I recently (finally) read Lorrie Moore's wonderful short-story collection Birds of America, given to me probably over a decade ago by a good friend. The whole thing is superb ("Which Is More Than I Can Say For Some People" is probably my favorite, but there's a lot of marvelous voice and detail throughout) but this passage jumped out at me in particular. Part of its brilliance is that it's not actually talking about travel writing, but using that as a metaphor for lived experience. Well, shut up, just read it:
How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning, make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye's instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That's where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes in with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth's eager devastation.
- Lorrie Moore, "People like that are the only people here: Canonical babbling in peed onk"
It's a thing I've thought a lot about - through my travel bloggin', of course, and the way that everything in this space feels thin and flat compared to the topography of my experiences... and how thin and flat those experiences become when I live them with an eye toward compressing them into reportage or film... but also how much of life is incohate and inexpressible until narration cleans, compresses, straightens. I've thought for a while that we only understand our life in retrospect - that the chaos of event, emotion, relationship, happenstance, only achieves narrative coherence with the sanding-down of time. (Unrelatedly: this is why major relationship shifts, whether deaths or breakups or moves, are so devastating. We tend for the most part to build linear narratives about ourselves, and when life intervenes and upends our understanding, it erases an entire lifetime of projected narrative. How could you not be rocked by that, until and unless you develop a muscular facility with rewriting yourself to the current eternal moment?)
Anyhow, them's my pile o' thinks for today. I will NOT be taking questions about any of this. GOODBYE!
