Dancing at the Edge of the World
Page 6
Are these the “primary experiences” experienced while her eyes move rapidly, furnishing material for the next dream? They could well be; but by following Aristotle’s directions and making purely temporal connections between them, we can make of them a quite realistic narration of the day Edith woke up and turned off the alarm clock, got up and got dressed, had breakfast listening to the radio news, kissed Mr. Driemer goodbye, and took a plane to Cincinnati in order to attend a meeting of market analysts.
I submit that though this network of “secondary elaboration” may be more rationally controlled than that of the pretended dream, the primary material on which it must work can be considered inherently as bizarre, as absurd, as the crocodile on the roof, and that the factual account of Edith Driemer’s day is no more and no less than the dream-story a “manoeuvre,” “rendering sensible-seeming something that is not sensible in the least.”
Dream narrative differs from conscious narrative in using sensory symbol more than language. In dream the sense of the directionality of time is often replaced by spatial metaphor, or may be lowered, or reversed, or vanish. The connections dream makes between events are most often unsatisfactory to the rational intellect and the aesthetic mind. Dreams tend to flout Aristotle’s rules of plausibility and muddle up his instructions concerning plot. Yet they are undeniably narrative: they connect events, fit things together in an order or a pattern that makes, to some portion of our mind, sense.
Looked at as a “primary visual (sensory) experience,” in isolation, without connection to any context or event, each of our experiences is equally plausible or implausible, authentic or inauthentic, meaningful or absurd. But living creatures go to considerable pains to escape equality, to evade entropy, chaos, and old night. They arrange things. They make sense, literally. Molecule by molecule. In the cell. The cells arrange themselves. The body is an arrangement in spacetime, a patterning, a process; the mind is a process of the body, an organ, doing what organs do: organize. Order, pattern, connect. Do we have any better way to organize such wildly disparate experiences as a half-remembered crocodile, a dead great-aunt, the smell of coffee, a scream from Iran, a bumpy landing, and a hotel room in Cincinnati, than the narrative?—an immensely flexible technology, or life strategy, which if used with skill and resourcefulness presents each of us with that most fascinating of all serials, The Story of My Life.
I have read of a kind of dream that is symptomatic of one form of schizophrenia. The dream presents an object, a chair perhaps, or a coat, or a stump. Nothing happens, and there is nothing else in the dream.
Seen thus in spatial and temporal isolation, the primary experience or image can be the image of despair itself (like Sartre’s tree root). Beckett’s work yearns toward this condition. In the other direction, Rilke’s celebration of “Things”—a chair, a coat, a stump—offers connection: a piece of furniture is part of the pattern of the room, of the life, a bed is a table in a swoon (in one of his French poems), forests are in the stump, the pitcher is also the river, and the hand, and the cup, and the thirst.
Whether the technique is narrative or not, the primary experience has to be connected with and fitted into the rest of experience to be useful, probably even to be available, to the mind. This may hold even for mystical perception. All mystics say that what they have experienced in vision cannot be fitted into ordinary time and space, but they try—they have to try. The vision is ineffable, but the story begins, “In the middle of the road of our life …”
It may be that an inability to fit events together in an order that at least seems to make sense, to make the narrative connection, is a radical incompetence at being human. So seen, stupidity could be defined as a failure to make enough connections, and insanity as severe repeated error in making connections—in telling The Story of My Life.
But nobody does it right all the time, or even most of the time. Even without identifying narration with falsification, one must admit that a vast amount of our life narration is fictional—how much, we cannot tell.
But if narration is a life stratagem, a survival skill, how can I get away, asleep and awake, with mistaking and distorting and omitting data, through wishful thinking, ignorance, laziness, and haste? If the ghostwriter in my head writing The Story of My Life is forgetful, careless, mendacious, a hack who doesn’t care what happens so long as it makes some kind of story, why don’t I get punished? Radical errors in interpreting and reacting to the environment aren’t let off lightly, in either the species or the individual.
Is the truthfulness of the story, then, the all-important value; or is the quality of the fiction important too? Is it possible that we all keep going in very much the same way as Queen Dido or Don Quixote keeps going—by virtue of being almost entirely fictional characters?
Anyone who knows J. T. Fraser’s work, such as his book Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge, and that of George Steiner, will have perceived my debt to them in trying to think about the uses of narrative. I am not always able to follow Mr. Steiner; but when he discusses the importance of the future tense, suggesting that statements about what does not exist and may never exist are central to the use of language, I follow him cheering and waving pompoms. When he makes his well-known statement “Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is,” I continue to follow, though with lowered pompoms. The proposition as stated worries me. Man’s refusal to accept the world as it is? Do women also refuse? What about science, which tries so hard to see the world as it is? What about art, which not only accepts the dreadful world as it is but praises it for being so? “Isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God!” says the lady with the backyard full of washing and babies in Under Milk Wood, and the sweet song says, “Nobody knows the trouble I seen, Glory, Hallelujah!” I agree with them. All grand refusals, especially when made by Man, are deeply suspect.
So, caviling all the way, I follow Mr. Steiner. If the use of language were to describe accurately what exists, what, in fact, would we want it for?
Surely the primary, survival-effective uses of language involve stating alternatives and hypotheses. We don’t, we never did, go about making statements of fact to other people, or in our internal discourse with ourselves. We talk about what may be, or what we’d like to do, or what you ought to do, or what might have happened: warnings, suppositions, propositions, invitations, ambiguities, analogies, hints, lists, anxieties, hearsay, old wives’ tales, leaps and cross-links and spiderwebs between here and there, between then and now, between now and sometime, a continual weaving and restructuring of the remembered and the perceived and the imagined, including a great deal of wishful thinking and a variable quantity of deliberate or non-deliberate fictionalizing, to reassure ourselves or for the pleasure of it, and also some deliberate or semi-deliberate falsification in order to mislead a rival or persuade a friend or escape despair; and no sooner have we made one of these patterns of words than we may, like Shelley’s cloud, laugh, and arise, and unbuild it again.
In recent centuries we speakers of this lovely language have reduced the English verb almost entirely to the indicative mood. But beneath that specious and arrogant assumption of certainty all the ancient, cloudy, moody powers and options of the subjunctive remain in force. The indicative points its bony finger at primary experiences, at the Things; but it is the subjunctive that joins them, with the bonds of analogy, possibility, probability, contingency, contiguity, memory, desire, fear, and hope: the narrative connection. As J. T. Fraser puts it, moral choice, which is to say human freedom, is made possible “by language, which permits us to give accounts of possible and impossible worlds in the past, in the future, or in a faraway land.”
Fiction in particular, narration in general, may be seen not as a disguise or falsification of what is given but as an active encounter with the environment by means of posing options and alternatives, and an enlargement of present reality by connecting it to the unverifiable past and the unpredictable future. A totally factual nar
rative, were there such a thing, would be passive: a mirror reflecting all without distortion. Stendhal sentimentalized about the novel as such a mirror, but fiction does not reflect, nor is the narrator’s eye that of a camera. The historian manipulates, arranges, and connects, and the storyteller does all that as well as intervening and inventing. Fiction connects possibilities, using the aesthetic sense of time’s directionality defined by Aristotle as plot; and by doing so it is useful to us. If we cannot see our acts and being under the aspect of fiction, as “making sense,” we cannot act as if we were free.
To describe narrative as “rationalization” of the given or of events is a blind alley. In the telling of a story, reason is only a support system. It can provide causal connections; it can extrapolate; it can judge what is likely, plausible, possible. All this is crucial to the invention of a good story, a sane fantasy, a sound piece of fiction. But reason by itself cannot get from the crocodile to Cincinnati. It cannot see that Elizabeth is, in fact, going to marry Darcy, and why. It may not even ever quite understand who it was, exactly, that Oedipus did marry. We cannot ask reason to take us across the gulfs of the absurd. Only the imagination can get us out of the bind of the eternal present, inventing or hypothesizing or pretending or discovering a way that reason can then follow into the infinity of options, a clue through the labyrinths of choice, a golden string, the story, leading us to the freedom that is properly human, the freedom open to those whose minds can accept unreality.
WORLD-MAKING
(1981)
I was invited to participate in a symposium called Lost Worlds and Future Worlds, at Stanford University in 1981. The text of my short contribution follows; a slightly garbled version of it was printed in Women Writers of the West Coast, by Marilyn Yalom (Capra Press, 1983).
We’re supposed to be talking about world-making. The idea of making makes me think of making new. Making a new world: a different world: Middle Earth, say, or the planets of science fiction. That’s the work of the fantastic imagination. Or there’s making the world new: making the world different: a utopia or dystopia, the work of the political imagination.
But what about making the world, this world, the old one? That seems to be the province of the religious imagination, or of the will to survive (they may be the same thing). The old world is made new at the birth of every baby, and every New Year’s Day, and every morning, and the Buddhist says at every instant.
That, in every practical sense, we make the world we inhabit is pretty well beyond question, but I leave it to the philosophers to decide whether we make it all from scratch—mmmm! tastes like a scratch world! but it’s Bishop Berkeley’s Cosmo-Mix!—or whether we patch it together by a more or less judicious selection of what strikes us as useful or entertaining in the inexhaustible chaos of the real.
In either case, what artists do is make a particularly skillful selection of fragments of cosmos, unusually useful and entertaining bits chosen and arranged to give an illusion of coherence and duration amidst the uncontrollable streaming of events. An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen to or watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity. And yet all it is is an explorer’s sketch-map. A chart of shorelines on a foggy coast.
To make something is to invent it, to discover it, to uncover it, like Michelangelo cutting away the marble that hid the statue. Perhaps we think less often of the proposition reversed, thus: To discover something is to make it. As Julius Caesar said, “The existence of Britain was uncertain, until I went there.” We can safely assume that the ancient Britons were perfectly certain of the existence of Britain, down to such details as where to go for the best woad. But, as Einstein said, it all depends on how you look at it, and as far as Rome, not Britain, is concerned, Caesar invented (invenire, “to come into, to come upon”) Britain. He made it be, for the rest of the world.
Alexander the Great sat down and cried, somewhere in the middle of India, I think, because there were no more new worlds to conquer. What a silly man he was. There he sits sniveling, halfway to China! A conqueror. Conquistadores, always running into new worlds, and quickly running out of them. Conquest is not finding, and it is not making. Our culture, which conquered what is called the New World, and which sees the world of nature as an adversary to be conquered: look at us now. Running out of everything.
The name of our meeting is Lost Worlds and Future Worlds. Whether our ancestors came seeking gold, or freedom, or as slaves, we are the conquerors, we who live here now, in possession, in the New World. We are the inhabitants of a Lost World. It is utterly lost. Even the names are lost. The people who lived here, in this place, on these hills, for tens of thousands of years, are remembered (when they are remembered at all) in the language of the conquistadores: the “Costanos,” the “Santa Claras,” the “San Franciscos,” names taken from foreign demigods. Sixty-three years ago, in the Handbook of the Indians of California, my father wrote:
The Costanoan group is extinct so far as all practical purposes are concerned. A few scattered individuals survive…. The larger part of a century has passed since the missions were abolished, and nearly a century and a half since they commenced to be founded. These periods have sufficed to efface even traditional recollections of the forefathers’ habits, except for occasional fragments.
Here is one such fragment, a song; they sang it here, under the live oaks, but there weren’t any wild oats here then, only the Californian bunch-grasses. The people sang:
I dream of you,
I dream of you jumping,
Rabbit, jackrabbit, and quail.
And one line is left of a dancing song:
Dancing on the brink of the world.
With such fragments I might have shored my ruin, but I didn’t know how. Only knowing that we must have a past to make a future with, I took what I could from the European-based culture of my own forefathers and mothers. I learned, like most of us, to use whatever I could, to filch an idea from China and steal a god from India, and so patch together a world as best I could. But still there is a mystery. This place where I was born and grew up and love beyond all other, my world, my California, still needs to be made. To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.
HUNGER
(1981)
To publicize the Oxfam America Fast for the Hungry in 1981, the Portland Food Bank held a “food for thought” luncheon meeting, at which I was asked to speak briefly.
You probably didn’t expect to hear anything about Macchu Picchu today—that lost city high in the Andes, built a thousand years ago—but the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote a book about it, and I could find nothing to offer you that came closer to the heart of our subject here today. He describes the wonderful place in a long series of images—this is my own rather wild translation.
Then up the ladder of the earth I climbed
through the terrible mazes of lost jungles
to reach you, Macchu Picchu.
Tall city of stepped stone
in you two lineages meet,
the cradle of man, the cradle of light,
rock together in the thorny wind.
Mother of stone, foam of the condor,
high reef of the human dawn …
And then the poet begins to ask who, in fact, built the city.
Ancient America, bride of the depths,
did you too, did your hands
up from the forests to the high void of the gods,
under the marriage-day banners of light and order,
mixed with the thunder of drums and lances,
did you too, did your hands
that wove the mind’s rose and the snowline
and th
e blood-red grain of the furrows
into the web of shining matter, into the hollows of stone,
O buried America, did you too, did your hands hold down
in the under-depths, in the bitter pit, the eagle, hunger?
Hunger, coral of mankind,
hunger, did your steep reefs rise
as high as those high, ill-founded towers?
Macchu Picchu, did you build
stone upon stone, and the foundation, hunger?
diamond on diamond, and the foundation, tears?
That says to me what we have come here for. It says that so long as the beautiful towers of stone, of concrete, of glass, are not well founded, they are not habitable. No house worth living in has for its cornerstone the hunger of those who built it. We in America now raise our cities taller even than Macchu Picchu. But along with what they call the “real” city, the “real estate,” there is an invisible city. It is to the stones of the city as the soul is to the body. And that’s what we’re talking about. That is the city we’re trying to build, to found, not on hoarding and moneymaking and hunger, but on sharing and on justice. A house that deserves its children.
We don’t live in such a house. We never have, no doubt we never will. But that doesn’t matter. Whoever helps to build that house, to lay a single stone of it, may feel that they’ve done more in their life and with their life than all the Kings and Incas in all their power ever did.