A few weeks ago, I found myself trying to explain how stories fit into my life and into our lives. Two moments came to mind: a conversation I had with an eye doctor, and a lunch I shared with a homeless man. Here they are.
                The eye doctor showed me a game. Find a friend (or someone else; maybe he’ll be a friend, soon) and tell him to look straight ahead, without moving his eyes. Standing behind him, reach slowly into his peripheral vision until he can see your wiggling fingers. Then take a colored pencil (which you had in your pocket; clever of you, knowing where this game was going) and put it into the edge of his vision.  Ask him if he can see it, and he can. Ask him to tell you what color it is, and he can’t. Humans don’t see color in their peripheral vision. (Our retinas have two types of photoreceptors: rods, which perceive movement even in low light, and cones, which perceive color and fine details. The edge of your vision comes through rods, the center through cones). Right now, the edge of your vision is in black and white. Most of the time your brain fills in the colors that “should” be there, or else doesn’t really mention that you don’t know. (When I do this, people are surprised they can’t name the color). If you showed your friend the pencil, and then held it back in his peripheral vision, it would “look” the color it is. But he’s not seeing that: his brain is painting the world with the color he thinks is there.
                I think we see stories the same way we see colors. Stories tell us what’s valuable, what’s allowable, what it means to be a hero, and then we paint the world to match what we think is there. I grew up in America, so as a child I thought of the man who builds his own log cabin in the wilderness as free. My friend grew up in Vietnam, so she thought of him as lonely–people belonged in communities, with responsibilities and ties. Neither of us decided that; the stories we heard told us to look at the world that way, and then we thought it was obvious. We thought we could see it. We thought it was the just color of the world, but we were seeing through our interpretations. Playing with stories, writing or rewriting or arguing about stories, gives us a chance to step back and think about how we paint the world, and how else it could be painted.
                Years before the colored pencils, I shared a sandwich with a homeless man. Once it became clear that I was listening, he wanted above all to talk. He wanted to tell me who he was, where he’d grown up. He wanted to tell me about all the friends he’d had once. “I’m still here,” he repeated. “They’re the ones who’ve gone.” His story saddened me. It frightened me. It was fractured, with events and timelines never quite fitting.His need to be heard overwhelmed me. His story wasn’t just a way of organizing information, of fitting events into a narrative we call a life. He didn’t tell it just for fun. It was his shell, and the door he opened for me, and the ocean he swam through. Telling it was necessary in some way that I didn’t understand.
                On the one hand, as I listen to one of my high school students define himself by the sport he plays or the career he wants, I see how a story shapes a life. I wonder where he got his story; I wonder if he would write a different one, if he realized that he could. On the other hand, I’ve never understood stories. I’ve loved them. I’ve been terrified by them. I’ve laughed with them. I’ve written them down because they were in my head, and I’ve read them and listened to them. We drink stories like we drink water. We share them like we share the atmosphere. You can diagram nitrogen and oxygen molecules, but that’s not the same as breathing.
                Essays–statements–even anecdotes arranged to tell you something–push us to say this or that. Stories let us walk with what we love and fear through everything that’s in between.

                “Right up to that afternoon at my grandfather’s bedside, […] I believed (and for the most part still believe) that silence was darkness, and that naming shone alight. I believed that a secret was like a malignancy and confession a knife, a bright hot beam of radiation that healed as it burned. I believed it was good–this being among the few things that truly did go without saying–to ‘get it all out.’
                Then I heard the bitterness of defeat in my grandfather’s voice […]. When it came to things that needed to be said, speech was always preferable to silence, but it was of no use at all in the presence of the unspeakable.”
                -Michael Chabon, Moonglow

                As a writer, Michael Chabon is in the business of naming, of speaking. Moonglow is his 428 page attempt to understand his grandfather by retelling large parts of the man’s life. It is as deep-hearted an attempt as I have ever seen to meld one’s heart with another’s. It is a revelation that revisits old wounds, and discovers wounds previously hidden. It is part confusion and part love song and very, very honest. On page 243, that honesty leads Chabon to question the value of finding the words, of “getting it all out.” Two-hundred and forty-three pages in, he questions the very task he’s doing.
                I want to learn from Chabon’s courage. I think it’s important, every now and then, to step back and question some of your most fundamental beliefs.
                Often, when I stumble into those questions, they hurt. I start wondering if my work (teaching, writing) is like trying to hold back the tides with sandcastle walls. I wonder if I’m like the child who moves his hands on the fake steering wheel of a rollercoaster, pretending that he’s directing the car.  Asking that hurts me. Why doesn’t it hurt Chabon?
                I think it does–but that’s not all it does. (And of course, our perspective can change the experience of pain. I don’t mind my hands hurting when I’ve been rock climbing. When I’m holding a friend who hurts, I don’t mind when I cry). Chabon’s questions do more because he’s actually willing to move, to reconsider, to learn. Hopelessness comes when I can’t trust words, and words are the only thing around to trust. Fear comes when I question my path, and still believe it’s the only path I could ever walk. If there are other things, if I could trust silence or music or movement, then learning that words can’t do everything is just an opportunity to learn more. If I’m willing to learn more, than questioning the things I believe in is an opportunity to look carefully and see some new facet, some new face.
                A little sand wall probably won’t hold the wave–but sand, and rock, and grass will. The little boy on the rollercoaster isn’t driving the car–but he is part of the movement. He’s learning that things change, that there are things he can touch, turn. If we hit ourselves with the questions, then questioning what we most believe breaks apart our world. If we’re open to the questions, and thoughtful with them, then they lead us to new possibilities and refine the possibilities of what we’ve already found.
                Speaking is wonderful. It isn’t everything. Words can do a lot. They can’t do it all.

The Soul selects her own Society –
Then – shuts the Door –
To her divine Majority –
Present no more –
                -Emily Dickinson

                My friends know so much that I don’t. One of them understands the intricacies of muscles, nerves, and fascia. (I, on the other hand, looked up “fascia” to make sure I was spelling it correctly). Another can explain the differences and similarities between Freud and Jung. Another can look at the oxygen isotopes in rocks to figure out what temperature the ocean was a long, long time ago. And all that has me thinking.
                I’d like to write a fantasy story where there are many worlds, worlds within worlds beside worlds, but you can only navigate the ones that you (to some extent) understand. The geography of each landscape would be based on connections within that understanding: the similarities between Freud and Jung, for instance, would become literal paths that you could walk, like passes through the mountains. In another world, the lay of the land would depend on the relationship between oxygen isotopes and heat. If you understood that, you could walk through this rock world. You could walk through the mountain. If you entered a world you didn’t understand, it would be worse than being lost. Here on earth, we use a magnetic field to determine north and south. It works pretty well. But in another world, your compass could work by complementary colors or musical scales or metal alloys. Enter a world you didn’t understand, and you wouldn’t know what bit of landscape sat next to what. You wouldn’t know what was up and what was down. You wouldn’t know where to set your feet.
                The idea’s rough. I’m still playing with it. But I like it because, like all true magical frameworks, I already feel like I’m walking through it. I feel like I’m living in different worlds: people are people, but we behave differently, value things differently, see things differently if we’re chefs in the kitchen or birders in the forest or athletes on the field. We use similar sounds, maybe even the same words, but we speak different languages. (I realized that when I first heard Professor Keller discuss the “motion” of a sculpture; a few days ago, someone tried to teach me a few steps of Irish dance, and they had to start by teaching me their words). On the one hand that’s obvious, but on the other hand, whenever I stay in one place for a little while, I start thinking that this world is the world. I start thinking that the values, worries, and habits I’ve taken up here are the only values, worries, and habits that are possible. I don’t mean to say that those values are wrong. (This isn’t an argument for moral relativity; courage could be courage, and still not be the only possibility). But here I stand, in one Society–and on the other side of the Door there are so many, many more. I think it’s nice to try to step through, every now and again.

                “I don’t wait. I prepare.” -Mrs. Hapsteade in Ted Sanders’ The Box and the Dragonfly
                “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolute nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” -the Water Rat in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows

                I wait a lot. I wait for the weekend to come around, and then I wait for the week, and work. I wait for my classes, and I wait for after my classes so I can write or read or sing embarrassingly. I wait for other people to start conversations. I wait, impatiently, for the microwave to finish it’s 90 seconds of BBBRRRRR-ing. (I wonder if there’s something wrong with my microwave). Over years and years I’ve built this habit of waiting. I’ve gotten angry when I was waiting, because it felt like wasting time. I’ve gotten frustrated with other people when they “kept” me waiting, and then, a bit BBBRRRRR-ish myself, I’ve been worse company when they showed up. And I wonder why I’ve done all that.
                (A note: resting is wonderful. Resting leaves you recharged, reanimated, reimagined, perhaps even realized or revitalized. My questions are for waiting, not resting).
                In wondering what else I could do, I’ve been looking at these two examples. First: Mrs. Hapsteade, who prepares. She aims from today to tomorrow. Earlier in the novel, Sanders comments, “Everything the future is made of is happening right now.” When I’m waiting, I’m usually preparing to keep on waiting. I’m setting myself into a holding pattern that stays a holding pattern. But I could be picking out a tree to climb, and looking to see how I’d climb it; I could be laying a foundation; I could be shifting my hips, and then when disco came back I’d be ready.
                Second: I don’t think the Water Rat’s aiming for tomorrow, like Mrs. Hapsteade, but he’s definitely not a waiter. He’s (sorry) a wader. A swimmer. A splasher, diver, paddler, laugher, talker, mocker, meandering thought-er in the water. He’s doing something, even if it’s nothing much, even if it’s “just” messing around.
                Maybe waiting is putting yourself on hold, and preparing is learning how to hold onto something. Maybe waiting is seeing the river as something that doesn’t have much to do with you, and boating is jumping in, because it does. Maybe the next time I’m waiting, I’ll prepare or mess around instead.

“[…] And re-enact at the vestry-glass
Each pulpit gesture in deft dumb-show
That had moved the congregation so.”
                -Thomas Hardy, “In Church”

To be natural is “such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
                -Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

                We have this idea that people should do what they’re good at, and that what they’re good at will come easily to them. I think that’s a lie.
                In Hardy’s poem, a girl from the Bible Class watches the priest, her teacher, as he speaks and inspires. She watches his gestures, hears the emotion of his voice. She trusts him, looks up to him–and then sees him step back into his vestry. The door doesn’t quite close. He turns to the mirror of his private office and recreates the motions and emotions of his sermon. She watches. It was all practiced. That makes it all seem like an act. This moment of “seeing behind the curtain,” in Hardy’s hands, is a moment of distrust and disappointment. At best, the performance feels disingenuous, manipulative. At worst it feels fake.
                I don’t think that’s fair. People can mislead us, they can lie to us, but work, practice, and revision are not in themselves misleading. I think we all work for the things we’re good at. If you read through Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches, you’ll see him shaping his most powerful lines in speech after speech. Those phrases that sing themselves didn’t just happen: he shaped them, time after time.  If you look at a dancer and see grace, see a body that almost floats, you’re seeing practice and effort, too. At sixteen I watched a modern dancer perform David Parsons’ “Caught.” (You shouldn’t google it: its not itself on a screen). The dancer moves through a strobe light, and the flashes make him fly: we see his shape, caught again and again in the act of leaping, as though he wasn’t landing, stepping, breathing. But then we get a single spotlight. Inside the dancer stands “still,” but he isn’t still at all. His chest heaves. Sweat runs down his skin. We see how hard he’s working.
                I think most art is like that. Talents, too. (Whatever arguments Capote and Kerouac have, they both revise–Capote’s revisions happen in his next draft, and Kerouac’s in his next piece). We can act to hide ourselves, and we can act to show our hearts. We can practice speaking so that our lies sound convincing; we can practice speaking because there are hard things we want to say.

                My friend Aaron and I were once in Richard Wilbur’s office at Amherst College. A few months before, Wilbur had opened his Poetry Writing Seminar by saying, “It would be churlish of me, indeed, to start this by saying that you all propose to distinguish yourself in the same field as did Shakespeare and John Donne. But the fact remains that it would be true.” Sitting in his office, Aaron (himself a budding poet) asked Wilbur, “How do you find something to write about? After thousands of years and so many brilliant, talented people saying brilliant, insightful things, how do you find something to say?”
                As I remember it, Richard Wilbur looked out the window. He was a tall man, and it was easy enough to see that he had been strong when he was young. Still, when I knew him, a few quick steps up hill were enough to take his breath away. So he paused, watching the trees.
                I’d heard how Wilbur had started his class: “It would be churlish of me,” and so on. I’d wondered why. It felt like an impossible challenge to offer college undergraduates. Looking back, I think that’s why he offered it–because it felt impossible, and it wasn’t. Everything from an airplane to a representative democracy to a poem was made up by someone. The constructions around us can feel inevitable, invincible, but they aren’t. They were made by children and adults, by inspiration and compromise. They might be intricate. They might be solid. They might’ve been made by Shakespeare and John Donne. But when we reach down, we touch the same field where they worked.
                Back in the story, in the office that day with Aaron, Wilbur smiled after a long pause.
                “You know, Aaron, with any luck, you can spend sixty years saying the same good things. I know I have.”

                Richard Wilbur, a guide to me and to so many others, died last Saturday. He was playful, attentive, and kind. He was as fully immersed in art and the possibility of art as anyone I have ever known, and, brilliant himself, he deeply, truly, hopefully opened to the art of others. He taught me that the same good things–compassion, awareness, dedication, joy, respect–are needed, again and again and again. He taught me that talking and writing are like planting crops for the community. He taught me that, in one way or another, we all share the same field, and what we’re growing is a world.

                “Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.” -Jack Kerouac, in Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, who didn’t edit anything.

                “Only they’re not writers. They’re typists. Sweaty typists blacking up pounds of bond paper with formless, eyeless, earless messages.” -Truman Capote, in The Paris Review, who did.

                I could get up in arms on either side. I could join Capote, and say that the carpenter who drops the nails and the screws and the hammer and the beams and the boards on your head isn’t honest. He’s not really a carpenter. Art, life, and identity are about the choices we make. They’re about how we hold ourselves. Spitting out another word and another word and another word in something you call “stream of consciousness” isn’t raw creativity: it’s giving up on the task of writing.
                I could join Kerouac: we pretend so damn much. We poise and perform and polish away the us in us, but we don’t need to. That’s a choice. Sound your barbaric yawp, howl, hoot, cough, scratch, “Be in love with yr life” and live it. (That’s Kerouac’s fourth point in Belief and Technique). Say what you are. Be what you are. Be it fully, and be it now.
                And Capote again: I’m not anything until I choose to be. I’m mad and I’m kind and I’m tired and I’m bored and I’m interested, or I could be, but what I really am is the collection I make by choosing which one to follow when, and what work to direct it towards.
                Kerouac: no, you’re just mad and kind and tired and bored and interested and wild and rough and drunk coy hopeless helpful cruel cautious curious spiteful meandering inspired. Own that. Doing anything else is cutting off a piece of you.
                Capote: if you want cutting metaphors, then carve me a duck without removing anything from the lump of wood. You’ll end up with the same eyeless, earless monsters you write. If you had a knife you might find form. An honest look comes from understanding your perspective, and walking around your subject so you can see from different sides; it’s not from pretending perspectives don’t exist.
                Kerouac: your perspectives makes what you see into lies.
                It’s kinda fun, watching them argue. I could get up in arms on either side. Sometimes I want to. Really, though, I think they both have a point. As far as I can tell, the two of them would never have gotten along in real life. I wonder if their ideas can in my head.

                Data: Strictly speaking, sir, it is not my playing. It is a precise imitation of the techniques of Jascha Heifetz and Trenka Bronkin.
                 Picard: Is there nothing of Data in what I’m hearing? You see, you chose the violinists. Heifetz and Bronkin have radically different styles, different techniques, and yet…you combined them.
                –Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Ensigns of Command”

                It’s supposed to be dangerous when you hear voices, but the truth is, I have lots of voices in my head. I’m not sure if there could be a me if I didn’t. I have my mother’s voice, and my father’s voice. They have their different perspectives, their different values, their different jokes. I have both of my brothers’ voices. I have voices from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ursula Le Guin, Ian Flemming (that’s the guy who wrote James Bond), and a whole lot of commercials. That’s what commercials are designed to do–stick in your head. Some of the voices I don’t want there. Some of them I do. Some of them I try to ignore. Some of them I listen to.
                I wonder if a lot of life comes from which voices you have inside, and how you listen to them.
                We talk so much about finding yourself, and about developing your ideas. Those are good things. They’re not the only things. There are a lot of sayings I could go to for help with this: Sir Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” T. S. Eliot: “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique […]; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.” Whatever good ideas and insights I’ve had, they were made from borrowed pieces: lessons I took from my parents, habits and hopes from my friends, perspectives from poets. Little seashells of grace, borrowed from the beach, and raindrops caught in my open hands. There’s that old question: is Data human? I don’t know, but I want to be more like him. He’s open to learning from so many others.
                This, all of this, it’s not my playing. But in playing it I’m becoming me. I’m making myself from you, and you, and you. As I do, I become something: a collection, an intention, a person. I become the kind of thing that other people can use in their threading, too. And I can wonder: when I braid tomorrow, what strands will I choose?

                “Children like being frightened by fairy tales. They have an inborn need to experience powerful emotions. […] Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays (as today’s moral tales insistently advertise, though it doesn’t necessarily turn out that way in real life), but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.”
                -Wisława Szymborska, Unrequired Reading

                It’s been a long time since I read Hans Christian Andersen, but I remember clever children and tricky troubles and shapes inside the shadows. I remember adults who did not mean well. I remember wolves.
                If I understand her, Szymborska says we should stop trying to scrub the fear from our children’s lives. We should stop telling them that everything will be okay. It’s not true, and besides, we don’t need that crutch. It’s okay to be frightened. It’s okay to get hurt. It’s okay to die, and you’re going to, and along the way, I hope, you’re going to do something else. Inside our fears of spiders and burning flames and commitment’s restrictions there are the beauties of fire and life and love. We don’t want a fire that doesn’t burn. It wouldn’t warm us. We want to learn how to tend a fire carefully. We want to learn how to treat the world with respect, and so live in it. We want our hearts to grow.
                If we accept that the reward for our goodness will not be the end of our pain, we’re free to see what the reward really is. We’re free to walk across sharp rocks, not immune to their edge, but aware of how to set down our feet. We’re free to grow tall, to feel deeply, to live in a world that hurts and heals. We’re free to build our house, invite in new friends and listen to the wolves.
                I’m not sure I’ll ever get beyond prejudice. I’m not sure I’ll ever get beyond hate, or anger, or thoughtless fear. Those things, Szymborska says, aren’t evil. Evil is the fruit of a tree that never grew. We can grow up, intellectually and emotionally, until we’re mature enough to be afraid and still be brave. Until we can walk through the forest of prejudice and keep looking for the spring of connection. To get there, Szymborska says, we’d better accept our fear. We’d better give our kids a chance to feel their own.
                So bring on the stories: the wild ones, the frightening ones. Bring on the the monsters and the unsettling dreams. Maybe my hate will always be with me. Maybe I’ll read (or write) stories about it. Maybe, that way, I’ll learn to never give it a knife.

-Randall Munroe, xkcd.com

                Me too, little man with a round head. Me too. But I don’t think it really IS too honest.
                Sure, containment is important. There are lots of people bouncing around together, and we can’t all throw our AAAHHHH! at each other all the time. There’d be too much AAAHHHH to ever hear anything else. Sometimes things can be going on inside, and I don’t need to share that because the moment’s not about me. But there’s another side, too.
                A couple months ago my friend was having a hard time. I gave her a hug. I asked her if she wanted to talk about what was going on. She said she was scared–really scared. She said she was confused. She said she didn’t want to tell me, because she didn’t want to make me “carry all that.” I don’t remember how exactly I responded, but I’ve been looking back at that moment. In it, there’s something important to say.
                We get stuck thinking that we’re supposed to be “positive,” that we’re supposed to show how bright and happy (and successful and productive and beautiful and cool and OKAY) we are. We get stuck thinking that we help those we love by always smiling. And I don’t think it’s true. I think we help each other and inspire each other by showing our hurts as well as our hopes, our confusions as well as our revelations. When we only show the “best” of ourselves, we push everyone else to do the same. We push each other to be okay; we push each other to hide the hurts we have. When we come out hiding, when we share that we’re hurting, we can come home to ourselves. We can realize that it’s possible to be scared and confused and struggling–and, in all of that, to be doing pretty well. The lumber of our lives might seem heavy, but it’s also the stuff that ships are made of, and it’s also ballast for the storm. I think together we can carry it.
                So me too, little man with a round head. Me too.