Driving back to Seattle from the Mukilteo ferry last week, my daughter said the trees and houses were in the way of her seeing the water and mountains. “The sky pretends to be water and the clouds pretend to be snow-covereds,” she said.
2) Timid, and always, still learning how to write,
I have tended to write stories that are mostly linear. I might mess with the order of things but there is usually only one layer of story happening. As a writer, more than that confuses me. Until recently.
Last spring, I set out to write an essay about stuff, the physcial stuff that fills my house. I forced all these ideas (William Morris! Feng shui! The long-kept dead canary in a close relative’s freezer!) into the salad bowl of words until it was a big mess (kinda like my closet). But instead, what emerged was that I actually needed to write an essay about my childhood house that burned down, and, alongside it, growing naturally from that fire, a ghost story (two ghost stories, as it turned out, because I thought the narrator was the ghost, but it was actually the boy whose father was the fire chief orchestrating the planned burning of the house. I’ll save the ghost POV for a parallel story, I think.) These last three layers (of fire) all turned out to be strata of the burning house “story” which is inspired by my own experiences. As the mess emerged (“wretched from my spirit” as I once described some of my friend Mark Horiuchi‘s ceramic art, which was “wretched from his spirit”) I realized I wanted to mess with my automatic stance of linear narrative. For the essay about the burned down house where I used to live, I set out to build layers, to mimic the memories as they occurred to me. Really, I was attempting a weak tea imitation of Joan Didion’s glorious memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. My essay is still an unfinished mess.
There is something in me that until very recently has always believed stories actually are (or worse, somehow should be) linear. Believed that, trick around with things as writers might, the human being who reads actually needs, on some biological level, a pattern that makes sense. But I’m starting to see more deeply into the crusts, the layers, how much there is (or can be, some day, if we work hard enough at simultaneous clarity and opacity) under the patina of the linear.
Like layers of paint, the story starts to peel away, revealing hidden stories and complexities and differing perceptions.
Like multiple transparencies (remember those, before PowerPoint?) in slightly different languages I try to make something that’s more complicated (on purpose! Take that, William Strunk!) but that still has some sort of shape, so it’s not chaos exactly, but a sort of artifice, imitating the mess that is realness while also, by the end of the thing, amounting to something, making some sort of sense or logic or scaffolding, a pattern, no matter how faint or possibly only visible to the eye of the writer. (I did say “try.”)
(What was I saying?)
I still want things to make sense. Maybe it’s my primal need. Writing a story that’s relatively linear, like arranging and organizing things in my home, gives me a false sense of control, as if I can shape the unshapable. The problem, maybe, is that no matter how we play, words can only roll out one letter at a time, it’s how they are made, so there’s no avoiding the linear, and facts and feelings tend not to adhere to my yearning for order, tend to sprawl out like oversized legs in the aisle of a plane, tend to bump against the cart that delivers (via lovely manicured hands) peanuts and near-dry, immasculated slices of lime in tonic.
I don’t want to open a book and have the letters fall off the page, I just don’t.
But then you realize there is a large-ish ball of magenta fuzz on the seat back in front of you and although you have been staring at it, off and on, for two hours, you will never know the air-traveler who left it there for you to stare at while your plane bumps in the air, what is this metal machine bumping against, exactly? for it must be something there, or how can air have such an impact? Somehow, we have to live in all this not-knowing, not ever being able to know whose fuzz we are staring at without even realizing it.
It’s weird writing something when you don’t know you’re about to write the end of the thing. This might be the end of the ghost story I’m writing. We’ll see. But it seems like the end.
This photograph faded with time, as he told the story to Cricket, as he counted to one hundred, night after night as he himself drifted next to his child, wondering how on earth such a tender thing could continue to survive.
In walking through the thick murk of life “after” my daughter’s accident when she lost part of each finger on her left hand, I have been thinking and reading a lot about pity. From the free online dictionary:
pit·y (pt)
1. Sympathy and sorrow aroused by the misfortune or suffering of another.
I appreciate real sympathy–it’s one of the things that has gotten us through this. But I’ve seen pity on the faces of strangers, and it’s of a different shade than mere sympathy. Waiting in the surgeon’s office for a check-up, others sit silently and smile those lopsided smiles full of benevolence, and selfish relief. I imagine even beloved friends might feel it for us right now, along with gratitude that it didn’t happen to their kids. (I bet I’d feel the same way: sympathy, compassion, and glad it wasn’t us. This is human!) But very soon after realizing how the change in my daughter’s hand might change our lives, I had a visceral wave of wanting absolutely no pity. Not for her, not for me, not for us.
Today I was reminded of the rightness of my reaction.
For the first time since her accident, we went to the playground at the Antioch School where she will begin nursery school in September. The last time we were there, she had climbed, fearless as is her wont, to the top of the blue jungle gym. (I blogged about that moment here.) Today, she climbed up, not to the top, but just about. She slipped a couple of times, but wasn’t hurt, and was unfazed. As she climbed, I coached a bit more than I would like, and more than I did last time, reminding her to pay attention to her feet, and feel her body. (This is something I hope to instill in her throughout her life, wanting, for the eventual woman she will be: root-like grounding, and trusting of the gut, that intuition that flows without effort from our bodies, in which dwell our souls.) Today, she was so proud of what she could do. As I witnessed her work, I was aware of my own body quieting down, being exquisitely present, breathing through my own fear of her falling or getting hurt. (Her surgeon seems petrified at the thought of her re-injuring her hand. I am too. But dammit, I wanted her to climb!) When she reached her near-top destination, I praised her but showed no surprise. For, some little shard in me knew she could do this.
She asked about the monkey bars. This question of monkey bars has been clunking around in me since the accident. How will her hands grasp and support her weight when she’s sustaining her entire body? Will she ever be able to cross those bars? Today I told her that when she’s bigger, she will be able to hold herself up and cross them. She wanted to try. I held her up; she grabbed hold of a rung with both hands. I told her I could hold on or let go. She wanted me to let go. I was below her, ready to catch.
I let go.
She held on.
She didn’t fall.
She dropped gracefully after a moment of dangle, and I was there, surrounding her with my arms. “You did it!” I said.
Of course she did it. I knew she could, but seeing was another thing.
I believe this strong, amazing child (who the hell can display such bias, if not her mother?) needs no pity. She may need some other things. She needs a world that allows for (and celebrates) all the ways we do what we do. I know she will teach me plenty along the way.
I know how lucky I am that she’s here with me now.
“The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’ Meander if you want to get to town.”
This is from Michael Ondaatje’s book, In The Skin Of A Lion, which I blogged about here. When I first read this passage, years ago, I realized this is the kind of fiction I want to write, and this proclamation provides comfort.
There’s a beautiful feeling I sometimes get when I’m reading. It’s the moment I realize I’m in the hands of a good storyteller. I’ve had that feeling sometimes reading “great” books, and sometimes reading unpublished student work. The feeling helps me relax and be along for the journey, and I crave it in everything that I read. This is not to say that I want what I read to soothe me–on the contrary. (As the fabulous Joy Williams wrote in her essay “Uncanny the Singing That Comes From Certain Husks,” “Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, neither is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader’s face.”) But that somewhat unnamable awareness that I’m in good hands as I read is always welcome. It has to do, maybe, with an amount of confidence (and sincerity) in the writer, because I don’t get that feeling, usually, when I read an overly clever or cynical voice–a narrative stance that, to me, usually feels insincere. I think the feeling I’m pondering can be called “trust.” As I notice it, something changes in my body; I relax a little (even if the story is unsettling, exploding in my face) because I understand an agreement the writer is making with me, and I am making with the writer: I trust that she or he will uphold whatever rules and aesthetics the story (or poem) requires, and I trust that the writer’s choices were made in earnest, and with honor behind them.
I want to give that same feeling to my readers. With my words, I want to craft a net, a web, or a hammock, to catch, or lull them into a place, a moment, a thought. Myself I want to quiet down to what’s essential, and I want the reader to witness (with me) that silver drop of water on a leaf, or that strange knocking sound that’s just too far off to identify but too close to ignore.
Near the end of the last century, I was traversing a difficult break-up. It seemed the only thing that got me successfully out of my depths was watching “Law & Order” which aired incessantly (several times a day, but still not frequently enough) on the cable channel A&E. Those gritty formulaic crimes and solutions, riding on the noble backs of wisecracks from well-worn characters like Lennie Briscoe, helped me survive my dark forest. For an hour at a time, I was distracted enough to gain the relief called numbness–sometimes needed when real things are too hard to face.
Fast forward thirteen years or so, and I need another escape. But we canceled cable last year, and now it wouldn’t be the classic L&O but instead one of its million children or grandchildren, the watered down spin-offs. And I’m sure as beautiful as Mariska Hargitay may be, these pale descendents would not offer the comfort of long-ago Jerry Orbach.
So, to reading. I’m enforcing a brief “vacation” from work-related reading. First I picked up Animal Farm, which I haven’t read since high school, and I love Orwell so want to read it again. But quickly I surmised that wasn’t the right book. Instead, on the beloved shelf I discovered a small gem calledThe Girl In Blue by P.G. Wodehouse. A student had recommended it to me after a chat when we each admired Wodehouse (on whose birthday, incidentally, I was born). I bought the book without knowing I wouldn’t have time to read it until now. I’ve adored the Bertie Wooster stories since I read the first after watching their dramatizations with the unequaled (pre-“House”) Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. But I’d never ventured outside the sunny, funny confines of Wooster and Jeeves.
The Girl In Blue stands alone, that is, it’s the only book he wrote about this set of characters. But Wodehouse’s hilarious hyperbole rings like a carillon throughout, and will sound to anyone who’s read his other books like the verbal equivalent of tucking into a good silk robe and a mohair chair before the fire, belly full of Anatole’s cooking. The perfect escape. A rollicking plot, and many hilarious twists, unfolding in a world blessedly unfamiliar to mine. But it was impossible to ignore the habit of reading like a writer, and this is good because this time, I found the novel better than escape. It’s Wodehouse’s prose.
In grandiose trappings, his sentences dance through and around what could easily turn to cliché, but he saves them just before they tumble; his facility with the shades and nuances of English spins what could be a simple fun romp into much finer stuff. To hell with the high art/low art debate! To hell with that lofty, sniffing disdain for stories created with the intention of (gasp!) entertainment. (I’ve never really cared about that fight anyway, but it’s fun to officially cast it off here.)
Could I please just spend a year reading through all of Wodehouse? Don’t they award grants for stuff like this? For 2.3 seconds, wild-eyed and laughing, I consider applying for Ph.D. programs, dream of researching a dissertation on the women in Wodehouse, if only so I could immerse myself in the genius of this man’s words.
(Okay, just one more book…)
Now that I have stepped from the safety of Brinkley Court, I will follow Wodehouse anywhere.
It’s weird writing something when you don’t know you’re about to write the end of the thing. This might be the end of the ghost story I’m writing. We’ll see. But it seems like the end.
Rebecca Kuder 