A Jaw-Dropping Miracle of Meat and Electricity

One of the first conversations I ever had with the Palinode, a conversation which occurred over seven years before we finally started dating, was about books.



I may have been engaged to another man at the time, and I may have been fooling around with the friend who introduced the Palinode and I — I was, shall we say, a lover and not a fighter in those days — but damn if that Palinode didn't seem like a fine human being, and one of my tests for fineness back then was to ask about books. If a person hemmed, hawed, or looked in any way confused by the question, they were deemed Not Fine.

"What book should I read next above all others?" I asked him.

"Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian," the Palinode answered without hesitation.

And he was, indeed, deemed to be Very Fine.

More than seven years after that conversation, we dated, and almost a year after that, we were married, and about a month or two into our marriage, we were sitting around in our apartment together talking about books again when he suddenly looked like he'd remembered something important.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I just remembered one of my favourite passages in fiction," he said. "Would you like to hear it?"

"I would love to," I said.

I expected him to get up off the floor to find the book the passage was in, but no.

"It's from Blood Meridian, pages 51 to 53," he said, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to remember that kind of thing, and then his eyes looked up at the ceiling for a moment, and then he looked at me and recited this section of Blood Meridian from memory:

The first of the herd began to swing past them in a pall of yellow dust, rangy slatribbed cattle with horns that grew agoggle and no two alike and small thin mules coalblack that shouldered one another and reared their malletshaped heads above the backs of the others and then more cattle and finally the first of the herders riding up the outer side and keeping the stock between themselves and the mounted company. Behind them came a herd of several hundred ponies. The sergeant looked for Candelario. He kept backing along the ranks but could not find him. He nudged his horse through the column and moved up the far side. The lattermost of the drovers were now coming through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed company met with on the plain. Already you could see through the dust on the ponies' hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armour of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant. ¹

OH MY GOD, I thought in my head.

I stared at him in silence.

"Oh, you didn't like it," he said.

"No, I loved it. That was like incredible poetry."

I remembered our conversation about that book from eight years before and decided that I had just landed in one of three situations:

a) This was a sign that I had married the right person.
b) I was in way over my head, and he should totally divorce me for someone who knows stuff.
c) I had married either a robot or a highly intelligent alien-human hybrid sent to infiltrate the species.

Ten-and-a-half years later, a full eighteen-and-a-half years since we met, I think the correct answer was A. He still knows a ludicrous amount of information — really, his brain is a jaw-dropping miracle of meat and electricy — but he's kind enough not to mock me for having trouble remembering the word for butter, and that, my friends, is love.

----------------------------

¹ Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. 1985. p. 51–53.

Our Life Narratives, The Problem Of Truth, And The Natural Elasticity Of Our Perception

The other day, I wrote seven short dust-jacket synopses of my early twenties. Each synopsis was about the same period of of my life, but the different focus of each of them made it sound like I was writing about completely different times and people.

None of them was a lie. Each synopsis was simply organized around a separate theme that threaded itself through my life.



I wrote the synopses as an exercise to show a friend how elastic our life narratives really are. She has been struggling with writing the truth of her story, and I wanted to help her see how maleable this so-called truth can be depending on the message we want to deliver.

Pushing and pulling our narratives into particular shapes is not essentially deceitful. It is something we all do all the time. We push our own experiences into the service of particular messages either to make ourselves look at our own lives in a certain way or to engage and teach others about a particular idea.

For instance, I have spent much of my time in the years since my early twenties concentrating almost primarily on the events that point out how I hurt someone terribly that I loved very much. It's obvious that much more went on over those years aside from instances of my being immature and thoughtless, but I chose to focus on the narrative that best supported my guilt. I was not only immature and thoughtless during those years, and so the narrative I chose to obsess over is obviously not the whole story.

The storyline that stars me as a duplicitous cuckold is not a lie, but it definitely isn't representative of my entire early twenties. It is but one narrative in a sea of many, and it has been my go-to tool for self-flagellation for nearly two decades.

Where the truth lies beyond the facts is difficult, if not impossible, to suss out, and I lean into the belief that there is no essential truth to find in an absolute sense. Every story is not only coloured but also, at root, created by our individual perspectives. Narratives that reach beyond the factual accounting of times and dates rely on the individual perspective of the narrator and the perceived needs of the narrator and/or audience to grow the flesh that allows them to be more than grocery lists of events.

The meaning within our stories happens beyond the accounting of the facts.



Instead of those seven dust-jacket synopses, I could have written hundreds of thousands of pages, if not millions, detailing the ins and outs of my days over that five-year period. I could tell you about every toothbrush I bought and what time I woke up every morning for 1826 days and how many steps I took to the corner of Broadway and 11th before turning right at 2:37 in the afternoon on the 3rd of July in 1995, but I doubt there would be much value in the chronological, technical minutiae of nearly two thousand days.

Does the truth of my life story lie only in the facts? No, but neither can it be found in the narrative choices I make to tell you about my chosen thread. The truth of my life shifts in both small and large ways with each movement I make, and my perspective on all of the stories from my days before this moment shift along with it.

I wonder sometimes if the divide between fiction and nonfiction when it comes to personal narrative is at least partially defined by intention. My intention is to be honest here to the best of my abilities. I won't lie outright about the facts of where I've been and what I do and who I am, but I am certain that self-deception and ignorance lead to inaccuracies at times.

This wandering line between fiction and nonfiction used to worry me. How honest was I being? Had my being fanciful dipped into too much twisting of the truth? Was my own perception of the meaning in a story actually a perversion of the empirical data?

I worry less now about digging away at what I once hoped to be the absolute truth. A story I told ten years ago through the lens of my 28-year-old self has changed now that I see it through my 38-year-old self's lens, and yet what I see in that story is no less or more true now than it was then. Meaning is shifty that way. It's not like a receipt stapled into a tax file.

We don't get to take comfort in absolute truth. Clinging to absolutes is a sign of fear and panic, not rightness and conviction.



I am by no means advocating that all personal narratives are the equivalent of fiction and that we should all lie with impunity unto the service of the story and its message. What I am advocating for is the therapeutic acknowledgement of the natural elasticity of our perception of our own lives and the allowance for the stories we tell ourselves to grow and to change as we do.

Bits of yourself speak to you from your past about what happened then, and the you of now speaks to those stories about how they sit in the context of all that has happened since, and you become a powder keg of stories informing stories.

Instead of fussing over a phantom essential truth behind our personal experience, I find it more useful to look into the meaning within the shifting sands of our narratives, to dig into the why and how of the stories we tell. When I write about my life, I ask myself:

Why this story, and why tell it now?

Who am I within this story, what role am I taking, and why do I see myself in that position?

What judgments of myself and others are framed by the story, why are those judgments there, and what purpose do my judgments serve within the story?

If I told this story from another angle — if I chose to write about what the food at the table evoked rather than the particulars of the dinner conversation, for example — what would it convey?

Have I treated each of the story's foundational elements with respect and compassion so that I can understand why they are there and how they interact with the other parts of the story?

What triggered my need to tell this particular story now?

What does the story have to offer myself and others by its being told?

Do you struggle with the line between fiction and nonfiction in your personal narratives? What drives you to tell your stories? What keeps you from telling some of them?