What’s Your Story? (Are You Sure?)

From whiskey river:

The Story, Around the Corner

is not turning the way you thought
it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,
the way a child draws the tail of a pig.
What came out of your mouth,
a riff of common talk.
As a sudden weather shift on a beach,
sky looming mountains of cloud
in a way you cannot predict
or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens,
takes its own side. And it is strange.
Far more complicated than a few phrases
pieced together around a kitchen table
on a July morning in Dallas, say,
a city you don’t live in, where people
might shop forever or throw a thousand stories
away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it
aren’t sure. Is this what we wanted?
Stories wandering out,
having their own free lives?
Maybe they are planning something bad.
A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember
is growing into a weird body with many demands.
One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock,
knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and (italicized portion):

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while.

(Joan Didion, The White Album [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Almost everyone knows what a shaggy dog story is… There is another type of witticism that seems to be achieving wide currency today. Through the authority invested in me by nobody I have named it the Shabby Friar joke. It is a sort of upside-down antecedency quip, or a reverse sequitur with backlash…

It is a linguistic contrivance that has fascinated me since that day in London when I first read about the Carmelite friar. Three or four hundred years ago this friar, clad in a shabby tunic, stood on the bank of the Thames and marveled at the surpassing wisdom of God in arranging for navigable rivers to flow past the larger towns…

I have come up with a dispatch case full of [such jokes], a few of which follow:

It has seriously been argued [says Bertrand Russell] that rabbits have white tails so that it will be easier for men to shoot them.

A lovesick student at Fordham University wandered into a laboratory, stumbled over a Bunsen burner and lurched against the university’s seismograph, setting off a calamitous earthquake in Guatemala.

…From the works of Artemus Ward: “I met a man in Oregon who hadn’t any teeth — not a tooth in his head — yet that man could play on the bass drum better than any man I have ever met.”

…Neill Beck of Malibu was asked once about the quality of property in a certain beach area north of where she lives. “I wouldn’t buy up there,” she advised, “because in my opinion the ocean is too close to the shore.”

(H. Allen Smith, How to Write Without Knowing Nothing)

One of my favorite Bob Dylan numbers is a big ol’ shaggy-dog story of a song — not funny in any conventional way, but it makes me smile consistently all the way through its loooong length: “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” (from 197x’s Blood on the Tracks). And in line with the H. Allen Smith quotation above, it even includes a friar — quite possibly even a shabby one.

(Unlike many of Dylan’s songs, it’s just a story (or is it?); not surprisingly, therefore, it has attracted a number of people (including Dylan himself) interested in turning it into a film. I really, really hope this doesn’t come to fruition — some stories just gain nothing by translation from words to images, or from short to long form.)

For some reason, I never had to work to figure out the lyrics of this song. (That alone makes it noteworthy to me!) If you’re having trouble with it, though, you might want to open this window to follow along through the entire nine(ish)-minute length.

(Remember: If streaming audio does not work for you, there’s always an alternative — clumsier, but it should work just fine. Just keep an eye on the correct bracket.)

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 8:58 long.]