I used to live in an
apartment with one bathroom that had two mirrors opposite each other. A friend
pointed out how this created an infinity of mirror images. I had not noticed it
until he pointed it out to me. He was a refugee from Latvia, from the former
Soviet Union, and had come to the United States under the asylum process with
his family. Some other time perhaps I could write about him, his daughter, his
wife, either as straight reporting or as a
fictionalized version. Maybe I could do both. Both or either would have a
rhetorical purpose.
I have this set of ideas. I could
write a story about a person who writes a story about a person who has tools
for detecting radioactivity and, in the wake of a nuclear war, warns others not
to eat the canned food because of high levels of strontium ninety. The others
ignore the warning and eat the canned food and die. The one who warned them
takes bitter satisfaction, having been right and having been ignored, having
tools that go beyond what others can detect, and the person in my story who
wrote the story would be supremely satisfied, thinking about the others in the
world who ignore insights, who lack the tools so to speak.
I have written a description
of story and about an actual situation. It is about an aspect of actual story.
I am not satisfied with it or with its echoes of ideas because I lack
confidence that anyone including myself has the tools for measuring the levels.
Think of stories with unreliable narrators. What is really going on with those?
For instance, that story by Thomas Mann about the train wreck. Does it really
work on reflection? Who really writes a story? Who is the author of meanings
and interpretations? Is the writer hiding behind a conceived author? Are the
readers putting up an author of their own imagining between themselves and the
author’s idea of the writer, between themselves and the text, between
themselves and themselves reading the text?
I have this set of ideas which reminded me of many other things. If only I had more face to shave. That place with the mirrors is not remote. It is just down the street and owned by the same partnership that owns the building I now live in and have lived in for eighteen years. What is strontium ninety? Why did I include that specificity? Is that detail a source of satisfaction to the imagined author, the writer you imagine?
