[Interstitial: n. Of an intervening space; esp. a relatively small or narrow space, between things or the parts of a body, of the minute spaces between the ultimate parts of matter. From the Latin, interstitium, space between]

[fragment: transf. and fig. a broken piece; a small detached portion, a part remaining or still preserved when the whole is lost or destroyed. from the Latin, frangĕre to break]

 

What images have burnt a trace in your mind when all else is forgotten? What stands when all else has fallen? What do we take with us when we flee?

Story burns, story stands. Story defines and identifies.

Anders Nilsen compiled Don’t go where I can’t follow, a story told in postcards, letters, cartoons, scraps torn from his jottings as his fiancée Cheryl was torn from him, from life. A camping trip, photos from when they visited France, then everything changes with the black and white text and sketches in The Hospital. After that, The Lake, the graphic story describes how Anders scatters Cheryl’s ashes where they had planned to marry. The book was first created as a memorial for friends and family. A relationship in ninety pages, this assemblage is as moving as thousands of words. It tells the story.

 

[fugitive adj. Apt or tending to flee; given to, or in the act of, running away. From the Latin, fugĕre to flee]

 

Story is elusive. Scattered snapshots, some burnt, blow across the pine needled forest floor. The house no longer stands, the people have been taken away, but a child hid in a gap in the wall, and now he is running too, so the story can go on … start … flickers, traces of memory, Fugitive Pieces, blurred memories tainted and torn by trauma, as in The Drowned City, the first section of Anne Michael’s novel. Chase the story, run it down, pursue it, consume it until it is part of you that only ends with death.

 

[fiction n. arbitrary invention, that which is fashioned or framed, counterfeiting, the action of ‘feigning’ or inventing imaginary incidents, existences; the species of literature which is concerned with the narration of imaginary events and the portraiture of imaginary characters. From the Latin fictiōn-em , noun of action, fingĕre to fashion or form]

 

Experimental stories glide into your mind, unseen, seep, creep, slide. Their presence eludes touch, but they are there, none-the-less. Expect no start, middle, end, no neat ravelling of threads to form a rope evenly over pages, chapters. When you close the book the rope is there, none-the-less.

In Katherine Angel’s Unmastered, A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell a woman meets a man, has sex, conceives, has an abortion; ‘and then down, down, down, further and further I tumbled – Alice, pointy boots, tressed hair, topsy turvey into a tunnel of grief, into its numbing invisible embrace.’ (p238) Abortion reverberates through her life, through the white spaces in her book where something elusive starts to become present, something intangible, something that changes texture when you try to grip it.

‘5.           Years later I roamed, stunned, excited, through the Neues Museum in Berlin: rebuilt, restored; the archive of itself.

Its wounds preserved, lovingly rendered. Its memory on its skin.’

(p282)

Story emerges, unbidden, unbound.

 

[borrow: v. To take (a thing) on credit, on the understanding of returning it, or giving an equivalent; a thing recognized as being the property of another, to whom it is returnable.]

 

The pieces for this story are borrowed, appropriated, adapted. I learn through others. I take what I am given, and that which I am not given. I consume, devour other people’s stories to narrate my own.

Life’s events force story: we are compelled to tell our stories, of trauma, of change. Life is rich in complexity, messy, uncertain, relationships are tangled, and however much you want closure, a creative writer’s perfect plot, the script writer’s story arc, neat endings are unlikely. As Anne Carson writes, ‘The fragments of the Geryoneis itself read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat … you can of course keep shaking the box.’(P6-7). That is life, that is writing about life.

 

[shake: v. to move quickly to and fro. To vibrate irregularly, tremble. To shiver, vibrate, flutter.intr. A poetical word for: To go, pass, move, journey; to flee, depart, in physical and non-physical senses.]

[unsettle: v. to force out of a settled condition; to deprive of fixity or quiet, not peaceful, not firmly established.]

 

Ref

1. Marsh, Henry, Do No Harm, Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery (Phoenix, London, 2014)
2. Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes University of California Press 1994
3. Nilsen, Anders,, Don’t go where I can’t follow (Drawn and Quarterly Quebec 2012)
4. Michael, Anne, Fugitive Pieces (Bloomsbury, London, 1998)
5. Carson, Anne, Autobiography of Red, (Jonathon Cape, London 1998)
6. Angel, Katherine, Unmastered, A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Allen Lane, London2012)
7. Inspiration for word definitions derives from oed.com and etymonline.com accessed 3, 25, 28 March 2015 and Downcast Eyes (referenced above)