enter into what the ancient Greeks called the agon, pitching ourselves into struggles we either overcome, fail to meet, or respect as a draw; this, it follows, leads to an end, a denouement, one that evolves naturally (if we are to be a story well-told) from all that has come before. Which I guess would be death. Nothing seems more natural than dying.
Yet whose life holds such coherence? In the sense that one thing naturally gives rise to the next? I am in my late forties as I write this, and have plenty of personal history from which to derive a narrative and construct a self. But it’s hardly overstating to say there isn’t much in the way of unity; memories float to the fore of my random mind and sink down again, discreet episodes bouncing around the years, linked sometimes by an image/subject rhyme scheme more often—if linked at all—than establishing any kind of narrative coherence. The center holding my story together is the bald fact of my physical body, that all my experiences have occurred to this nervous system, this set of heart, lungs, and ever-wandering mind, but the circumstances offer little narrative direction aside from time and aging. I can look to any number of moments and label them “formative” to my identity. For example, the memory of my mid-twenties self being startled, at first even frightened, on a midnight beach stroll by the sudden movement of a man-sized shadow standing calf-deep in the waves as I happened near. I stopped without meaning to, as though the sight of that still form several yards away required I mirror it, the both of us stuck on sudden alert. Then, my instinct for self-defense suddenly transformed to fascination, even awe, as the silhouette fell forward yet without crashing into the water and for an instant seemed suspended in space, an action my mind couldn’t make any immediate sense of. It looked like the figure was throwing off a blanket of some kind that caught in the wind—exact detail was impossible in that dark and with that distance—and then the instant found coherence, the blanket changed to wings, the strange man-figure became a bird taking flight low above the breakers, the beat of those wings heavier and louder than the waves rolling over my feet.
My first great blue heron, and a great (because unexpected) moment of intimate witness to the majesty of the wild. A city boy, I’d never encountered an animal of that size outside of a zoo, and never at such proximity, the heron passing close enough to push a breeze across my cheek, filling my nostrils with a gamey marine scent.
This, set against a recent moment in which again I was made unexpected witness, this time sweating heavily, heaving breath on an obscure trail through park woods near my home, where I run most summer evenings. I’d stopped, struck still by an irregular jabbing movement at the edge of my vision and the sound of sudden disturbance in the quiet water of Beargrass Creek, a rivulet that feeds the Ohio river and cuts a profound and winding swathe through my city. At the edge of one steep bank I caught the flight of another great blue heron seeking to escape my presence, and again it was the heavy heft of large wings over water, a resonant hush, three or four wing-beats and then a stately gliding upward to reach an overhanging alder branch upstream. I walked slowly toward the tree to get a better look, and the sunlight angling through the trees glinted on the silver scales of a fish dangling from either side of the bird’s lance-like beak before being tossed and sucked down the long question mark of the heron’s throat. The bird’s yellow eyes blinked in contentment a few times before then coming to cautiously regard me.
Such a strange, prehistoric-looking bird, with it’s stalk legs and shaggy feathers sprouting about like unkempt, tousled hair. The stillness of the heron astounds me; once so composed, the bird appeared to become an aspect of the alder itself, and easy to overlook if my eyes hadn’t followed it on the path it took to get there. For what seemed like several moments the city surrounding us fell away and we were two singular living beings, one wild, one not, silently taking in the other, until I stepped slowly to the base of the tree to see how close it would allow me to come. Evidently the heron did not share the same fascination for me that I felt for it, though, and with its peculiar grace it leaned forward into the air and sailed back down the creek until I could only make it out via its movement among the summer green, and then lost sight of it altogether in leaves atop of leaves. In that view my head made an easy transition into picturing the world without me—without any of us—and what the planet must have been like eons ago with trees and streams full of such sights, what extraordinary brutal and violent beauty the planet must have teemed with then.
I take these two instances of direct encounters with herons, both of which were intense and invigorating experiences (for me) marked by that kind of awe that comes with any close-up interaction with the indifferent wild, especially the “great” or unusual wild—the one beyond squirrels and robins and cardinals puttering about their business in my yard—and pronounce them “formative” in that both instances occurred at a time of great doubt and loneliness; they construct a brief rhyme scheme to my life, and tempt me to pursue some level of meaning in that both times I came upon this bird known for its solitude when hurting from the marked degree of my own isolation. What meaning might there be? The natural world mirrors my inner one, as though making commentary? It wishes to remind me that in solitude one can still thrive, be a thing of beauty?
I can recognize that such grasping at meaning is entirely a construction of my own mind struggling to assert its centrality to the universe, that solitary bird/lonesome man are no more than random coincidences, the likelihood of which could be formulated probably into an equation by another mind much more gifted than my own. Neither memory connects to who I am and have become.
The supposed memories that would build my narrative identity should be memories of a different kind, I suppose—memories of similarly intense events that have modeled me into this man sitting with a keyboard on his lap at this precise moment. And yet a case could be made that those salient events, and the identification of them as salutary to my becoming, are similarly selected, their meaning foisted upon them by my choosing. Couldn’t a case be made that my two close runins with (what seems to me) an exotic bird are in fact formative experiences? One can construct a narrative however one wants and derive from it some attendant meanings, but these meanings leave me ambivalent to their objective veracity; yes, I can argue, my sense of my past allows for a sense of unity to my current self, yet I’m not entirely convinced that I’m getting to an impartial truth of what brought me to this self.
In particular this leads me to a similar ambivalence about the experiences that unify my sense of a writing self—a self I value, encourage, and protect fiercely even during the long stretches when not much writing of consequence is getting done. It has become and has long been the self that provides me most with purpose, the one that gives the deepest sensation of personal evolution, this sense of moving toward something important, and but also it confounds me because I don’t know exactly why this should be the case. The writing self—and by this I don’t mean diary/journal/letter-writing, but the conscious undertaking of creating narratives that hopefully others, even strangers, might read and find stimulating, moving, artful—is an often unpleasant one wracked by doubts, anxieties, frustrations and failures, an identity often saddled with the suspicion that none of what it does actually needs to be done anymore, and certainly not by me; an identity consistently tempted to extinguish itself; a temptation held off by the final question: If not this (the writing), then what? The lack of a clear answer often leads to more writing.
This kind of circular ruminating (the above paragraph cannot be termed reasoning) prompts me to wonder what experiences proved formative to the creation of this writer. I do believe a writer is formed and not born; we may be born with a natural strength for language, say, for the sounds of certain words arranged melodically, but that’s a far cry from all that’s required for the creation of worthwhile novels, stories, narratives of any kind, or even for the harboring of a desire to wrestle with the making of these things. In personal terms, inspecting early experiences suggests I could have turned out quite differently. I can construct a narrative identity that lends coherence to my being a writer, true, but could also construct one in which I turned out otherwise. I could have turned out as another kind of man were it not for the formative experience of certain books at certain times. A Separate Peace by John Knowles was the first of these.
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Aside from my personal history cohering around this same body as it has changed in time, this same brain as it has struggled to grow and remember and accept and decide, my “narrative identity” seems to