RACONTEUR 1. Story is the breath of the human spirit, an involuntary reflex that’s also useful in soothing and centering the self. Story is medicine. Watch the hero plunge into darkness, then struggle into a larger light and gain a fraction of her strength. Make sense of your fragmentary life through the art of narrative quilting, then watch yourself morph from the subject of your life’s story into the teller of the tale. Story is the antidote for confusion, depression, alienation. When we cannot find a fellow man to speak into our soul, we can find the markers he left behind. It’s almost enough to live on. Story is a remix of reality. Nothing happened the way it happens in your recounting but the song remains the same. Story is a mutation of memory. Add beginning, middle, and end to fact and watch it turn into truth--a slipperier eel by far. Try to deal directly with the raw data of experience and marvel in the frailty of your mind. Story is sadism, a cruel manipulation of things only half-seen. Gossip precludes empathy. Understanding another man’s life the way I do when I describe him to a third divides him from me, and that division is always a lie. Story is war’s most powerful weapon, rending each battle into a scene until the scenes, taken together, demand their epic conclusion. A treaty is nothing but sequel-bait. Telling, in this sense, is a prelude to slaughter, and every ear’s an accomplice. 2. I heard that story’s dead. Genre doesn’t even believe in itself any more. No one has time for a drawn-out tale unless it has a budget of $1M per episode. Stories told with ink and paper must be built of fault lines, they say, of empty spaces, of spiderwebs, of confessions to events that didn’t quite happen. The story’s future lies in lies. But every step away from story is a step into its arms: from Joyce’s glut to Beckett’s drought, every experiment reorders or obscures what was there all along, as surely as every atheist’s arguments are rooted in a beef that began with a man of God. Deny it, ignore it, rail against it; burrow underground to get out of its light, and you’ll only end up in its shadow. 3. Story was playing in the meadow where story spent every morning when suddenly something changed. Maybe she found an ache in her chest where once peace had been beating, or maybe she was bit by a magical snake who conveniently named the cure for its fangs before slithering into myth. So story went on a journey whose details are largely irrelevant, and discovered, at journey’s end, the beginning of the middle. For a time story and her middle were very happy together, but when that got boring to hear recounted, which didn’t take very long, inevitable complications drove them apart. Fights were fought, adventures endured, however petty or heroic or pettily-heroically tongue-in-cheek, and when the patience of listener and raconteur and story herself were all on the edge of exhaustion, resolution revealed itself like a ruby on the tongue of a snoring tiger. Gently story creeped back toward her middle who by then had aged into an end. With an ache in her heart that was also a hard-won throb of peace, a breath of the spirit that was also its death, story reached her trembling fingers toward her only possible conclusion. As her end awoke and began to reach back, their fingertips almost but not quite meeting in the meadow where all this began, our hearts pounded louder for a moment, then calmed. What we knew would happen happened, and for one naked moment, no longer, our worlds of words were set aright.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Jun 2013 00:55:27 +0000
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