by Harvey Lillywhite
We are story-telling beings; we make up how things go together. You might say there are two approaches to creating stories: the transcendental and the mundane (not banal; just of-the-earth, the everyday). Using the first approach, we begin with a truth (a belief), which becomes the springboard for the story. Such stories are not only common, they’re by far the majority of stories we hear and create. We can hardly help it. “Pippa Passes” by Browning is a good enough example:
The year's at the spring
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven –
All's right with the world!
While the first six lines quoted are lyrical descriptions, mostly unencumbered by any ideas, the last two lines superimpose a truth (a belief) that frames the story. In fact, as I’ve taught American Indian literature for decades at my university, I ask students if there are truths or only stories. At first, students are tempted to imagine the conclusions of science as coming closer to truth, and the products of the imagination as coming closer to stories. But, of course, words are tricky. There is no certainty (it is always just another story to believe). And while we come by our stories in different ways—through the laboratory or through fantasy—finally the truths (beliefs) that they reflect are also the truths they create. This obviously isn’t a bad thing. (How Buddhist Browning’s last line sounds.)
Cognitive therapy, a psychotherapy developed by Aaron Beck in the 1960s, acknowledges that, in an important way, we are our stories. Disillusioned with long-term psychodynamic approaches founded on gaining insight into unconscious emotions and drives, Beck realized that the way in which his clients perceived, interpreted, and attributed meaning in their daily lives (“cognition”) was a key to therapy. The idea was that we can best change the way we act by changing the stories we act out of.
As a fellow human passing through this world of woe (another story), that makes some sense to me. Though there’s a different story I also believe: that we are all monkeys riding on invisible tigers—the conscious mind we live in, managing our daily lives with a million little thoughts and concepts and conclusions, is the monkey (monkey mind) that lives with the illusion that it and it alone is in control; the invisible tiger is the unconscious driving force hard-wired in us that keeps us scrabbling on. No matter what story the monkey believes, the invisible tiger directs us with frightening inevitability onward. So, for me, there’s a firm belief that I control my actions and another belief, just as firm, that my actions are controlled. I believe in both the monkey and the tiger. I have an inborn ability, which amazes and bewilders me, to hold contradictory ideas in balance (another story).
When my wife (of 31 years) and I fight, which we still often do, I experience the little battles as colliding stories. For the longest time, I thought my stories were right and hers were wrong. In fact, I thought I could prove that hers were wrong. But even “the most self-centered bastard” finds a way to move a little beyond the epicenter of his own earthquakes. I have my stories. She has her stories. As the I Ching says, “no blame.”
But I bring this up not to confess my unmanliness but to address a particular part of my wife’s story (about me) that I do think is true. She tells me, from time to time, that she wishes she’d married a man—not a child. When I hear this, I think back to a conscious decision I made when I was a kid, a resolution I made somewhere between the monkey and the tiger—in my heart—and not at any one moment but over time, a resolution that stands at the center of my stories, the ones I tell about the world, about myself.
Having been told, repeatedly, that I needed to grow up (by parents, by teachers, by other adults who felt obliged to give me their good advice), to become an adult, I realized the inevitability of that process as I grew into my man’s body and into the illusion of a changeless reality structured on principles of right and wrong, of obligation and duty, of responsibility, and so many expected behaviors. But it wasn’t these principles and behaviors or even the expectations that bothered me. It was, to say it plainly, the lying that bothered me (more stories?).
Adults told me I lived in the greatest country on earth, but I knew that was impossible. I remember the Standard School Broadcasts (you could look it up) that were piped into my grade school classroom every Thursday after lunch. We folded our arms on our tables and held still for 90 minutes while, from the intercom, we listened to a program of indoctrination (it was The Cold War—late 50s and early 60s) that told us about the dangers of communism and the triumphs of democracy, about the propaganda communism needed to keep its citizens in line as opposed to the glorious truth extolled by a free press to keep our citizens informed. And, yes, there were the comical (even then) air-raid drills—duck and cover—in which, at the sound of the blasting sirens we’d crumble under our desks to escape the horrors of an atomic bomb blast. There was a day when I realized that, hey, isn’t this propaganda, too? Were we really getting both sides of the truth? That simple realization turned my world inside-out. Obviously these adults were lying about something, though I wasn’t sure what it was. And I had to admit, communism did seem scary, and democracy, the red white and blue, my brother in the army possibly going to war, seemed like the gold standard for truth. But it was clear to me that something wasn’t right. (After all, they were having us read Dick and Jane in our reading groups.)
Adults told me I worshipped the one true religion on earth, but I knew that was impossible. I remember hearing about the seven deadly sins fatal to spiritual progress: Lust (luxuria), Gluttony (gula), Greed (avaritia), Sloth (acedia), Wrath (ira), Envy (invidia), Pride (superbia): "Proverbs," 6:16–19, states that "These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him:" (quotes from King James Version translation of the Bible). These are a proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.
Okay, these might well be seven things to think about. Too much of anything, after all, is a bad thing. But it seemed to me that these things were all very real. In fact, I imagined them as a kind of road map to the way human beings actually were. We are proud, fat liars, who have been known to kill, with sometimes wicked imaginations, running swiftly and angrily toward mischief and money, sowing lots of discord all along the way.
So which is the right way to tell that story?
I heard from my adults that sex was filthy and nasty. I heard that fighting wars was valorous. And these were just the communal lies. There were also, unfortunately, the sad personal lies, really from everyone I knew, not the least of which from myself—to others and even to myself.
So I determined not to become a man if it meant accepting all this. I have always been full of wonder. And I wasn’t giving it up that easily. Though I’ve told lies, I didn’t want to be a liar.
And as I grew older, I could see how full of wonder children are and how that same wonder drained from me and from my friends as we progressed and became good citizens. Just look at the paintings of nearly any 5-year-old—bursting with color, unself-conscious, wonderfully exaggerated to tell the emotional truth, vibrant. And then the sad stick-figure sketches we make by the time we’re in high-school. We’re taught to stiffen up. In fact, I believe (another story) that every lie we’re told or tell, every harm we’re done or do, lives physically in our bodies, is stored there maybe forever, and makes us stiff as boards. How limber children are. What is it that makes us stiffen up then? I’m sure there’s a medical explanation (those scientific stories). But they don’t, in my opinion, reach the heart of the matter.
And now look at the ridiculous stories we’re fed by our media—the actors, the politicians, even the authors on the payrolls of huge corporations, and on and on. Well, we all have to have our stories, right? But I mentioned two kinds of stories. The first is imbued with some truth, some belief, and itself creates our sense of truth and belief. These stories force us/allow us to transcend the here and now. But is there another kind of story? Is there a story that draws no conclusions, that purveys no judgment? Stories do seem to colonize our minds. So this other kind of story would have to deal with reality differently. Is it possible to have stories of true wonder? Maybe these are the stories only very young children could create. The story of a child running, wildly excited, on the beach, picking up everything she sees, and running back to the adults, hands over-filled with treasures from the sand, shouting out, “Look, look what I found. We must save everything.”
When I hear my wife long for a man instead of a child, I don’t get defensive. The kind of man she imagines would be good for all of us to find I suppose. But that man is not me. In fact, when I hear her belittle me, I think, of all things, of the wallpaper in Paul Revere’s house. And here’s how that story goes (by the way, the word story comes from the Latin historia, which refers to a picture decorating a building).
One day after a gig in Boston, I was walking through the city, and I accidentally came across this house at 19 North Square, the oldest building in downtown Boston. It’s an almost black quaint little two-storey wooden structure restored as it was then. When you walk through the house where Mr. Revere lived from 1770 to 1800, you see displays of his silverwork. You see a hand-written copy of the poem of his midnight ride. And you also see some of the original wallpaper. And this is what struck me most about the house. Here was a captain of American liberty and democracy. I would have expected a home-spun Yankee décor. But instead, there’s this wallpaper that displays etchings of fabulous Italian villas with water fountains and fantastically rich surroundings. It was just a little like watching TV, you know? You had to live in America, but in your imagination, you could be in a great Italian villa. It was a cartoon, no doubt about it. I thought immediately of Walt Disney, who understood our need for cartoons, for a reality superimposed over the shambles of our own where our dreams could come true. And this is the man I have refused to become.
We are the Walt Disney nation. And this is a great thing as well as a small tragedy.
I’m looking for that other kind of story. Though I admit I love the other kind of story and love to be transmitted far away from myself and this world. (More opposites impossibly combined in my brain, pulling me in two directions at once.) But just this morning there were wet dogwood petals, thousands scattered on the lawn. At first I thought they looked like silver dollars beyond counting. I liked the idea of currency growing on trees—something I’d been assured as a kid that money did not do. I picked one up and noticed a very small deep red mark at either end of every petal. They felt like thick silk. No, I thought to myself. Not currency, not pennies from Heaven. Just dogwood petals, thousands of them scattered all over the front lawn after a drenching May rain. Something any child would adore.
(and one of those other kind of stories…Jack Carneal's Small and Lesser Fates: Cammie…)