Same Old Stories

Like nature, my 3-year-old son abhors a vacuum, especially in his knowledge and understanding. If you ask him a question, he always answers, convincingly and in vivid detail, whether he knows the correct answer or not. Psychologists call this fabulation to distinguish it from garden-variety lying. He believes what he says. He is not knowingly trying to deceive. He is still largely free of guile, unlike his 5-year-old brother who recently started telling fibs on an experimental basis, testing the results. What the 3-year-old is doing is something all of us do throughout the day, I suspect, though perhaps with more sophistication or attention paid to believability, and that is telling stories. Blanks in knowledge are bothersome, and we like to fill them. We like linkage and resolution. Our minds are like artists working in collage, bringing together disparate materials and crafting them into pleasing wholes.

Some of these ideas comes from a book I read several years ago by Mark Turner, The Literary Mind. The title is intentionally misleading, because this is not a study of writers, at least not principally. Rather, Turner argues that humans, even non-writing humans, by nature, possess literary minds. His book is a work of cognitive science, not literary criticism or biography. Stories, he argues, are almost our essence.

“Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories,” Turner says. I’m not convinced of this idea in a scientific sense but I find it useful. While reading the book and for some time afterward, I saw and heard stories everywhere – in random street scenes, banal conversations and even in seemingly non-narrative poems.

I thought about this in connection with poetry because I seem to be reading a lot of it, and I’m seeing stories whose existence is no more than implied. This seems like a great strength of poetry, especially in short forms, a strength that goes unused by poets too eager to bang home their meaning. Most fiction advertises itself as story. In poetry, story is often smuggled in unannounced, like contraband.

Here is “Here,” in which an entire life is implied, by the famously concise Samuel Menashe:

“Ghost I house
In this old flat --
Your outpost –
My aftermath”

And Geoffrey Hill, who writes that “Wild Clematis in Winter” is written “i.m. [im memorium] William Cookson,” the English poet and longtime editor of the journal Agenda:

“Old traveller’s joy appears like naked thorn blossom
as we speed citywards through blurry detail –
wild clematis’ springing false bloom of seed pods,
the earth lying shotten, the sun shrouded off-white,
wet ferns ripped bare, flat as fishes’ backbones,
with the embankment grass frost-hacked and hackled,
wastage, seepage, showing up everywhere,
in this blanched apparition.”

And finally, “An Elegy Is Preparing Itself,” by Donald Justice:

“There are pines that are tall enough
Already. In the distance,
The whining of saws; and needles,
Silently slipping through the chosen cloth.
The stone, then as now, unfelt,
Perfectly weightless. And certain words,
That will come together to mourn,
Waiting, in these dark clothes, apart.”

Distilling a world into a clutch of sentences, suggesting more than the words can ever say without being excessively elliptical or resorting to a private language, suggests poetry is a species of very dense matter, freighted with potential meaning. Is “story” the author’s intent or merely the presumption of the reader? Yesterday, when I asked my 3-year-old what he had been doing, without hesitation he answered, “I see Michael [the 5-year-old] in New York. We go to the zoo and eat pizza.” We hadn’t left our house in Houston and pizza was not on the menu.