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Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon << continued from Part 1 III. I want to say that it's possible for a story-maker to be friends with a poem-writer-we are no Capulets and Montagues. But it does mean that Josh and I look at the world in different ways: I pay attention to the way moments fit together. I watch for themes that carry through, for the way one thing has led to the next and the possibilities it could lead to beyond that. Josh, by contrast, is tuned to the elemental: the power of small things to move the spirit; the intensity of a single moment fully inhabited. My instinct is to find meaning through connections. Things matter-or I know how they matter-because of their relation to something else. But Josh has learned how to take the moment in isolation: the word without the scaffold of context; the world without the myth of narrative. He wanted to kiss me like a poem. It was one of many nights in which we'd had long conversations about a million things, and I'm not sure what made that night any different. We hugged goodbye and he didn't move away, his face serious, his eyes searching. The silence was conspicuous: a moment without words in a friendship built on conversation. What's the story we're making? I had to say. We can talk about the story we want it to be but we are making stories; our choices string together and ripple out. I know the narrative is constructed, but I need you to make a choice with me about how to construct it. He hadn't been thinking about the narrative, of course. He'd been thinking about the elemental: about the intensity of a single moment fully inhabited. He'd thought about the poem.
IV. When I first learned about constellations, I found the whole concept confusing. Diagrams always included lines connecting the dots, and of course those lines were nowhere to be found in the actual night sky. "Who picks those lines?" I asked. "Who decides which dots to connect?" Adults gave various unsatisfying answers about ancient myths, which years later I coopted for the kids on my street: but the truth of the matter, which grown-ups seemed reluctant to articulate, was that it's essentially arbitrary. We connect the dots we want to connect. We make the stories we want to tell. Some cultures have legends about a great bear that walks across the sky, pointing you north. I grew up in suburban Chicago hearing about a giant ladle. "What's wrong with just looking at the stars?" you might want to ask. "Who says we need to make shapes at all?" But I worry that there is a cost to not having a story. Because even though we often identify our influences after the fact, and even though we sometimes believe we control more than we do, this much is really true: actions lead to reactions and choices make a difference. A story is a way of accessing that causality, of laying claim to it. A narrative is a kind of coherence-but it's also identity, and purpose. Do you want your life to be bear-shaped, or ladle-shaped? What kind of story do you want to be in? There's nothing in the sky itself that says, connect these stars and not those. But if you choose to make the Big Dipper-when that's the arc you pick for yourself-you're a lot more likely to search for soup. This is my side of the debate, of course. Josh likes to quote Frank Kermode, a British literary critic: "We satisfy ourselves with explanations of the unfollowable world-as if it were a structured narrative. But world and book are hopelessly plural, endlessly disappointing: we stand alone before them, aware of their arbitrariness and impenetrability, susceptible of interpretation only by our hermetic tricks." In other words, you can try to understand the world as if it were a story, but that story is not reality. Narrative is artifice. Here's the danger, though: that without a narrative-or at least an attempt at narrative-the future becomes an empty void. A person without a story doesn't know what moment comes after this one; and he doesn't know what moment he wants to come after this one. I find meaning in uncertainty because of the possibilities it could lead to, because of its potential to become-but becoming is a narrative structure, a hermetic trick; and so for a person without a story uncertainty turns untenable. He is at the mercy of every instant: but instants are not always kind, emptiness is overpowering, life is broken and the splinters draw blood. He wanted to die like a poem. It was one of many warm evenings in June, one of many late twilights in early summer, and I don't know what made this one any different Look I don't think I'm ok He knew, from poetry, how to fully enter an instant. He knew how to give himself over to the power of it, how to feel the weight of every element-but this was too heavy to bear I think I'm going to be taken to the hospital When he texted me I ran, down twilight streets and past quiet storefronts, but at his house the windows were dark It's ok don't poI'm not there So I called. "I'm at Central," he said, his voice flat; and then he hung up. I ran again, scanning every face every face but there were only strangers, and when I called again each ring was a question: where is he-will he answer-can he answer- Finally: "I'm at People's Republik" I doubled back and at last I saw him across the street coming up a flight of stairs from the bottom of the parking garage I jumped off a high thing Maisie I jumped off a high thing and I landed on grass So I ran until I held him trembling close to me, until I felt his ragged breaths and beating heart against my body, my breaths, my beating heart. "Should we get a ride to the hospital?" I asked. "I can walk," he said; and after all it was only a mile. But after we crossed the street he broke down again and I held him, felt his weight, unable to tell if he needed to sit or if he could go on. My mother tells the story of when she went into labor with me on a summer night. It would help to take a walk, the midwife said, so my mother and father strolled along the city streets, and when my mother felt a contraction she'd grab a parking meter and grip it with a focused intensity. More than one passer-by came up to my father: "Want me to hail a cab?" Dad just smiled and reassured them, while my mother moved on to find the next parking meter. But the people around us were minding their own business: without a pregnant silhouette they could not tell that we were laboring-they could not tell that we were trying to bring life out of this- I didn't know what to say as we made our way to the hospital, so I rambled, anecdotes about my weekend, what our friends were up to-perhaps hoping that the stories in other people's lives would be a reminder that there is always a story, and your life is not just what you feel right now- your life is not a moment; your life is movement- Chapter 2! Chapter 2! (I would not have minded a deus ex machina) I searched, desperately, for the story: for that moment to give way to the next, for the pieces to fit together, for the threads to intertwine and make something meaningful. As we walked we wove what we could: here are our hands and they fit together; here are our fingers and they intertwine. Giles Corey would not tell a lie in the Salem witch trials and so he was sentenced to death by pressing: stones were piled on top of his body until the force crushed his ribs and his lungs collapsed. With his final breath he refused to recant: "More weight," he said. "More weight." I do not know if narrative is a lie but I am seeing him crushed for lack of one.
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ISSN 2150-6795 |