Story

    It took me two days to finish this sketch because I was on vacation and ran out of ink and had to wait until I got home.  Here’s to good sketching partners like Di. Thank you for sitting with me while I use my imagination today and tomorrow. 

All my life I’ve used Story as mother, father, confidant, side kick, brother, sister, best friend, teacher, lover. People ask, “Where would you have been without books in your life?” And I think about the desolation of a childhood without Nello and Patrasche, without Scout Finch, or Bilbo. But, But, but, I would not, even then, have been stripped of Story. Story and the imagination it holds tight to its heart, is, in the words of Ursula Le Guin, “an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.”

Even those we might imagine with no imagination, use Story. The gruff farmer looks over his field and imagines when the rain will  come. He remembers past springs when the rains did not come in time, and he remembers springs where the rain came and came and came until his seeds were washed from their neat rows and into the drainage between the fields. 

I don’t mean he sees a bar graph or a set of numbers (though he might as part of his ‘seeing’ and wouldn’t that be a story too?) but that pictures flash through his mind, fast fast fast—some of things he has seen and many of things that he has not seen but imagines. And a story breaks through the crunch of the dry ground under his boots, and for a few seconds the blue sky above turns a heavy grey with rain, or takes on the endless beached-out blue of drought. 

Farmers and chemists and engineers and teachers, and children and teenagers make up stories all day long and throughout the night in their dreams.

I can’t see a window over a kitchen sink without imagining all the women standing in front of windows just like that (I realize that I’m painting with a broad gender brush here, but my oh my, isn’t it truer than true?) doing the dishes as they look out into the backyard and they’re making up stories that help them cope, make sense, remind them of good times and bad. They rearrange dialogues and actions until they are the hero, the villain, the victim, the avenger. They dream of the city, the country, another family, another life. They find hope and despair and though the life that they will live into, is never quite like the life they imagined, they are a little more prepared now to live it.

I have long thought that the imagination used in Story has taught me more about myself and the human condition than all the sermons preached on a Sunday and all the academic articles in the Bodleian. 

I am Human. I dream. I Story.