…and Sometimes the Story Chooses You

[Image: “Peeping Tourists,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river:

As it is, we are merely bolting our lives—gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in—because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more simple than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable? But suppose you could answer, “It would take me forever to tell you, and I am much too interested in what’s happening now.” How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god?  And, when you consider that this incalculably subtle organism is inseparable from the still more marvelous patterns of its environment—from the minutest electrical designs to the whole company of the galaxies—-how is it conceivable that this incarnation of all eternity can be bored with being?

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Blessing for a Writer

May you hear in your own stories
the moan of wind around the corners
of half-forgotten houses
and the silence in rooms you remember.

May you hear in your own poems
the rhythms of the cosmos,
the sun, the moon and the stars
rising out of the sea and returning to it.

May you, too, pull darkness out of light
and light out of darkness.
May you hear in your own voice
the laughter of water falling over stones.

May you hear in your own writing
the strangeness, the surprise of mystery,
the presence of ancestors, spirits,
voices buried in the cells of your body.

May you have the courage to honor
your own first language, the music of those
whose lives inhabit your own.
May you tell the truth and do no harm.

May you dare in your own words to touch
the broken heart of the world.
May your passion for peace and justice be wise:
remember—No one can argue with story.

May you study your craft as you would study
a new friend or a long time, much loved lover.
And all the while, lost though you may be in the forest,
drop your own words on the path like pebbles

and write your way home.

(Pat Schneider [source])

Not 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:

#11: In the small town in which a certain small boy grew up, there worked an elderly barber named Mr. Owens. He was the barber who always cut the boy’s hair. And his patter while doing so always took the same form:

Let me tell you a story, he’d say, and off he’d head on a wild narrative — often but not always involving a boy in that very town, back in the days when only wealthy people owned cars, or featuring a teenager falling in love and having his heart broken for the first time, or perhaps a frightened young man on combat duty in Europe in the 1940s…

Whoever the story’s protagonist, whatever his dilemma, the shape and many details of each story resembled a fantasy: animals could sometimes talk; teachers were often witches or wizards who could conjure up fantastic beasts and alternate realities just by waving a piece of chalk in the air; machines seemed almost alive, possessed of motives and means of expression which enabled them to achieve impossible tasks while the human characters gawked and fumed; the Four Horsemen knocked at human doors, politely requesting entry but gaining it even when refused. The stories were always somehow timed to conclude, mysteries unlocked and climaxes resolved, just as Mr. Owen unclasped the sheet fastened at the nape of the boy’s neck. And that’s how that story ends, he’d say.

Years later, the boy had lived long enough to recognize in Mr. Owen’s stories the shapes not of fantasy but of reality, the fact not just of metaphor but of metaphor’s referents. Dragons (sometimes evil, often kindly) do indeed live in old houses on the corner; heroes do indeed accomplish impossible tasks, small and large, every day; at times of despair, on dark windy nights, phantasms do indeed reach for us from the shadows; animals do indeed live rich lives of their own, alternately happy and desperate, and enjoy sharing them with humans who come their way.

Finally, the boy came to understand something else about Mr. Owen’s stories: their timing resulted from many repeated tellings. And if Mr . Owen had begun them not with I’ll tell you a story but with the phrase I remember, his tales would not have been so wondrous. In his childish ignorance, the boy would have scoffed: Such things do not happen and never did. But they do, and they always did.

There are lessons here both for storytellers and for nostalgists.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)