Wrangling Space

Standing on the edge of the world. On the edge of space and time. On the edge of a coastal cliff. On the edge. On the edge of something. The ocean below crests and waves, alternately glassy, suspended, still, then seething, threatening, pounding in tidal patterns of watery distance. The distance between here and there, then and now. You and me.

“You are right to fear me now, and I you. But love, this ritual will exhaust us. Come closer. Listen. Be brave. I am going to talk to you quietly, as sometimes, in the long past (you remember?), we made love.” (Adcock, 2000).

Distant. Distance. Home and not. Presence and absence. This yawning space between, silences us. Silence, this concrete absence of lost moments. Lost mentions. Unmade conversations, unanswered calls, untold stories. These lives that never were, that are, that never shall be. That may have been.

The distance in time. In a ticking clock. The lengthening spaces between tick and tock—the realm of possibility and our adventures in time and space. These accidents of proximity that leave us present or not. Loved, loving, leaving, left. Missing the minutiae afforded in presence. And, so very inevitably, bruised by the incidental and tedious trauma of it all.

Is trauma too big a word for these shallow bruises, these dents on the self, these narrative absences and infractions on our lived experience? These small psychic shifts that on occasion, but not so very occasionally, do us damage. These everyday interruptions, “seismic” rumblings in the landscape of our lives that still us, shake us, and leave us changed.

Constructivist psychologists such as Neimeyer (2004, 2005) draw attention to the dramatic life events that traumatize, that disrupt, and potentially “disorganize” the self-narrative. To Neimeyer (2004), the “disorganized” narrative reflects an individual’s inability to reconcile the “micro-narrative” of the traumatic event with his or her broader “macro-narrative” or self-narrative. Further, to Neimeyer (2004), the self-narrative, “a cognitive-affective-behavioral structure” serves to establish one’s sense of self. “From this perspective, identity can be seen as a narrative achievement, as our sense of self is established through the stories that we tell about ourselves, the stories that relevant others tell about us, and the stories we enact in their presence” (p. 54).

The emphasis in such literature is, however, on truly traumatic events, those events that leave us profoundly shaken, that register on the Richter scale in our personal plot. Events that disorganize a survivor’s self-narrative, that disrupt the coherence of the life story—that in turn instigate processes of narrative revision that serve to restore and repair the self-narrative. The same processes are those deemed to potentiate meaning-making, and consequently, “meaning-made” (Neimeyer, 2004; Park, 2010; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004).

But what of those fragmented moments of experience, the half-formed fractional iterations of our lives? The inexpressible or inexplicable? The irrational and invisible? Those small nonevents or happenings that change us in small ways. That make up a memory. That defy storying. That resist the imposition of narrative coherence.

I come from a land down under. Probably not the one you’re thinking of. Further. About as far as you can go. The little country that could. We do moody well—it’s imbued in the landscape of things. In brooding volcanic cones, the mirrored glass of black sand beaches, deep harbors, mudflats, and misty, fern-fringed bush. But the light, that rare photographer’s dream; that light that filters the world and runs through the collective blood. Light that adds depth to the darkness and luster to the living. This geography shapes lives. Coming and going. Loving and leaving. Returning or not. Staining one with the incomparable idyll of a childhood summer, remembered through a sunshine-filtered frame. Running through the long grass, the thwack of a cricket ball in the background. Lawnmowers and sand and cicadas. And swimming and sunshine and sunburn. And endless, endless days. But so too, distance from this. Distance in space and time. A distance between then and now. Between you and all those possible futures and the realities of a life lived onwards and half a world away. The stories that . . . love . . . sunshine . . . home . . . family . . . friends . . .

These versions of our lives that reside in some small half-made memory of what might have been.

In one, I’m some small town girl living some small town life in some small world. Where everyone knows my name. My name, my face, the way she moves . . . In this world there are family, friends, children. And no one is missing, absent, gone. Home is here, where the heart is. Where all the hearts are.

In another, I’ve taken any one of the paths not travelled.

My high school sweetheart—the one who went away.

That man, the one who never asked.

That woman, the one who should have.

That city.

That country.

Travel.

(Money?)

Maybe she’s just pieces of me you’ve never seen. Well (Amos, 1992).

Accepting the common theoretical refrain that “people construct stories to make sense of their lives” most typically also implies the importance of constructing coherent narratives of the self (McAdams, 2006, p. 110). Various scholars have advanced the notion of coherence in the construction of life-stories. Notably, Habermas and Bluck (2000) emphasize the centrality of temporal or causal, autobiographical or thematic coherence in narrative explanations of life events. Coherent life-narratives are those that enable storytelling, that convey understanding, and that “have a beginning, middle, and end” (McAdams, 2006, p. 112).

But what when my middle is a muddle, or my beginning has no end? And our meeting is mosaic, only offering a mimicry of memory? For there’s a fraction too much fiction in our telling. The small talk too small. The stories too big.

My fly-in fly-out friendships, unavoidable accidents of a life-lived long-distance, show me Skype is no substitute for a shoulder. Or presence. We tell our stories: you of your children (how did that happen?) and your job, and your home. Me: of my invisible man. Of life in this new place, in this new country, in this new time. Time has a lot to answer for. Years. Days. Moments. Gone forever. We “catch up,” but there is no catching.

Shared cake, coffee, and crises. Criticisms and catchphrases. Like, you know.

Whateverrrr (I say in my best American accent).

McAdams (2006) further reminds us that coherence encompasses not only form, but also content. Expectations around plot and character are both socially constructed and normative. The extent to which stories are structurally dysfunctional or otherwise disorganized in terms of content is evidently considered indicative of a disordered mind (Dimaggio, 2006; Neimeyer, Herrero, & Botella, 2006).

That said, incoherence seems inevitable, particularly insofar as life narratives are considered to be “true to lived experience” (McAdams, 2006, p. 120). Lived experience that is, in all its glory, messy, indeterminate, unstable—and indeed, incoherent. From this perspective, coherence seemingly operates as a “system principle that is never fully achieved” (Neimeyer et al., 2006, p. 130).

Further, it seems reasonable to suggest that the imposition of coherence as a guiding principle of life-narrative structure actually functions in ways that do a disservice to the storying of experience.

The structure of coherence renders the incoherent invisible. Absent. Gone. Forgotten.

As in wide-spaced, long-distanced calls to long-distance loved ones, we miss the minutiae. The little things. The everyday lyrical fragments that make up the melody and memory in the songbook of our association. Anniversaries, accidents, loves, and other disasters are present—are storied, are shared. The tedium of an awfully average day, the humor in a fleeting moment, the flickering dreams, the futures, the fantasies, often rest unexpressed. Unstoried.

What of these fragments of our lives?

That spelling mistake on the street sign down the road. Eigth Avenue. Really?

The man in the green pants at yoga.

The bees in the water meter.

The wallaby down the road.

My catering-style cooking for one.

Running-or not. Water. Whales. Termites. Tea. And toast.

That damn toaster.

Pieces of me.

A curse on the time zones in my world. The passing moment is left in our unshared past, as the inconvenience of a 2:00 a.m. phone call looms large. Large enough to leave. And in the leaving, a nothingness in our never-ending story. There’s no recovering these silences.

Neimeyer and his colleagues, in the language of disorganized narratives, would possibly suggest that such moments reflect a “fragmented experience waiting to be integrated into” a life story (2006, p. 142). But such an argument seems uncomfortably teleological. (We developed wings so that we could fly). An alternative explanation further suggests that content that cannot be elaborated is consequently “dissociated from the self-narrative, as well as silenced in relation to other people” (Neimeyer et al., 2006, p. 142). Hence, in Neimeyer’s terminology, a second form of narrative disruption termed “dissociated narratives.” The literature, however, conceptualizes dissociation in this context as the exclusion of aspects of traumatic memory “from both conscious awareness and the narration of one’s experience in a social context” (Neimeyer et al., 2006, p. 133), advancing again a view of narrative as it pertains to trauma with a capital “T.”

Psychologists further caution us as to the consequences of too much cohesion in the life narrative. Antithetical to the disorganized narrative, the dominant narrative reflects the tendency to story trauma in problematic ways—to organize the sense of self in a singular, labeled, hegemonic manner that serves to deindividuate the self from the trauma (Neimeyer, 2004). And so, in the dominant narrative, one becomes nothing but “patient,” or “victim.”

The research in this area is intuitively appealing; the explanations—theoretically compelling. It resonates, it (sorry) coheres (Tracy, 2010). I am left wondering though, as to the extent to which the principle of narrative coherence in itself serves as a “dominant narrative” device, leaving us storying, restorying, and ultimately storied in ways that assert, and that impose, an artificial rationality on our messy, lived-in lives. Our quest for coherence; that holy narrative grail, scripting life experience in clean, sanitized, transformed or reformed, and sometimes entirely fictional ways (Henson, 2011). One becomes nothing but coherent?

Writing on the retelling of stories, Norrick (2000) argues that in telling “we create and recreate our past in light of our present needs and concerns” (p. 69). Highlighting the inherent contextuality of the rendering of “twice-told tales,” Norrick further observes that in contrast to “new” stories, where an original story is deemed “tellable if the narrator can defend it as relevant and newsworthy,” retold stories, are instead dependent less on content, and more “on the dynamics of the narrative event itself” (p. 91). This finding reminds us, perhaps, that in principle a story exists to be told (McAdams, 2006) and further suggests that in circumstances of comfortable conarration (conversational storytelling, even in the absence of clarity and coherence), familiarity breeds narrative content. It’s not the story that’s most telling . . .

No. It’s you, and me. And us. But you’re gone. Again. Off fighting pirates, floating on the big blue sea. So, it’s me and the cat. The cat and me. And we wake in the morning and newly notice your absence each day.

We would laugh of book smarts and street smarts. Now you have sea smarts. And I’m one grounded girl. Grounded in this daily living of work, and books, and bills. I picture myself at sea. That doesn’t last long.

I consult world clocks and world weather, and worry for you in the storms of my imagination. I think others worry more. I know you. And you weather storms and win. We both do. So it’s not what you do. It’s the absence in your doing. What to make of this space in my world, in my life, in my house.

Solitude and I are good friends. We take comfort in each other, and appreciate the time to ourselves. We live this table-for-one life side-by-side. We lie at our leisure, moving from room to room, book to book. We eat what we want, when we want. We play our girly music on the stereo and sing and dance like nobody’s watching.

And nobody’s watching.

And so, you’re at sea. And I’m lost. Not lonely. It’s me and the cat. The cat and me. And we wake in the morning and newly notice your absence each day.

But we miss you Mr. And we miss those small moments of everydayness in our everyday lives. The squeeze, the tug, the tickle. The warm body in a cold bed.

The inevitable trip down the stairs. The empty glasses and dirty towels—and sand—left lying around for some imaginary maid to clean (you know you did not marry one).

The loving and the leaving. And the leaving again.

The daily disagreements: shutting the garage door. Surfing. Sand. Frickin’ sand. Did I mention sand?

The hugs. The raised eyebrow. The handyman. Your silent self. Your calm in my storm. Your darkness in my light (wry grin).

My mix and match memory had managed to make you a god. And everything else I forgot (Frente! 1996).

Conversational storytelling is, quite necessarily, an exercise in narrative reproduction; the (re)storying of some aspect of personal experience. That the storying is then an accident of proximity, some particular permutation afforded only by presence in some particular place and time, is itself inevitable, and perhaps often overlooked. The contextualizing of any given story within any given conversation illustrates the significance of the other in coauthoring our self-narrative, but also perhaps the inevitable incoherence of such storytelling.

I guess you had to be there.

McAdams (2006) contends that “the problem of narrative coherence is the problem of being understood in a social context” (p. 111). He continues to suggest that a “a life story that explains clearly how a person came to be who he or she is, a narrative that successfully integrates a life in time, is ‘better’ than one that does not” (p. 117). Which all sounds well and good, but I, for one, am struggling with the notion of temporal coherence. That, and the idea that I might clearly understand how I came to be who I am.

My life in time is a reverie of the inbetween. My arrival? By plane. Or a series of generally fortunate accidents. My time? Here and now. Except when it’s not. When on a day, any day, when slowly—then suddenly—the distance between where I am and where I want to be yawns itself into troubling reality. Then there I am. In another might have been.

On a late night ferry ride to Devonport.

Under a blue-domed desert sky in the Arizona of my imagining.

Someone else’s wife in someone else’s life.

All those things I think and shouldn’t say.

Better the ability to forget.

It’s risky this remembering. Place and faces. This remembering of the way we were. The way I was. This cast of characters keeps changing. I’m left with ghosts and shadows and silent loving of those I once loved out loud (Mountain Dreamer, 2006).

I’m practicing forgetting you. The way you walk. The way you move. The way you moved me.

I want to be an Ice Queen.

I want to be a lot of things.

My meaning-making is fractional, iterative, ruminative. Unsafe, unsorted, unhinged (Speedy, 2011). It ripples on the wind, in the space between dreams and desire. It drifts with the murmurs of our faded conversations. It finds me in the slow unraveling, in the traces of my troubling. Yes, “you are right to fear me now.” I make my memories in the space between experience and story. I make my memories with you, in presence, turning our space into place (Pelias, 2011). I leave part of me behind in the leaving. I make my memories in the living.

The living, rather than the telling.

And my living is messy.

McAdams (2006) suggests “the stories we live by must be evaluated with respect to their influence on how we live” (p. 121). Convention would have us think of “good” stories as those that embody coherence and clarity. But good stories are so much more. Good stories reflect complexity, subjectivity, and multiplicity (McAdams, 1996). They seek—they achieve verisimilitude (Bruner, 1986). And that’s no easy feat. But how often do we squeeze, we stretch, we manipulate our stories to fit the principles of basic goodness? And what do we lose in the process? I fear falsity in the reification, the imposition of coherent structure. I am afraid for the ignored, the invisible, and the obscured fragments of self that make me who I am. That make us who we are. I am, like Tamas (2009), often alienated by the clean and reasonable stories we tell “about messy, unreasonable experience.”

So, not for me clear cause and effect; some tidy, clean-edged and clinical eventing of the problems that punctuate my plot. No. No linear rendering of the traumatic or troubling, no directional and sad-scripted stories of redemption. No old school album or imagery, where the blurred and unflattering have been lost and forgotten. The negatives gone, the negative erased.

Let me lose the structural imposition of coherence. Let me live in the margins, in the spaces outside the story: in this movie in my mind, where freeze-framed moments flicker on the periphery of my every day. That haunt and taunt with the past and present and possibility.

Where I’m all or nothing. Or both.

Your all, or everything, or not.

Here or there. Or some version of the in-between.

Riding on another runway, looking through the window of another world. The lights of the city are the stars on the ground (Loeb, 1995).

Coming and going. Loving and leaving.

And leaving again.

In some decaffeinated high, or low, where time stands still as long as I’m standing. Or in some passenger seat, a character in someone else’s story.

In the freedom of forgetting for a moment, where we are or how we got there. Or where we go from here. And just riding along. Watching the world go by. As trees, and green, and sheep, or cacti and blue sky turn reflections in the window to windows on my world. As shared silence says enough.

And it’s all enough. For now. For then.

For maybes. Might-have-beens. What-ifs and what-nots.

What’s not.

I want to be loud (I’m not loud). I want to run (I don’t run). I want to say what I think and mean what I say. I want to travel. I want to stay home. I want to win the lottery. And have a baby. (Maybe). I want to feel safe and squeeze my nieces and share my Christmas. I want to have far-flung parties for my far-flung friends. I want to write the book. I want summer. And financial freedom. And health and happiness for my loved ones. I want real tomatoes. And proper chocolate. I want the cliché. I want to forgive. I want to not worry. I want, I want. I want a lot of things.

Wanting’s a bitch.

If you write the word often enough, it loses all meaning.

If wishes were horses. Or something.

Standing on the edge of something. On the edge of space and time. Walking the roads of my memory. My history. Her story. Schools and clubs, and pool and gymnasiums. And after hours, shared secrets, and stolen moments. Bicycle rides, and beaches and boyfriends. And golden friends from the last of the golden summers. Music and barbeques. And libraries, homes, and holidays. And jobs and cars. And late night drives and history and hurting. Bars and morning-afters and slow Sunday afternoons in rain-streaked solitude or shared-wine sunshine. Baking and eating and missed calls and mixed messages. Too small to mention. Too big to not.

I don’t want my narrative “being adequately organized” (Dimaggio, 2006, p. 106). I want to embrace the irrational, and rouse the shadows between you and me. Revel in the moments that haunt us. And honor the collection of small moments that change us in small ways. I want to feel the bruise.