STORY
Sven Birkerts
I catch myself fascinated by the way things change when they go into story, not just in the obvious sense of changed particulars, smoothed down or heightened, but also in their essence. It’s a complete transformation, one that might compare with whatever happens to a landscape when it is transferred into a painting. Which is to say that the features are still there, but only as a kind of platform for the paint, for the eye and hand and imagination. I noticed this in Atlanta, sitting on the 28th floor of the Hilton in a lounge, a small group of us talking, and one, a poet—this is a writing conference—is remembering being in a workshop with Robert Lowell, how he one day brought his friend Elizabeth Bishop in, along with his then-wife Caroline Blackwood, how Bishop was talking about her poem “In the Waiting Room,” and all the while I’m thinking about the differential, my serious transformation. Because I’ve been in those rooms, too, had those kinds of moments, whether in the literary category or some other—we all have—where the unfolding situation is, for whatever reason, already tagged with its futurity, is already a bit distractingly unreal for that reason (How could this poet, then young and vigilant, not be thinking at every moment, “My God, this is Elizabeth Bishop here, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell!”?). Maybe the legend-narration has already started, before the past tense has intervened, the person projecting in imagination to when she can tell it. And then when everyone was sitting there, he came in and there were two women with him…Already. Bishop reaches for a handkerchief from her purse and she’s in history, in some story in the future where she is seen taking her handkerchief from her purse. What haunts me now, this time, is the sense of added dimension that the event takes on as soon as it is enshrined as story. The past is made resonant, and I can almost believe that the resonance was already there in the room, though likely it was not. Or not quite. I find that this quality stirs me deeply whenever I encounter it. Give me any old-timer with a bag of stories, who frames his anecdotes with the magic phrases “We used to…” or “I remember one time…” and I am his captive, completely ready to trade off our thinned-out scattershot present for that dense sweet past. No use reminding me that that then was a now and subject to the same diluting uncertainties, or that this now will become a then, rich in its own right, subject to others’ longings. Mallarme said that everything exists to end up in a book. I wonder if he didn’t mean a ‘narrative,’ and for just this reason.