In the book Chimera, John Barth's genie told Sheherazade his own story of
"a snail in the Maryland marshes that makes his shell as he goes along out of whatever he comes across, cementing it with his own juices, and at the same time makes his path instinctively toward the best available material for his shell; he carries his history on his back, living in it, adding new and larger spirals to it from the present as he grows."
Seven summers ago I attended a weekend workshop in biological illustration on the Oregon coast. I came away with a few nice drawings. One was of a snail shell. Fast forward a couple of years. I needed a card for a friend who was stuck in his past, and I felt drawn for some unknown reason to the image of that snail. I fooled around with it a bit in Photoshop, printed it, et voilà! Card.Whether the drawing spoke in the same visceral way to my friend as it did to me remains unclear but after that I read Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space to gain more insight to the shell's symbolism. Bachelard wrote, "it is the formation [of the snail's shell], not the form, that remains mysterious." Enduring interest in its beauty, he argued, stems not from the geometry of the shell but from "the original amazement of a naïve observer" in the image of emergence summoned by the shell. "Man lives by images," he continued, noting that words in themselves offer little in the way of movement toward grasping abstraction except through the images they convey. One particular word image from the book haunts me still: a coffin containing hundreds of snail shells placed about the corpse.
The representation of the marsh snail carrying his history, living in it, and continually adding to it resonates with me as well. In introducing this creature to the storytelling sisters (in the book Sheherazade's younger sibling Dunyazade retells the telling), Barth's genie reflected, "My project is to learn where to go by discovering where I am by reviewing where I've been."
This brings me to where I've been. Mémé, my paternal grandmother, told our family's stories again and again and again until at some point along the way I recognized a certain geology to them and understood that the key to their meaning lay in the order and combination and the cracks between the telling.
For at least a dozen years, I have wrestled off and on with how to pass Mémé's stories along, though I suppose, now that she is gone, they have become my stories, part of my inheritance. I feel a responsibility not to squander them. Of all the remaining family members, I probably possess the most knowledge of our family's past. I feel obligated to pass on whatever I know of where we've been so we all can see more clearly where we are and perhaps map from there where to go next.
I think my hesitation pertains partly to the fact that most of what I think I know didn't come firsthand, and I will unavoidably take a lot of liberties (and perhaps some heat) as I remember and interpret imperfectly what happened through my own different lenses of social consciousness, timeframe, language, institutions, assumptions, expectations, and memory. Some aspect to the stories will remain, but in another sense, I cannot help but betray them utterly through my retelling. And a great part of my hesitation resides in my fear of doing it badly. Although I have other talents, I did not inherit Mémé's gift for storytelling and I freely admit a dread of botching the job.
While it may be isolating, I'm certainly not alone in my self-paralyzing fear. I don't know how many times I've heard people say "I can't draw a straight line" or "I can't do math" or "I can't leave" or "I can't stay." In fact, there are some things we can't do. Maybe the trick lies in learning to differentiate between what we can and truly cannot accomplish and then accepting responsibility for that awareness by venturing lovingly and courageously from the seclusion of our shells.
One last image from Maxine Alexandre, "Le peau et les os," as quoted by Bachelard:
Mon ombre forme un coquillage sonore
Et le poete ecoute son passé
Dans la coquille de l'ombre de son corps.
(My shadow forms a resonant shell
And the poet listens to his past
In the shell of his body's shadow.)
