On the search for story
Also: Orion, myths, a compass, writer's block, wayfinding, haunted houses, and Harriet the Spy
One night last week, I stumbled around my backyard exhausted and bleary-eyed, waiting for the dog to do his business. Then I looked up. My eyes fixed themselves on the stars — the ones I could see, anyway, given the light pollution of a city. While searching for constellations, my sight landed on a narrow band of three bright stars, close together in an almost-straight line. It was Orion’s belt.
I wondered: What’s his story? What can it tell me about my life right now? What can it help me understand?
It’s in this very seeking of meaning that makes meaning – this search, this curiosity. This willingness to remain open, even when it’s difficult. To regard others — people, places, stars — as teachers. To be open to the lesson. To learn, even when I don’t like the lesson.
This is when things click for me – about writing, about the essay.
A thing I find beautiful about constellations is how some of the earliest astronomers used the stars to immortalize their myths, casting the bodies of their dead gods into heaven. Stories encoded onto stars.
The Wikipedia entry for Orion is complicated. It says there are two major versions of his birth, and several different versions of his death. (That’s to say nothing of all the complicated and controversial things in between.) I thought about all the different ways a story can be told. The way a death can be told. I think about my own practice, how I write and rewrite death myself, how the process of telling – smoothing out the jagged edges, rearranging them as puzzle pieces – allows me its own comfort. It’s a way to revisit the dead, to honor the relationship.
I am an astronomer of my own, casting bodies into the sky, words on paper, asking you – asking me – not to forget.
Sometimes I wonder if I will write about this for the rest of my life. As if it will bring Andrew back, keep him close. My own way to encode a life, a history, a memory. I have written these words before.
There is something to this multiplicity — many narratives converging into one story suggests a desire for a new future. Telling the story in multiple ways doesn’t occlude the truth, it deepens it. There is something enduring about it.
Greek myths have been told and retold for centuries – over the last 2,700 years. Thousands upon thousands of retellings of the same story. They’ve evolved, shifted, accrued perspective.
Sometimes I think of the stories as breadcrumbs, leading us back to something. Sometimes I think of them as warnings or encouragements, something akin to an instruction manual for life. Do this, don’t do that. She did that, and yikes – see how that worked out for her!
Last weekend, I went to my parents’ farm to visit my mom and do some writing. I went upstairs to my writing desk in the spare bedroom, and there, among the objects I left there as talismans (a shell, two rocks of jasper with quartz veins that I procured from Iron Hill in Delaware years ago), was a grey engineer lensatic compass.
Last year, I told my dad about a (very beginner-level) orienteering project I did with a group. I need to get better at using a compass, I told him. He mentioned that Andrew had one somewhere, one from Uncle D., who gave it to him as a kid. I’ll see if I can find it, he said.
I texted him a photo of it.
Me: Is this the compass that you mentioned? I found it on my writing desk.
Dad: Yes, I put it there several months ago hoping you would find it.
He had listened and remembered.
He found it, and left it there for me to find.
In her famous essay “The White Album,” Joan Didion wrote:
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
Lately, I’ve suffered from a bout of writer’s block that makes every sentence feel like torture. My body wants to quit on me, purports exhaustion. My shoulders creep up to my ears with the fear-based tension that I might not have anything else to say. My brain outright rejects the kind of deep thinking that’s required of me to drop in, to go deep, to mull and write and mull and write some more. At least, this is what it feels like in the body when I sit down to write: I feel wooden, immobile. I feel frozen by all that space to fill.
When I get this way, I turn to stories. I love a good mystery. Throw in a strong female protagonist, an old house that may or may not be haunted, family dysfunction, long-kept secrets, and an undercurrent of darkness and there — that’s the sweet spot.
M. teases me when I say I’m watching something new. Is there a creepy house? he asks. Family dysfunction? A ghost? Almost always, the answer to all three is yes.
But the house is a metaphor, I say. And it’s a great one — how can it not be? A dwelling that becomes a signifier of all that’s wrong with our psyche, a home that becomes infected with our own dysfunction. The house isn’t just haunting us, we’re haunting it, too.
Right now, I’m watching the show “Requiem” on Netflix (note: spoilers ahead). It’s about a young woman named Matilda whose mother died under strange, traumatic circumstances — a horrible suicide in front of her daughter. Then, she begins the excavation process. She puts her whole professional life on hold (she’s an accomplished musician; a rising talent) to go searching on her own, tracing clues her mother may or may not have left behind: photos, newspaper clippings. She has these dreams — but they’re more like memories or visions — and when she ends up at someone’s massive estate in another tow, she recognizes the place. Or at least, she’s convinced she has, because she believes she’s been there before. Then, she’s convinced that she’s the missing little girl in all the newspaper clippings her mother kept.
So the quest for truth accelerates, becomes more dangerous, taking many twists along the way. There’s a mute, elderly woman who seems to want to help Matilda, but she dies suddenly, mysteriously. There are strange symbols, a history of occult on the property, references in the home’s library to alchemy and scrying. There are black mirrors (which, in the occult, are used for divination, rituals, and talking to spirits), voices, apparitions, and a rough looking man who lives in the woods (who might also, by the way, be her actual father).
While I can’t relate to feeling like I don’t know who or where I come from, I understand the impetus to want to know one’s own history, especially the ways in which other histories have formed mine. I’m curious, and I’m a searcher.
I can’t live without curiosity, and I can’t live without story. Sometimes, in a search for my own, I’ve found myself emulating others.
When I was a kid, the book “Harriet the Spy” changed my life. I was maybe 9 or 10, and I was so inspired by it that I rode all around the neighborhood on my bike, with a notebook and pen tucked securely in the zip-up pouch between my handlebars. I spied on the neighbors and took notes. I watched for anything that looked out of the ordinary, anything I could create a story from in my head: why was that man digging a hole in the backyard? Why were those adults at the playground with no children?
I wrote it all down. Then, I’d share this “helpful information” with the head of the neighborhood association, a woman named Barbara whose newsletters arrived each month in our mailbox. Andrew and I knocked on her door one day to share the sobering information of several teen kids we’d seen sitting on the roof of a house. Probably drugs, she’d said, shaking her head sadly.
People have used stars to navigate for thousands of years. Sailors would watch the stars and their movements from east to west throughout the night, using that to determine their course. The constellations themselves are wayfinding tools. Orion’s sword points south. Ursa Minor, better known as the Little Dipper, has the North Star in its handle.
Stories, then, are their own version of wayfinding: tools to observe the terrain, to see the path another has taken. Constellation, compass, story. No one path the same, but similar threads. When Andrew died, I asked some writer friends for reading recommendations. Anne Carson’s “Nox.” Christa Parravani’s “Her.” Barthes’ “Mourning Diary.” I read them all, desperate to see myself in their pages, desperate for instruction of what to do next. They resonated, yes, but there was no easy fix. This was the frustrating part, as if I’d expected to read my grief away, to use their words to exorcise the pain. Eventually, this morphed into gratitude for the wisdom of those who had walked similarly difficult roads.
My spying days may be over, but my search for story continues. Constellation, compass, story. What does Orion have to do with my life? What can it teach me?
Once again, you blow me away with your thoughts and written words! Good job, Ashley, I’m so proud of you!
Gorgeous as ever, Ashley. (And Harriet the Spy inspired the same habits in me -- I spied on neighbors and wrote everything down in a notebook for ages. Wonder how many of us grew up to be writers.)