March 19, 2009

I completed yesterday the 213 page manuscript of my short story collection, The Reason Vincent is Alone.  Strangely enough when I had the thing in my hands all I could think of (aside from wishing I could take a long nap) was that while I'd been finishing the damn thing, I'd been starting to look at the whole ball of wax, fiction writing mostly but also non-fiction, in a disconcerting new way.

I always thought it was necessary to unpack events, deconstruct them to find the narrative thread hidden in the larger cloth. How else to understand what's been impelling us forward all these years?

I had faith I suppose: a faith in story telling to unlock the deepest mysteries, that the key to breaking a pattern was in telling and understanding the story. Writing as religious act. Striking the keys, the rite of a true believer.

    I see now how deluded I was. Oh, blame the entire Western Canon and the perils of academe, but leave it to the movies to set me free at last. In the end of The Wizard of Oz, Billie Burke tells Judy Garland she’d had a power all along that could have taken her home: I see now that I had a power all this time too. For years, I’ve been terrified that I'd be hopelessly perpetuating every nasty twist of heart, mind and behaviour, every character flaw which have  so far, been part of the genetic code of the women in my family for countless generations. I needed an exorcism or I'd fall prey to all of their ghosts, every wicked echo from the past reverberating into my future.

Now, I know the truth and it's got nothing to do with writing.

     The way to escape the patterns of the past has nothing to do with telling a story at all. (Questions about fiction or non-fiction are irrelevant here.) Just the reverse is actually true.

In using narrative craft, I've only served to reinforce my sense of who I think I am. By writing, rather than shifting the family paradigm (or, more to the point, my own) I was only condemning myself to be as fixed and unchanging, as much a victim of circumstance, socialization or psychology or isms as any of the women in my family have ever seen themselves. The more I have kept trying to tell it, the more I've been saying, “I am just the same.”

In fact, constructing a narrative of any kind only creates a continuing flow of delusion and wrong thinking. Through stories we are always saying some kind of version of this: "We are the kind of people who..." Feel free to complete that sentence any way you like based on your own experience. 

The kicker is, all those experiences are in the past and unless we let them, out of habit, work their influence upon us, they have no true bearing on this, a fresh new moment passing before us and through us.

     What I need now is silence. No more stories. Only a letting go of stories. 

***   

    It’s a clear bright day. Out on the prairie the spring burn is on. The plume of swirling grey smoke carries the smell of burning leaves and sweet grass my way. 

     The ice has broken. The lake has melted. The grape hyacinth are up and bursting into bloom. Their plentiful flowers have brought the color of a twilight sky down here to earth.

     My mother suffers because she holds tight to a sad and terrible story as if were the truth. As if the truth was a codified unchanging thing. A life raft. A veritable stalagmite of calcified personal history.

All that has come before is long gone. Here we are (amongst the cabbages) and all I have is right now. And that is more than enough.