Every Picture Tells a Story

Last night I sat in a small Capitol Hill restaurant observing the kind of drama that is not uncommon in the city these days. Two men, seated near a partially open window, both nicely dressed, clean, professional. Pin stripes, salon haircuts. Casual, not stuffy. One is smoking in the most unobtrusive way possible: hand out the window, guiding the smoke down the street instead of into the roomful of diners. A smoking saint.

Ambling down the sidewalk just outside the smoker's window is an unshaven, grinning man of about the same age as the professional pair-somewhere in his late thirties. Jeans too long, slit at the ankles, sagging around the hips. Hair hanging in his eyes. Not enough, though, to obscure the moment when he sees the smoker's hand and it becomes a target. The grin freezes, then spreads, and the man stumbles toward the window. The professionals are engrossed in talk and fail to notice.

"Hey-can you spare a smoke?"

No answer. It's unclear whether or not they have heard him.

"Hey man-you got another cigarette?" The man on the sidewalk sidles up to the window and taps the smoking saint's hand.

The smoker looks startled. You can't ignore a tap-a direct hit like that. He picks up the pack lying next to his wine glass and says "Sorry-empty. See?" holding the empty package out to the man.
But the guy persists. He's seen the cigarette. He wants it. He'd take it out of the smoker's hand if he could reach it. But the hand has been withdrawn from the window; it's in the room, the cigarette with it.

"Aw-don't you got another?" It's more pathetic than menacing, but the professional men look nervous. What to do. What to do. They shift in their chairs, the non- smoker glancing toward the kitchen where the owner generally stations himself on busy nights like this one.

A decision has been reached. "Okay, hold on." The smoker reaches into his briefcase, stashed against the wall, and pulls out another pack, a brand new one. Relief on all sides. The thing's been settled. A couple of cigarettes out the window, a bow of thanks, that crazy grin, and the man is gone. The restaurant breathes in, breathes out.

I'm lying. I didn't actually see any of this. My back was to the window and I was talking to my partner, Jay, about an interview I heard on NPR. Just when I was getting to the point, his eyes lost focus and I knew he was gone. "Hey-are you listening to me?" I hate it when he does that. It's like somebody turned the lights out. But he's transfixed, watching something behind me. I turn and see a scraggly looking man with a big grin on his face just outside the window. I turn back and Jay apologizes, then proceeds to narrate the whole story as it unfolds behind me. I love this.

I won't turn around again for many reasons. For one, it's not polite to stare. For another, if I get caught staring, the man outside the window might notice and do something awful. Draw attention to me. Demand cash. Make a scene I don't want to be part of. And probably the best reason-the one least likely to give me any guilt-is that I like not seeing the whole thing and instead getting it in a story. I even prompt Jay-"So is the smoker uncomfortable? Embarrassed? Irritated? Sympathetic?" I imagine a dozen different responses and identify with every one of them. I listen carefully to the very end. "What a great scene for a story," I say. I'm glad I didn't turn around. It's better this way.

Before I wind up sounding too insensitive (like the kind of person who regards all human tragedies except her own as grist for some literary mill), let me explain why I sometimes don't want to turn around, why I think a story is often more present to us than life, and why I think literature sometimes brings us closer to understanding than life itself.

I don't want to turn around because if I do I'll start theorizing. I'll observe this little twenty-first century tableau and apply some kind of post-modern paste to it: my particular store-blend of social and psychological analyses, all cleverly constructed and containing some important truths about the world. But these analyses often simply serve to protect me from the world, to hold its chaos at bay by circumscribing
experience to such a degree that something of its depth and complexitis lost. My own sense is that while theory is important, story is essential for the fullest expression and experience of human life.

Literature also protects me to some degree. It channels the chaos of experience and its attendant emotions into some sort of meaningful and manageable form. That is one of the primary functions of art. But literature does not protect me from the complexity of life. It offers no clear solutions to the problems thrown out by experience and while it may present a fairly coherent vision of the world, it generally refuses to offer a monolithic model of reality. And somewhere between the lines, in the paradoxical and slippery construction of the lives that stories tell, arises a sense of life that cannot be described conceptually, but only enacted through the art form. Art allows us to know ourselves, to apprehend reality, in ways that a conceptually-based system of knowledge cannot. It does not define our lives; it allows us to experience them more fully.
In the end, sometimes I don't want to turn around because in the pure rush of experience I may miss something. My fear, my embarrassment, my intellectual perceptions, the crick in my neck, may prevent me from seeing how complicated the whole thing is. How complex these men at the window are. How silly, how scared, how wise, how confused, how driven by desire and by the need to have at least one person turn around and notice them at some point in their lives. Sometimes it is not life, but only a story that can teach me this.

 

Chris Kellett was on the faculty at Antioch University Seattle from 1989-2004 where she taught literature and writing in the undergraduate program. She currently lives in Seattle and holds the position of Associate Provost at Cornish College of the Arts.