Unknowing the Known World
A meditation on letting go of what we know + a potent recipe for a micro-story
updated & expanded from April 2022
I’m interested in narration—on and off the page. How we narrate our stories, yes. Also, how we narrate our lives. That’s what I want to talk about for this week’s writing prompt. Bear with me as I navigate a circuitous path toward the point, starting with this quote from Stephen Jay Gould:
“The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best, and therefore never scrutinize or question.”
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also purportedly one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. I love Gould’s call to examine the stories we think we know best. Which must by definition include our own stories, the stories we tell about our lives, because where else do we see ourselves as holding more expertise and certitude?
I’m examining one of my own stories as I watch fall unfold here in Minneapolis. I don’t like winter, but I love fall. September especially, because there’s so much summer still shimmering in September. But I also love October a lot. The leaves are usually peak here in October, and on good years, the leaves are one of nature’s most mesmerizing shows. There are days when the colors and the light and the temperature combine so that you can hardly move in the face of such beauty. You can’t believe its real, no matter how many falls you’ve lived through before. This is even true—though sparingly—into November. Maybe even more true in November, which is mainly gray and brown, but clings to bits of battered gold, gold so close to losing the essence of its goldenness that it’s somehow even more beautiful than the more brilliant, show-offy golds of September, golds too fresh-born to know that their own goldenness will too soon darken.
Anyway, it’s fall, and the trees are just starting to turn—just starting—and it’s pretty. I can see the trees from every window of our house, because our house sits on a hill that is technically an urban forest. Well, I don’t know actually if it is technically a forest, but an arborist told us that once, so I’m going with it. Either way, it feels like a forest and in the summer, our mostly white living room which is also mostly windows takes on a tinge of green from all the leaves.
Our second-floor bedroom sits right in the branches, this wild tangle of oak, framed by gauzy white curtains to let the light through. The branches are a better curtain than the curtains, and more lovely. Yes, I love fall, but I dread winter, and my dread of winter makes fall a hard liminal space to manage. Let’s just say, my feelings are mixed. It’s so fucking pretty,” I said sadly last night as I threw my t-shirt and bra on the chair we keep in our bedroom solely for this purpose, a concession my very tidy husband has almost stopped complaining about after nearly a quarter century together. “So goddamn pretty.” We both laughed.
T.S. Eliot said that April is the cruelest month, but I’m certain it’s November. I’ll never forget the November—this was several years ago, maybe a decade—when my youngest child, still in high school, discovered the koi fish dead in the pond. November had been warm that year, but there’d been a sudden, unpredicted drop in temperature—just enough, apparently, to kill the fish. Our cat had also disappeared that same autumn (to be found later, but not before the fish died). “Everything is dying, Mom,” my youngest said to me that morning. “Why is everything dying?” This, I’ve come to believe, is what our bodies know about November, the arrival of which is nothing if not the harbinger of endings. Even literally. According to BBC News, “Nearly all countries in the world suffer from ‘excess winter deaths.’” The weird thing is that this holds true even for warm countries.
So, sure, maybe all this is why I hate winter.
But then again … maybe hating winter is just a story I tell myself about myself.
I’ve always believed it’s a true story. I’ve traced its origins (as you may have long ago read about in my post on time spent in foster care) to those long frigid walks to the bus stop in cheap plastic shoes. But then again, maybe there’s more to the story than I know. Maybe there’s a story under the story, or a new story altogether.
This openness to what we don’t already know we know is, I believe, the most potent quality we can bring to our writing and to our lives. I think diving into this forced uncertainty is what Gould is compelling us to do, and what we’ll attempt to do this week.
Writing Exercise: Unkowing the Known World With A Three-Step Micro Story
For this week’s writing exercise, I invite you to consider the intimate, rhythmic, and and self-revelatory narration of one of my favorite novel openings, from