Fiction for survival

The second time I went to the First Me church on Whitehomer Road was shortly after moving back to Clintonville looking for a job. (The first time was an Easter service way back during graduate school, which didn't stick and doesn't count.) But the second time, the minister was on vacation, so there were two lay speakers who talked about a method they had used as counselors to help people see themselves differently and find a way through their most sticky problems. Dave and Laura called it 'restorying'.

The major premise is that there is a narrative going on all the time. There's a postmodern school of literary theorists who like to call this the 'text'. Your job is a text; your family life is a text; your social life is a text; a basketball game is a text. Stanley Fish wrote a book called Does This Course Have a Text? So you get the idea: everything, not just printed, verbal accounts of things, can be seen and "read" as a narrative.

The minor premise, according to Dave and Laura, is that everybody constructs their own narrative of their own life, selectively working with the facts they are given. There's the rub! We don't choose our parents, siblings, birthplace, birth order, or what happens to us, but we do string together those facts in a way that somehow hangs together and makes sense. We also don't choose what other people choose to make of it, what conclusions they draw, and what meaning they give to the story.

It gets hairy when someone's version of the story does damage. That's when it's time for some restorying, according to Dave and Laura. My favorite novelist, John Barth, who is at least as serious about making art as Dave and Laura were about doing therapy, would call it fiction for survival. Barth is all about getting into the writing/living/rewriting of the life/story, which makes his writing convoluted and his characters complex. Like most people living an examined life.

This is a process I have returned to many times over the years, and most of it is boringly self-involved and not for publication. There have been other times where the writing of the song of myself spilled over the boundary in ways that should have been instructive, had I been paying attention. And maybe someday those episodes will find their way into a narrative I first committed to writing during graduate school, when the movement/discourse analogy began to crystalize into a group of fictional characters.

This miserable post has been sitting in my outbox fermenting for weeks (months?) now, so it's either ripe or about to "turn" - just as the would-be manuscript of self-revelatory metafiction has been sitting in a manila file folder and floppy disk so long there is no computer alive that will read it. But I continue to scribble Mitty-esque paragraphs that go in a drawer, because as Anthony Burgess said, the important thing is to keep writing.

This just in: grass greener

Pissed off? Dissatisfied? Fed up? Bored? Just plain tired? Had enough already? Honeymoon over? Everything gone south? In the toilet? Down the tubes? In the pits?

So quit. Leave. Get the hell out. Splitsville. Vamanos, hombre! There's bound to be something better out there. Slip out the back, Jack, make a new plan, Stan, and all that. I mean if the story isn't going the way you want, write a new chapter, right?

When I have this inclination, someone sagely reminds me of the conventional wisdom, and of course I don't do anything drastic and impulsive. Sure, there are better jobs, classier neighborhoods, hipper cities, and cooler living situations out there. But who knows what the unintended consequences would be?

This is not - repeat NOT - a "healthy dose of realism." I'm not acknowledging the necessity of what is, and I'm not affirming some kind of facts, irrespective of perception or perspective, that are true regardless of what anybody thinks. I'm not that far gone yet. I'm just too lazy or busy or complacent to do anything about it.

It's a lot of freaking work to make major changes happen, aside from the risks involved, and who has the time and energy? Learning the ropes of the new workplace, the streets of the new city, the habits and requirements of a new set of people? I have my hands full as it is, so I think I'll stand pat for now.

I asked the I Ching, and it said, "Wait in the midst of danger...take the line of least resistance...there is no way out for three years...(then) cross the great water with deliberation." Oracles - can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.

vertigo in centro swingstatum

Can be induced merely by climbing (puff puff, pant pant) from the third floor to the fourth floor of a glass and steel office building. Look out the window. You can see the horizon.

It's so flat here that most of the time there is no visible horizon, so there's that building next door, and the one behind it, and the clouds. Now I look out the window from the vertiginous height of the fourth floor (facing southeast) and I see the ridge that rises slightly beyond two water towers, probably the rise that separates Alumni Creek from Big Walnut Creek east of Methodistville. Not exactly a birdseye view, but still a different view.

All due to the move that's part of a reorganization that's part of a merger. My department has been subdivided while being shifted up one flight of stairs, so I have new officemates as well as a cube by the window. We have yet to meet our incoming K-5 editors who either migrate from the Big Apple or join from somewhere else. For now, most work processes are continuing unchanged - if we can find each other in the new physical layout.

My biggest immediate challenge is conditioning my heart, lungs, muscles, and energy systems to walk up four flights instead of three. And I ain't taking no elevator, nosir.

Time passes. I walk - no, I stride - up the four flights every day without undue effort, albeit without boxes full of files, and I'm adjusting body and soul to the new space. Pictures are finding their way onto the walls of my cube - not all that were in the old cube, only those I can't live without - and I know where to find a pen or paper clip or dictionary when I need one.

In short, it's good to be up and running again and able to function in the rarefied air of southern Delaware County with the morning sun streaming in.