Pagnucci’s work resonated with me on a primal level. What are we, if not a collection of stories? In the beginning I thought he might have been traveling down the deterministic route. After reading the whole piece I realized that he gave the idea some weight, but that wasn’t the point. Pagnucci provided hope for free will when he quoted Kundera, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The quote struck me like a fist to the gut. When you take in those words, eat them, let them fill you, the absolute truth of them gives you POWER. Bad memories have power over us, they eat at us like cancer, we give them that power, it is our choice. The only way to overcome the past is to own the memory, and then control it. But I digress.
Getting back to the point of the blog….
I felt Pagnucci’s tone was light hearted, it was one that basically said, you are your history, and you are changing up to right now, and right now, and right now…
You are a collection of all your stories, all the events in your life, all you’ve witnessed, all you’ve heard, read, thought, dreamed. Add time and place, and there YOU are. Place, location, space, whatever you wish to call it, comes in only as the background. It’s the events or stories that take center stage and most of them can happen anywhere, but they need to happen somewhere. And if they happen somewhere they happen at some time. (Yes, because Einstein said that there is no separation between space and time. They are intricately bound, we live in space-time, one cannot exist without the other – not in our world.) The somewhere (plus time) is necessary for the plot, but it’s not the main determiner of “who” you are. The somewhere is the seed, it provides the landscape for the story to unfold, but it’s the story that your heart, mind, and soul live that makes the “who” in you. I like this vision. I’ve always believed that life is viewed through a prism, not spectacles.
Now for Berry. Wow, I came off the euphoria of Pagnucci and I was a little too generous (in my mind) to Berry. I was probably ten pages in before I realized how solemn he was in telling his story.
In the beginning, I viewed his words as quiet, nostalgic, and melancholy. I completely dismissed all the negative and even nihilistic tones because I was still flying high from Pagnucci. All that talk of “going back” made me think about my childhood. I was remorseful for not feeling that same sense of home for my hometown that Berry felt for his, that connectedness, that feeling that I belong nowhere else. I actually stopped reading and called my mother, “Ma, what was the name of the woman whose husband was taken away in the ambulance?” Turns out it was Mrs. Talbert. I watched the EMT’s load her husband into an ambulance, and he never came home. It was the first person death to happen in my story. Up til then I had only seen a dead baby rabbit, which I had “rescued” from the backyard. Not a good idea when you have two adult cats in the house. Anyway, so I stopped a few pages in on Berry, took a long and happy stroll down memory lane, and wrote alot of nonsense about it. I should have stopped there and responded. But, I was intrigued, and it’s an assigned reading so I went back to it. All 17 pages of it. And wow, what a difference a little distance makes. Now, I saw the negative aspects of his words. Let’s look at some quotes…
“I was taught what was here to be lost by the loss of it.”
“…heaven-bent have abused the earth thoughtlessly, by inattention, and their negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately.”
I think I’ve made my point. There were many beautiful quotes and ideas, but his negativity began to overpower everything else. Okay, so if I have to talk about tone, let’s find the right words…
Nihilistic
Guilt laden/shame
Deterministic
Some glimmers of hope
Nostalgic
Solemn
Melancholy
Portent – (his word, I couldn’t help myself)
Berry is all about setting (space). Who you are is bound to where you lived. I agreed with his idea that people should connect with and cherish the land they inhabit. Some of his words were soft and lovely, “The way I am going is the way the water goes.” Those words reminded me of words from the Tao Te Ching, “The highest good is like water, which benefits all things, and contends with none.” Oh, if he had only stopped there! It was all the writing about the guilt and shame of “his” people ruining the land, and ironically, he mourned a land he never knew. He was born too late (here’s where the time thing comes in) to ever have known the land he lamented.
Berry really drove home the point that who you are is all about setting (at least as it pertained to his life). Berry is Port Royal manifested in the human form. He is a reflection of that place, and all the events are background, they are the spice or flavoring of life. He goes as far as to say that the history of the place is embedded in who he is. The stories of others are embedded in place and therefore he is a collection of all stories that took place in Port Royal. This completely dismisses time, remember Einstein? If I had to make an equation out of it, I think it would go something like this…
Place * (history) + life experience = person
Place first, everything else seems to be an accident. Berry is making wine, our lives aren’t stories, our lives are like wine. The grapes are grown in soil that has certain properties on farms that are surrounded by different types of flowers, spices, air, and breath. When they make the wine the grapes absorb the all of place creating a unique flavor for each vineyard. The soil here is different than the soil over there. The soil determines the flavor, richness, sweetness, or dryness of the wine. Wine from California is inherently different than wine from France, etcetera, etcetera. The setting is the main idea, it’s center stage, it’s the determination of all else that follows. I can’t relate to that idea. I am a story, I'm not wine. But, my Cabernet is tasty.
(Response to Living the Narrative Life by Pagnucci and The Native Hill by Berry)