On Contexts and Stories

It had been raining for two days. The old adage I have seemingly always known promised that April showers will bring May flowers. Somewhere that may be true, but in Minnesota that assurance doesn’t safely hold: even into the month of May the weather remains problematic—I recall a snowstorm in the more recent past that took place in mid-May and deposited twelve inches of wet, heavy snow on the deck of my then Wisconsin home. The rains in April may be somehow a portent for Spring—but not always here in the Mid-West. Here in Minnesota the wiser flowers wait to bloom until at least mid-June. In fact, Spring is not an actual season in the upper Mid-west where I have lived for the past thirty-five years: we most often go from winter to summer in a single day and the rains occur amidst thunder and lightning though sometimes they are gentle.! But, it is now November, and it has been raining for two full days. During this time the rains don’t soften the frozen soil for the flowers to burst through or provide them with the necessary water for their rooting sustenance. Rather, these autumnal rains help the leaves fall from the trees and float to the ground. I see that the trees outside my window are fast becoming bare. I watch the squirrels gather up the tumbled leaves and with the soggy materials gripped firmly in their mouths scurry up the disrobed trees to build their winter home. Thoreau writes that the fallen leaves “teach us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as ripe.” Not me, not yet. The falling leaves and bare trees do remind me of death, and so I return to my writing. What falls from the sky is still rain even as it is in April, but today the rain feels different than it does in April or May: today it is a bleak November rain and holds little promise for a milder future. And a rain-filled Election Day has come and gone, though its repercussions will affect us for decades. And the rain it raineth every day!

Things become known from within the context in which they are experienced; the original response to events is that of the body; that bodily response becomes associated with an emotion which in the future will be evoked when the body experiences a similar context. After the bitter winter in Minnesota, forty-five degrees feels quite warm in April and May; the body loosens and the mood lightens. But today, in November, forty-five degrees feels rather chilly, and when I go out of the house today for my morning walk, I will put on my insulated winter jacket, wool mittens and stocking cap. My body will tighten and try to hold in its warmth; my mood will be wary. I prepare for winter. I am more hopeful in Spring, more cautious in Fall and Winter. In November’s forty-five degrees I put away my short pants, but in May’s forty-five degrees I take then out of winter shortage. Like the buds on the trees, in May’s forty-five degrees I begin to open and enjoy the rain. In November’s rains I begin to close and stay dry inside, but in May I’ll be found singing in the rain. 

A recognition of the significance of context seems to me necessary for an examined life. To know ourselves means that we acknowledge the contexts of our lives as the place from where the stories we narrate and have narrated have their genesis. I know that there are many stories that do not come to the surface, and that there are stories that are consciously or unconsciously refused, though I know that these buried and unnarrated stories have yet their influence. The narrator of George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda says, “No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistakes in our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about.” We fill the unavoidable gaps in our knowledges then with narrative. Emily, in Ann Patchett’s novel, Tom Lake, says about the origin of the narrative of her painful break-up with Peter Duke, “The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story.” At the end of the day (and even of a life) the story tells what it all felt like and even what it all might have meant. In The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store at the livery stable “somebody’s up late and talking.” They are telling a story. We define ourselves by the stories we tell. We know others from the stories they tell. Fatty, in James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, says about Nate Timblin, “Rather, he was a story, a wisp, a legend, a force, a fright.” I think the same might be said of us all: we are stories. Emily the narrator shares the name of the character in Thornton Wilder’s play that our narrator played in high school, university and summer stock!

Story telling is how we create sense of our lives. Ben, one of two narrators in Anne Michael’s novel, Fugitive Pieces, says “But the search for facts, for places, names, influential events, important conversations and correspondences, political circumstances—all this amounts to nothing if you can’t find the assumption your subject lives by happens in memory.” That assumption is the source of the pop and scoop narrated into story, and that assumption is responsible for the question about what we want to answer—or deny—at the moment. Ben considers the life of Jakob Beer who had lived with Athos the geologist who was a “splendid anthropomorphist,” and Ben acknowledges that Jackob had to have been shaped by storytelling cared for as he was by a master story teller. And who is not shaped by storytelling? The forces within us that inspire our behaviors and thoughts require excavation and study and as they are unearthed the story evolves. Our desire to know occurs in a context: “No thing is sudden . . . Just as the earth invisibly prepares its cataclysms so history is the gradual instant.” The forces that produce the volcanic eruption had been in place for years, centuries and eons. Geologists and archeologists, like Athos study those events and uncover the artifacts about which they then narrate stories. In Fugitive Pieces, Ben’s father demands from Ben’s piano practice perfection. But the context of this demand is that Ben’s father, is a Holocaust survivor, and as Ben acknowledged, his father “understands his son’s piano playing practice as a moral imperative: each note setting order against chaos . . .” This moral imperative is the buried force in Ben’s father desperate demand of Ben, and the demand also represents the father’s felt responsibility to Ben. Finally, his father’s demand shapes the contexts of Ben’s gusts and storms. Out of his turmoil Ben narrates his story. It is of course a different story than either his father or mother might narrate, but then, it derives from a different context.

Much, however, remains buried. The narrator of Daniel Deronda says, “There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.” The narrative we create depends on those gusts and storms; certain contexts call up certain gusts and storm. These can be understood as a source for our stories. We must survive the storm, however. Events occur, but what we remember and narrate is reflective of what we can come to know about our gusts and storm; what we know is moral. What we consciously remember and what we narrate of our memory is that which possesses value for us. How we narrate that knowledge depends on the questions that one has. In his autobiography the philosopher and historian R.G. Collingwood says, “That what one learned depended not merely on what turned up in one’s trenches but also on what questions one was asking: so that a man who was asking questions of one kind learnt one kind of thing from a piece of digging which to another man and revealed something different, to a third something illusory, and to a fourth nothing at all.” Sometimes it is the therapist, a trusted loved one, or even sometimes a stranger who asks the questions. And there are some who never ask questions, who disregard their contexts, but they tell stories nevertheless.

Memory sometimes is buried and out of sight but not out of force. In Fugitive Pieces, the geologist Athos says, “If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one can make a map.” These maps are important to the geologist, but the work of the geologist demands presence at the site and digging in the earth. The map might indicate the events, and there are maps that show the topography. But the map is not the territory, nor is the event the story; that event must be narrated to be known and then it becomes the land and not the map and the narration includes my travels through it: it is the story. From the map I can learn the names and places and contours, but it is while traveling the territory that what lies beneath and has been buried can be learned. In the ghettos the Jews buried their valuables. “All across Europe there’s such buried treasure. A scrap of lace, a bowl. Ghetto diaries that have never been found.” But these artifacts lie waiting to be excavated. One cannot get lost studying a map, but walking the territory leaves time and space to get lost: to find oneself it is important first to be lost. It is in those details during discovery that one creates and others may find the pop and scoop of the story.