Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon
Here Are Our Hands

<< continued from Part 2

V.

How, then, do we find a story to tell? How do we make coherence from something so fragmented? And how do I understand what even to him is incomprehensible: how do I grasp a life that is not my own? I can make a story from the lines on his palms but I do not know how to read the scars on his arms.

Literature, of course, takes an endless interest in our mutual unknowability, and the way we use narratives to bridge the distance. Proust's narrator feels this unknowability most keenly in his relationship with Albertine: "I could not tell," Marcel says, "what her feelings were for me, whether they were inspired by self-interest or by affection." So he turns to story-making. He creates a picture in his mind of who Albertine might be and what she might desire, "an Albertine who was the image precisely of what was mine and not of the unknown." But the moments that give him the greatest success in this endeavor-the only times it really seems possible to understand her, or claim her-come when she is asleep. Her complexities are hidden as she lies still and silent: there was no moment "so sweet as when I was watching her sleep."

This is the impulse: to say, hold still so I can see you clearly! Go to sleep so my image of you can come to rest! At nighttime, motionless: this is my chance. Then I will understand you, then I will see the story, then I will make the story.

VI.

He shook in the night. I could feel his feet twitch against mine, the gentle spasms, his body flinching from something unseen-as if it too had taken up the fight. As if it could shake away the thing inside him that wanted him to die.

VII.

Not only "how do you make a story," then-but how do you make a story of someone who does not hold still?

Or perhaps the harder question: what good is a story, if it can only describe stillness?

I can write Josh into a narrative but the cost is that it isn't Josh at all: it's a character. I can make him comprehensible but the cost is that it's not he I've comprehended. And you cannot survive without a story but if you are only a story you are not alive. If your life is movement then to grasp it is to end it.

What does it mean to live with a story? What does it mean to love you without one?

VIII.

Albertine dies young. She falls from a horse and Marcel gets the news in a letter from her aunt. The deepest part of this grief, for Marcel, is the loss of Albertine's living complexity. He goes on an exploration to learn more about her life, even though it brings him great pain to hear details of her affairs and experiences. "In her heart of hearts what was she? What were her thoughts? What were her loves? Did she lie to me?" He yearns to restore her to multiplicity-the closest he can come to restoring her to life.

Only the dead are static. Living people are dynamic, multivalent, erratic. No moment with Josh predicts the next: good days are followed by bad days and we do not know which is coming. What is the story we are living today? And is it right to make a story at all, when if he is still it is because he is dead-when the only thing that would render him constant is the loss of him entirely?

I cherish the complexity because it means that he is alive: but nothing has ever been harder for me as a story-maker, as a person looking for the thread through this, than the profound unsettledness: who you are, who you are to me.

XI.

Maggie Nelson, Bluets: "I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words."

X.

I don't know how to make a poem and I am afraid to make a story and so all I am left with is this: that you are so valuable to me-unspeakably valuable

Is that a poem or is it a story

Or is it just a star in the sky

>> click to read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon studied philosophy and literature at Swarthmore College, and completed her MA in philosophy at Brandeis University. At present she is working in consulting while applying to doctoral programs in literature.

>> Back to Issue 22, 2019