Contact

Sometimes this trait is complained about and sometimes it is pursued:  contact with information seems to hold both a sweet spot for speakers and their variants and to be the bane of social intercourse:  the repetitious family member, the boastful neighbor.  And yet this need for people to express what is on their mind or to offer a conclusion of certitude is so strong that they will do it despite possible negative consequences, fully in the face of the knowledge that they have done it before, and prostrate across the world, unapologetic of their social sins, as if it is not they who are thus conversing but a force external.

This force external is also the contact writers make with reality.  It is what brings the world into their pen and out to their readers.  Experience enters their mind and exits same, meanwhile joining the daily disparate threads of information into a whole.  A rich, meaningful muff which, while not crisp in its circumference, has the virtue of presence. 

So when your uncle tells his dog story over Thanksgiving yet again or when your cousin recites tasks she is committing to for her children, they are making order of what is otherwise a mess.  As the author Donna Tartt says*, the writing life is satisfying, because it is filled with little moments that put information in its place.  The life of the fiction writer, as she also says, must be especially satisfying, since it adds a dimension to clarifying experience.  An extra dimension to the satisfaction of nonfiction writers whose joy lives in noticing and pointing out. 

Building a story, in addition to offering contact with sweet spots of clarity, offers the opportunity to sculpt clarity as if from scratch.  To see and notice as you go.  To adjust based on what makes the most watertight fit around the experience you are focusing on. 

Reading this kind of sculpted fiction, which is to say real fiction, is like taking a drug.  You read it again and again.  And every time it is sweet.  You repeat passages from books.  Or repeat your favorite work story, because, every time there is clarity.  Once is not enough.  Or rather, once is enough for its own duration.  The brain does not store the satisfaction of clarity into memory for continuous access.  It does not spread it around experience as a permanent feature.  The clarity must be accessed again in order to be experienced.   Hence our culture’s endless hashing out of the same basic human problems:  how much love is there and who dominates whom.

True to people’s hard, physical nature, it seems that, in order to experience truth from insight, we must simply hear it again.  The result is no less satisfying, but it is occasionally disturbing to listeners.  Especially if the insight is personal and therefore not as much fun for listeners as for the teller. 

This mental characteristic may be the culprit for why we repeat conversations at dinner and why, despite the repetition, company remains poignant.  To love the world through proximity, it seems, means to require constant contact with it.   Or, in the state of our current psychological presets, constant, short bursts of illumination that flash, with healthy self-satisfaction and no regard to originality, often on the very same spot. 

Wasn’t it the director James Cameron who said that, no matter what of kind movie he starts to make, it always ends up being about his mother?

* In February 8, 2014 interview with Charlie Rose