William Faulkner’s 1930 novel,As I Lay Dying, is a masterpiece of Southern Gothic. Drawing upon dark and peculiarly Southern elements, the story of a family’s trek to inter the body of the family matriarch in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi is told by fifteen different characters over the course of fifty-nine chapters. One of those chapters is famously short -- five words long, to be precise – and it is told by a character named Vardaman who is trying to make sense of his mother’s death. My mother, he says, is a fish. Much has been discussed about these five words, but it is not our purpose here to, in you will pardon the pun, dig into that analysis. What interests me is that Faulkner managed to capture the life of a moment in so few words. He said everything he needed to say in that beat, and then he was able to move on. Allow me to explain.
It should come to no surprise to you, dear listeners, that I have written many creative works, poems and letters, mostly, though I have a few books under my belt. I begin each one of my works by intuiting its beginning. It’s a feeling in the gut. Or perhaps the heart. A hum. An internal divining rod that points to a natural start. And then I start to mumble, searching for the first word. And when I find it, I write. Get it down. Take hold of the work’s thread or spirit or soul and allow my efforts to be channeled by it. I am less creating something out of thin air than I am listening – yes, listening – to the story or poem or letter that is already there. And when that story is about to be exhausted, I can feel that, too. Another moment of intuiting, though this time, I am feeling for the natural end. And if this process goes well, I can pin down the final note and be at peace. The “thing” has been captured. I need not do anything else.
Of course, in my process, there is the matter of the match. I light one, blow it out, and take in the smoke. We heated with wood when I was a boy, so the smell of burning wood transports me to another time. I imagine that you, dear listeners, also have scents that take you places. But I digress. I am interested in what makes a piece whole – a novel, a poem, a short story, a chapter decidedly complete. Finished. Done.
It occurred to me on a walk with my dog, Arrow, that, perhaps, we are called by God to live our lives as if we are living out the story He made for us. He is the grand and ultimate author, after all. What, then, is seeking His will for our lives but aligning our lives to the story that is meant for us? Our lives began exactly when they needed to. We all had a natural start after some Divine hum, some capital I intuition that spoke us into existence. And then we live our lives, many of us doing our best to listen to how the story is meant to evolve. What is dying but a natural ending to our story? We may long for another chapter, another episode, but the fact of the matter is that our death marks the time when God says we are, at least on this earth, complete, finished, done. Some of us are novels who live into our eighties, nineties, and even beyond. Some of us are short stories whose endings make some people wince at the brevity. Still others are poems. Exquisite. So very beautiful. But brief. Sadly, brief. But in all cases, whole unto themselves. Just like Faulkner’s famous five-word chapter. My mother is a fish.
We might even go further by wondering about the physical book or page themselves. If we were to read a book and then toss it into a fire after we were finished, would the story still exist? Would it somehow still be out there? Or, if you prefer, in here? The spirit of a story never dying despite the destruction of the physical thing that conveyed it.
There is certainly a lot of room to theorize and conjecture, philosophize and speculate, so I will leave it to you to mull it all over should you choose to do so. I have my answers. Perhaps you do, too. For me, I return to the warm feeling of putting down a good novel or good short story or good poem. Each may have required from me different amounts of time, but the sweetness of their impact is nevertheless comparable. I put them all down with great satisfaction. Indeed, great peace. Would that we all have that experience upon our own final punctuation.
