Eight of us gathered 'round the candles, voices swinging across the planks, stories spilling laughter and tears, resonance and incredulity, criss-crossing here and there as life is wont to do when four couples start passing pasta.
"So tell us the story of how you met," went the refrain, and each couple filled in blanks. Our marriages are 8 and 9 and over 30 years long. They include a boatload of talents, regional and global long-distance, letters and emails, high regard, college love affairs, arranged marriage, some altered states of consciousness, many kinds of intelligence, deep hurt and healing, transitions, children and no children and grandchildren, foreign languages, crises and near-misses, passion, trust, varying plays of other people, and the mysteries of time. Searching for and abandonment to love and its remarkable ways.
The next morning I woke up early and unloaded the dishwasher, wondering about the point at which people stop telling those stories of meeting and marrying....because people do stop....other stories stand out more and take their place. Or after time, recollecting can lose some sparkle...for some times, for some folks, remembering becomes bittersweet, painful even, depending on where the relationship has gone. I suspect there's not a couple on earth that can't look back at their early relating and find inklings of their relationship's eventually more developed pathologies. I suppose that sometimes in very early marriage those meet & marry stories are the ones that couples tell partly because not much else has happened in their lives together. Later we tell them because they are charming and fun and as the song goes the beginning is a very good place to start. But even where the eventual strengths are sturdy, and even as the sweetness prevails, we didn't all get married to have that one early chapter be the whole book.
When you read good novels you should be able to find intimations of the whole story in the very first paragraph, like harmonics that ring at the slightest touch. Those lines should suck you in, whirl you around, and stir your bones in such a way that the story lives with your very breath, every sentence a respiration. I'm reading a book like that right now -- it's almost 542 pages and I can't put it down -- I read the first half in two sittings. The opening paragraph starts like this: "It's so hard to explain what the dead really want." You're with me, right?
Openings are gates. And open gates are irresistible.
It's well worth it to write good openings in novels. And no less so in life. We all want good starts, right? So the novelist rewrites those first lines endlessly. The editor reads the manuscript and you make pre-printing revisions; but in real life you don't get that luxury. Or is it a luxury? Isn't the essence of craft life? We get redemption, we get transformation, we get process, but not re-writes. Our lives flow -- sometimes roughly, sometimes smoothly. Each story its own paragraph and flowing from the previous. At some point the story has to be let loose to tell itself. The only way that first paragraph gets sweeter is with the liberal permeation of time's release. The constant becoming. Not the re-writing....the writing. And I can't wait to keep reading.
©2011 Mindy Danylak
3 comments:
This is beautiful Mindy! Makes me lick my lips when I'm done.......I can still taste your words.
I have an argument with you, though. I think we can, and do,and maybe must, continue to rewrite our stories for our whole lifetime...finding meaning in different nuances of them, seeing events from the other side, which in turn makes our preveious version feel slightly false, or even alien. Our stories, after all, reflect more what we understand at this moment than what happened at that one. So maybe the essence of life is craft!
thanks rebecca! i'm not sure exactly what you're arguing, but something stands out to me around it so a few thoughts... yes, i agree that understanding shifts over time. thank god!! :) so on re-writing, i'm with you that we write new understandings, see things in new lights. our understandings at a given time are limited...they change.
but if you're suggesting (but are you?) that we can actually re-write life, i don't think i can go that far. yes, the story as we tell it may be different from what "happened" but we cannot ignore what happened...it's already on the page, touched the heart, prompted decision, evoked feeling. living is real. things happen in time and space. to re-write them, newly? we simply don't have that much control.
i think there's divine mystery at play...the story is not all our own...there are the stories we write & there are the ones we're in...stories we don't (or wouldn't, or couldn't) write ourselves, but that are nonetheless real & true, across time, regardless of what we understand.
as art is about life, life is about making life. we can write the next chapters differently because of changed understanding, we can live out new understandings of earlier ones. but total re-do? i doubt our human capacity is enough for what re-writing really means. but with them there is still life. there is process, there is redeeming and transforming. understanding story anew is good. and there's no need to make it start over. i think that's at least partly what love is for.
thanks so much for your comments....i enjoy knowing that you're there reading and resonating so thoughtfully! xo,me
SOOOOO fantastic.
Post a Comment