The Fiction of Myself

[This is an indirect response to a post on Felix Grant's blog titled Secret Garden. Though not obviously about the same thing, I think that the William Kittredge quotes used below may be closely related to what he was trying to get at. ]

Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

That’s taken from the story called Home  by William Kittredge in his book, The Next Rodeo.

In the middle of the story, he tells an anecdote that begins:

When I was maybe eight years old, in the fall of the year, I would have to go out in the garden after school with damp burlap sacks and cover the long rows of cucumber and tomato plants, so they wouldn’t freeze.

He hated this job. One day, an enormous black bird suddenly appeared from the nearby corn field,”black tail feathers flaring and a monstrous yellow-orange air sac pulsating from its white breast” and it seemed  to be stalking him. He was completely terrified until if flew away and he then realized it was only a courting sage-grouse.

For that childhood moment I believed the world to be absolutely inhabited by an otherness that was utterly demonic and natural, not of my own making. But soon as that bird was enclosed in a story that defined it as a commomplace prairie chicken, I was no longer frightened. It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful sacred strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

Such emblematic memories continue to surface, as I grow older and find ways to accept them into the fiction of myself. One of the earliest, from a time before I ever went to school, is of studying the worn oiled softwood flooring in the Warner Valley store where my mother took me when she picked up the mail three times a week. I have no idea how many years that floor had been tromped and dirtied and swept, but by the time I recall it was worn into a topography of swales and buttes, traffic patterns and hard knots, much like the land, if you will, under the wear of a glacier. For a child, as his mother gossiped with the postmistress, it was a place, high ground and valleys, prospects and sanctuaries, and I in my boredom could invent stories about it — finding a coherency I loved, a place that was mine. They tore up that floor somewhere around the time I started school, and I had the sense to grieve.

That tale rings so true for me. Though now that I am grown, rather than a fully enveloping fiction, I have little enclaves, both macro and micro, that are the environments of the stories I make about, or for, myself — which is what I think, perhaps, Felix was describing or mourning the loss of, in his blog post.

But when I was little, the “place that was mine” was all encompassing.

As Kittredge says in the first sentences of his story:

In the long-ago land of my childhood we clearly understood the high desert country of southeastern Oregon as the actual world. The rest of the creation was distant as news on the radio.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/