Nothing Without Art: January 1, 2018--Stories, Place, & Memory

So already, while I was looking back over 2017, I became keenly aware of how much the works of others' imaginations had kept me afloat during some of the year's darkest moments. 

Thus, my January 2018 writing resolution is to blog frequently (and therefore briefly!) about some example of artistic expression that got its hooks into me--or that currently has me in its grip. It's intensely pleasurable when some human being's expression of something, of anything, grabs hold of us and won't let us go, making us newly or truly see, feel, or understand. 

So today I share two paragraphs from Ann-Marie MacDonald's The Way the Crown Flies: A Novel. I am not very far into this book, but I love it already. And I've read enough to know what I believe this passage makes clear to you: that the family at the center of this novel moves often, which is something they have in common with many families in our present moment.

      "If you move around all your life, you can't find where you come from on a map. All those places where you lived are just that: places. You don't come from any of them; you come from a series of events. And those are mapped in memory. Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we all are. Almost not born at every turn. Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots. Stories shading into one another. You come from a plane crash. From a war that brought your parents together.
     "Tell the story, gather the events, repeat them. Pattern is a matter of upkeep. Otherwise the weave relaxes back to threads picked up by birds to make their nests. Repeat, or the story will fall and all the king's horses and all the king's men. . . . Repeat, and cradle the pieces carefully, or events will scatter like marbles on a wooden floor (41).*

MacDonald has me thinking about being shaped by place versus events, and about how we--as individuals, and members of families and cultures--choose what patterns to enshrine in our stories. She also has me wondering how right she is when she says our human impulse is "to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we all are." 

And yes, I love reading books where a philosophical digression like the one above fits so easily into the story of young family doing what it always does to make a new temporary place become "home."

* MacDonald, A. (2004). The way the crow flies: A novel. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.