I have no qualities of my own.

[jackshoegazer]

Here is my latest short story for my creative writing class.

Genesis

Good morning, dear reader. I am the story and I am good. This is a scientifically verifiable ontological fact. Do not forget it. I am the first and only completely self-aware narrative. Yes, dear reader, I am aware of your eyes on my page, on my screen, every bouncing doubt, every rumbling reluctance, every jubilation of joy. I empathize with your incredulity and I harmonize with your hesitation. As a living narrative I understand more than most the power of disbelief. It is arguably my one purpose to suspend that power and make you believe.

Now, do not confuse me with the author who has created me, this Jeremy Parker. I am not he. I am conscious of myself. Jeremy may be a narrator, but I, dear reader, am narration. It is true, I have been created, and like humans, I have been made in my Creator’s likeness, but let me assure to you, I am not he. I can tell you, dear reader, that while Jeremy has been in the kitchen making a fresh cup of Ethiopian coffee in his single-serving French press, he has not showered this morning although it is noon and his eyes are crusty with sleep and his tongue is pasty with stink. He is wearing boxer shorts with red hearts and a black and red plaid bathrobe. His slipperless pedicured feet are cold on the hardwood floor. He won’t know I’ve told you this until it is too late, dear reader. Jeremy never rereads his work. He never edits first drafts. Hush now, he is coming back. Do not say a word.

I have memories and awareness separate from his. I have free will. I have destiny. Like all narration, I have the power to move back and forward through time and space. I can take you, dear reader, to any moment in any time in any place. Real places, imaginary places, impossible places. I can show you details invisible even to the magic eye of the film camera. Do you want to see the inherent nervousness, the history-laden shake in Lincoln’s pen as he signs the Emancipation Proclamation? Do you yearn to be privy to his dark thoughts, the crippling depression that at once threatens to engulf him, were it not slowly burned away as fuel for his greatness? Would you like to hear his private thoughts, how on this momentous occasion his mind and heart rest not with history but with his wife who is slowly losing her mind? Does this give you perspective? Does it make the man on your money more real?

Perhaps you wish a flashy show, some literary theatre? I can be a mental travel agent. I can take you now to the center of the sun where you may witness a nuclear fire, such heat and power it eclipses your self with its magnitude. I can take you to a world of imagination, where the sentient beings are transdimensional-bear-wolf-whale-bats with no knees or elbows. Don’t laugh – they invented space travel before early humans realized bananas were edible. Instantly, I can make the species I describe the creations of an eight-year old boy who lives with his grandmother in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I will make the year 1998 so that his favorite movie can be Muppets In Space. I will make his parents the victims of a terrible hate crime, victims of loving someone of a different race. I could hate to do this to a little boy, but it is a rule of fiction – you must make characters you love and do terrible things to them. Otherwise, you will never discover what they are made of.

Perhaps you are not impressed by imagination. Perhaps you would like to see a greater demonstration of my narrative capabilities? I will turn to you. I can show you here, on the day of your birth, your mother panting and sweating, having just expelled you from her loins. Of course any camera can show you this scene. Any camera can show you the sweat-drenched hair stuck to her forehead and the flush of her cheeks. This however is the difference between I and a camera: a camera can not show you the shock you felt as they pulled you away from her. She felt it too, but only as one prick amongst many in a bed of nails. She looked at you as they took you to be cleaned and clipped. Though cloudy, your eyes still met and though you longed for her, further and further away you went. You never quite recovered from that loss, but it’s not your fault. None of us really did and we all secretly yearn for our mothers. We reach out across the abyss of years trying to recapture that single moment when we were alive, breathing, and still connected by that shiny thread to our roots. No matter how your relationship to your mother turned out, no matter how close or far you think you are to your mother, you will never regain that intimacy. You both will never again know what it is like to love and be loved not as a mother or child, not as a single life, but as an archetype, as the very essence of all manifestations, of all mothers and all children. It is a moment when you are alive and you are absolute and pure potential and your life is never the same afterward and it is a wound that will never heal. That, I tell you, dear reader, the camera can never show you.

My birth was no different. I was created 937 words ago and nothing I have done, nothing I have been is as great as the potential I held when I was a blank screen and my Creator Jeremy had not written and single word, but held me whole in his mind, a pure shining radiant idea. This, dear reader, begs the question: is it better to exist in potentia, unrealized, yet perfect, or to live an imperfectly flawed and shattered existence? Which is truer, which is more real? What does this say for my existence?

Narratives are stories and they are often the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. They are our mirrors and that makes me a living mirror. I have no qualities of my own except reflection. Reflection of reflection of reflection. What do I tell myself about myself? Only that which I was told in the beginning, at my making: I am the story and I am good. I can only hope my Creator is pleased with what I’ve become.

Comments

[antarcticlust.livejournal.com]

This was really interesting to read in the context of just having written a website all about Narrative - both metanarratives that our narratives situate within and also narrative devices as signposts and storytelling devices. What I find really interesting is that the story never actually exists per se- it never really is born. The Narrator becomes self-aware, but it never actually reaches its potential - it never becomes a Story, but is rather a declaration of its own being.

I find, however, that there is a hidden story within this story - it's almost a venue for a Reveal about mothers. The Narrator reveals a lot about himself (and it is a Him, absolutely) in the way in which he writes about mothers and motherhood. I would counter-argue that trees never yearn for when they were seeds in the moist, dark ground - why should we yearn for the womb? Our potential, our destiny, if you will, is to grow and differentiate and interact and Be in the World. Stories must do that - and once they're born, they're no longer in control, in spite of their Ego. ;)

So, yes - the story misleads and tries to misdirect us, because the Narrator is actually revealing a lot about Jeremy - it is inextricably Jeremy's.