, then 17, stood before the TAT exhibit, the Thematic Apperception Test, Henry Murray’s brainchild.

Explain, briefly, how the TAT works, this alternative to the Rorschach: I will show you a series of pictures and you will tell me as dramatic a story as you can about each.

Question whether you really felt goosebumps seeing those picture cards from the 1930s, or whether you are just attempting as dramatic a story as you can.

Establish that the curator asked, “You know about Christiana Morgan, right?”

4

Imagine that the curator felt the need to intervene because she sensed the goosebumps and sensed your enchantment with Henry Murray as pioneer in the field.

Regret the reality that if this piece were still a novel, you could have her first say something like, “Hold the phone,” or “Not so fast.”

Recall having to admit that no, you did not know about Christiana Morgan.

Remember hearing her say that Christiana Morgan was Henry Murray’s colleague, that Morgan and Murray were lovers; that Morgan may have had a larger role in the TAT’s development than Murray and history have allowed.

But remember most the detail that Morgan and Murray built a rendezvous tower in some town north of Boston, near the ocean, modeled after Carl Jung’s tower on Lake Zürich.

And remember thinking, A tower? Because someone else had one? Textbook case of tower envy.

5

Admit that you felt some shame not knowing about Christiana Morgan, some displeasure that the curator one-upped your expert moment with your daughter.

Recall thinking something along the lines of, Hey, Harvard, I may not know the whole history of science, but I do know pop culture. Recall actually saying, I love the video for the song “Crazy” being looped at the entrance, all those inkblots blurring in and out.

Revisit the curator’s reply, Yes, well, we thought CeeLo Green would be a nice counterpoint to the history, and then revisit your smugness because you knew that it was Gnarls Barkley who did “Crazy,” and not whoever this CeeLo Green guy is.

Remember the immediate evaporation of that superiority when, later at home, you discovered that CeeLo Green was the vocalist half of the duo Gnarls Barkley.

6

Specify that you purchased the Christiana Morgan biography, “Translate This Darkness;” that you pored over it, that you lost the book years later in an office flood.

Wipe away the visual of a state university’s aging pipes pouring their contents all over Harvard history.

Explain that you thought about that tower for 11 years, that you called it the Penis in the Woods, that somehow you just never mustered the energy or the curiosity or the wherewithal to actually go find it.

Cut yourself some slack because the tower does seem somewhat lost to history, and because there are no clear instructions for finding the tower … private school … near the Parker River … … close to the cross-country trail …

Indicate that Christiana Morgan bequeathed the tower to the Governor Dummer Academy, wisely renamed the Governor’s Academy in 2005.

Mourn the working title of your short-lived novel: “Dumb and Dummer.”

7

Establish that the rendezvous and the correspondence between Morgan and Murray were much steamier than you’d imagined. Flag use of the term “ritualistic” to describe their encounters.

Note that they called themselves “the dyad,” and called themselves Wona (her) and Mansol (him).

Register your fascination that both were married to other people, that the families traveled together, that the spouses knew full well about the affair.

Mention that the relationship between Morgan and Murray was fraught, that it lasted over four decades, and did not end well.

Make note of Christiana’s alcoholism.

8

Explore the appeal of heading off alone to a tower in the woods, even after two years of off-and-on pandemic isolation. Ponder solitude, ponder loneliness, ponder loneliness vis-à-vis solitude.

Contemplate using this piece to settle once and for all whether you are best described as an introvert, a hermit, a solitude-seeking artist, a woman who just needs her space, or an irritable shrew.

Get back to business and interrogate this purported human urge to go it alone.

Consider exploring whether your discipline has responsibly documented this urge or whether men like Murray and Jung merely projected onto an entire species their own need to get away in towers and coax out their brilliance.

9

Stifle the discomfort that arises when you remember that Jung, too, had a wife and a (former patient) lover who shared dinners and family life with them; that Jung suggested that Morgan play a similar role for Murray.

Document your aversion to yet another story about a woman behind the throne, a woman in a man’s shadow.

Resist the rabbit hole that Jung wrote about shadows, the “unknown side.”

Admit that the above quote comes from a Wiki page and not from in-depth research into Jung, which, to be fair, you did attempt years ago but then abandoned.

Experience chagrin that your rabbit holes seem to be so well-traveled by others, those with more intellectual curiosity, say, or more stamina.

Feel the chagrin, for just a minute, morph into that old question, credentials and positioning aside, what if you’re just not all that bright?

10

Revisit the magic of the day that you and your daughter searched for the tower, the last day of the year, just hours to go before 2022; that the two of you and her rescue cat would ring in the year with wine and whipped ricotta, olives, and prosciutto.

Document that the day began with a hike up a different wooded hill to a pagan-looking circle of stones around an ancient tree overlooking delicately encrusted marshland and, a bit further away, the ocean.

Incorporate sensory details: the almost-snowy bite to the air; the sometimes-mucky, sometimes-crunchy sound of your boots on the ground; the hypnotic delight of applying gloved fingers to the nearly frozen drops of water suspended from the tips of branches.

Share that you and your daughter specialize in a certain kind of idiocy, in chases that only very rarely ensnare a wild goose.

Enter as evidence having once driven 30 miles to find a bread bakery that turned out to be only a production facility, and then finding their loaves in the neighborhood supermarket.

Register the fact that information about the tower’s location is only slightly more helpful now than it has been over the years: private school … near the Parker River … near the cross-country trail … close to the athletic facilities …

11

Document your arrival at the Governor’s Academy and the drive towards the river.

Include that you pointed to a trail in the woods and suggested that it could be the cross-country trail. Create clever dialogue of daughter scoffing, former runner that she is, Yeah, well, any trail could be the cross-country trail.

Incorporate detail that upon arriving at the trail you saw the faint reminder of last season’s direction to runners, what had been an enormous white arrow sprayed onto the dirt. Weave in the sensory detail of just how hard the two of you laughed about this.

Revisit for inspiration the photos on your phone from that day: you, triumphant, in front of the tower and its adjoining cottage; the scrap of orange bark on the trail shaped like a small, cooked lobster; those diaphanous and gelatinous water drops at the ends of branches.

Point out that since this daughter’s birth, and more than 100 times, some combination of you and her and her father and her brother have driven by this tower, hidden by trees but merely yards away from Route 1.

12

Begin ending the piece with an account of telling a Freudian analyst friend that the Penis in the Woods was less of a tower than you’d imagined, that it was shorter and wider than you’d envisioned.

Share his quip, “Huh. I would have expected more of Murray.”

Wonder, though, if this really is the end of the piece. Feel those loose threads scratching your skin.

Research, for example, whether that curator from 11 years ago may still be at Harvard. Document that in fact she is.

Explore whether the author of Morgan’s biography is still alive. Indicate that she seems to be, and that she is a Jungian analyst on the West Coast.

Discover that there is a similarly dated biography of Murray, then wonder whether these books were parallel or competing projects.

Request this book through your university’s loan program, joking that despite the title of the book, “Love’s Story Told,” you are not requesting a Harlequin romance.

Discover, though, that the details are even spicier than those reported in the Morgan biography, I give you the morality of a large penis and imperial authority – I want daring, my Mansol … show me the animal in you.

13

Explain that you spend half of your time now in Cambridge, and that you are almost as close to the Harvard locations pinpointed in both books as the tower is to Route 1.

State that this is especially true of the apartment building on Mass Ave, the Fairfax, reported to be the home of Morgan and Murray’s non-tower rendezvous, and now a dormitory.

Savor the tidbit that, for secrecy, they gained access to their unit via a back staircase in the street-level tobacconist shop. Feel your own swirl of pleasure knowing that the shop is still there.

Admit that it could be interesting and easy enough to contact the Governor’s Academy, to seek an interview with the cottage’s caretaker, perhaps request a tour of the tower.

14

Recall the essayist Phillip Lopate’s meditation on the joys of research for writing, that in his next life he’d like to be a scientific scholar and devote himself more fully to research.

Wonder, not for the first time, whether your time would be better spent in more scholarly pursuits.

But establish clearly the one truth you can muster about writing. Steer clear of sentimentality, to the extent possible.

Say that despite all the dead ends, the litter on the cutting-room floor; all the regrets about pieces never developed, or novels never attempted, or leads never followed, that there is nothing quite like the thrill of beginning a piece.

Say that there is nothing quite like being wrapped, for even the shortest imaginable time, in that blanket of possibility.