“The dust of an eroding planet and the tiny animalcules of the chalk are destined soon or late to entomb us all” - Loren Eisley (Introduction to T.H. Huxley’s On a Piece of Chalk, 1967)
As I mentioned in my previous post, I am writing in one of the oldest buildings in one of the oldest cities in North America, and all that on top of a rock partially made of the oldest physical material on the planet. And the stories I am writing, these true-fictions, are all about danger. Each story (though mostly still unwritten) tells about a violence that was close enough to whisper in my ear. We live on just the thinnest sliver of the planet, and all above and beneath us is so fundamentally inhospitable that traditional hellscapes look like cluttered, stuffy, basements. Below us is the searing density of mantle, above us the freezing void of space, and just there, driving towards you in a late model, white sedan, is someone without your best interests in their heart. I am writing about that sedan. All the tiny exquisite dangers on our human scale.
Or… my intent is to write about that sedan. Three weeks in to this eight week residency at Mallard Cottage, and what have I written? I am writing these fictions, and concurrently rushing to understand how I can write fiction. All while I practice writing fiction so I can do it well enough to produce it. This concurrency is the least efficient synchronicity of work I have experienced. And, so far, my fictions are not even false. Some are other people’s stories I have dug up, some are stories I remember.
For the latter, the fiction is in the translation of memory. Some of the stories happened, objectively. Probably. Others are accretions of auxiliary memory. Anecdotes and little white entertainments lying up against favored personal myths. They may have no chronological or geographical origins in common but have since slid along the strike-slip faults of resonance and lateral thinking and now form one contiguous landscape. Your story overheard, my story, that guy’s story that is mine but more suspenseful, now lie together: valley, mountain, plateau, desert. They are waiting for good lighting (the illumination of sunrise/surprise) and the right vantage to deepen the shadows, until the surface compels exploration. Adjusting that lighting. Making the landscapes I love compelling outside of myself - that is the art. But not art, not science. Stage lighting is a trade. I am learning a trade.
Up here in (sort-of)Canada, we have been following the sexual assault trial of once popular CBC host Jian Ghomeshi as it plays out, tweet by painful courthouse tweet from the mainland. Each woman’s memories of the traumas he caused, taken apart by the defense. Memories are so vulnerable to cross-examination. The problematic subduction of details and compression of emotion forms terrain, crumpled and difficult to map. Once subducted, a memory metamorphoses and is not so much in disarray or partial, but elementally changed. Lighter elements return to the surface through volcanic activity (or whatever tenor this geologic vehicle describes). The remainder is fractionated, heavy and dark, and continues down until incorporated into deep mantle. This ultramafic black and deep green, viscous solid is cut off from the cycling and recycling of the lighter, surficial material. Only under very special circumstances can we find this mantle “memory” again exposed. Beautifully for this metaphor, one of those places is here on the island of Newfoundland.
The urgency of translating memories into fiction is more sedimentary/stratigraphic than igneous/metamorphic. The more that I tell a story of an actual experience, the less I remember it. As if each time I tell it, it is being touched. As the substrate is touched in the telling, it erodes. That erosion eventually wears down the whole story and it's gone. I've noticed, whether I tell some stories ten, or a hundred, or just three times, I can feel the last time that I will be able to tell each of them from memory. An experience gets told up. It is told out. And if I try to tell that story again, I am not telling it from a memory of it happening. I am telling it from the memory of the last time I told it. At that point, it becomes a second-hand story. I am then telling somebody else's story. That other person happens to be me, but it is not my story anymore. There is no memory at the base of it.
Before they are dust, I want to set some of these stories into something stronger than memory: the epoxy of fiction. It will preserve them through time and it will infuse the natural intergranular voids with substance. I will make up the parts that are unknown, add coherence and lustre. The more stories we can take from life and classify and polish and preserve; the less dust of words and memory there may be to bury us. Or at least the more we will have to read when we are finally entombed beneath our own lived detritus.
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