How to Not Hold Everything and How to Not Tell a Story
For Anyone Else Lost at Sea in a New Year
Hi again to you and thank you for your hereness—I’m roughly back from a strange sabbatical. Or maybe all sabbaticals are strange. I’ve never taken one before. As always, you can listen to today’s story or read along.
An Introduction
I’ve held my breath underwater for all this time so all this to say, today I am sharing a piece of writing I made to launch an adaptation of a fairy tale, the one I made last Fall for Folktale Week, (the ongoing project/movement/IG challenge I help to run and host and cheer on). The original is called The Fisherman of Cefalú, a wonderful flash story from The Telephone Tales by Gianni Rodari and republished a few years ago by Enchanted Lion Press.
But I wanted to tell you where I’ve been, about my sabbatical, about how not to tell a story: The other day C. started our conversation straight out of the gate, “something is shifting astrologically do you feel it? Our collective creative juju opening for business again?” I didn’t know what to say so I put my face in the sun and I felt that. Something like Spring which should be hopefuller.
I told her that all the other creative things I do just to stay afloat aside from my work work, like the creative part of my psyche that is moved to share, aside from atop the paper and the page itself, has been shut down these last few months: SHOP’s CLOSED! Sign’s right there! my friend Emma says. I have a show coming up at the end of March and I have been searching in my work for the work, piecing pieces together but so much time is spent seeing this war and the time before it erased, watching the live decimation, all the ruins of human lives and broken things and hearts. Its a crushing thing between all the rivers and seas and beyond.
I haven’t been able to speak as well since October or say anything that isn’t about figuring out who is war what is war why is war and war and war and trying not to feel what I feel in public which pretty simply is fogged in. I feel fogged in. This has been a private time I suppose. Or another way: like my ghosts and my ghost’s ghosts and their ghosts and so on are holding me down trying to tell me something and when I think I know what one voice is saying the other is out of reach or out of touch. Either way they are too many of them to shake. I keep trying to write it and then lock it away again.
Before February hit and even in February, with its solar flares and astrological constellation adjustments and fallen moon rocks lodged in my throat, my month long shabbat turned into me trying to figure out how to rest and to not hold the entirety of everything inside me. I sat in my own marine layer for many days. I sit some days with a paint brush painting my own atmosphere. Sometimes with sore fingers trying to tap it out on the keyboard or via pencil and book. I am stupidly susceptible to the crush of outside voices and have had to turn off social media most days. The dissonance has been jarring.
So instead of a month long shabbat, or, as people who get paid to teach call it, a sabbatical, I still made myself so stupidly busy that last night I rendered myself back in the old boat. I thought I needed a bigger boat (a la Zissou) but I think I just need a new boat. Or a boat.
In the days of January and February I recount the hundred things poured into the days when I tried to get a hold of my words and my pictures and myself things like noticing disparate connections between things and writing them down, reading parts of things, not painting because I was writing, not writing because I was painting, not doing either because I was reading or reading the 1000 emails from the 1000 websites I was forced to sign up for to get 15% off of a thing that I don’t think I ever bought or maybe I did (shit), and figuring out how to make hope more active which is like a kind of praying for atheists, writing about this, blocked up about that, but really trying hard to get outside and then into another inside of my body and brain and into the world of my work which is whispering to me so softly I can't hear what its trying to tell me and I try, lord, I try.
Really I am learning and unlearning. I just need to unlearn and learn to hold less of the world in my hands and heart at all hours of the day and night and stop thinking if I didn’t do one thing or another the world would fall apart. I mean the world is doing fine with that all on its own, but I really don’t know how much void I can stare down into with it all. I’m just trying to hold my own together and make some stories about it, feel water and colors on my brushes without the rush of proving that I am here because in the fog I am barely here. I might be trying to erase myself and I might be proving I am still here. I think it’s the latter. Every day is up and many days are down. I wish I could tell you otherwise. I write about all of this and I’ll share it with you soon since the astrology and the solar flares and the moon juices have given me back, at least for now, the truth of it enough to share.
And now…
The Fisherman of Cefalú/The Sea Creature of Everywhere: A Story of Not Telling a Story
Once was a fisherman, lost at sea, the fisherman of Cefalú. And once was a sea creature the size of a sardine, smaller than a sardine, also lost at sea.
The story can go many ways. I’m terrible at beginnings. I used to be so good at them.
“We knew this time would come for us soon,” said the sardine boy.
The sea creature the size of a sardine (or smaller) was blown to sea and bobbed forever upon, owning and not owning the waves, so forever it seemed.
“The mistral winds are very powerful,” said the fisherman to himself on his small wooden boat fishing out at to sea. He said this to Ernest Hemingway and whoever else was listening because there aren’t many others listening to a fisherman, even the fisherman’s family and neighbors.
The sea creature was living inside an oyster shell in a dry part of the sea. When the oyster shells disappeared, he lived in clam shells, once a Coque Saint Jaques shell (spacious), once, in the Caribbean a conch, once even a cowrie, but cowries were cramped quarters, dark holes.
Anyway, he moved out of the oyster due to a rent increase. His landlord was such an asshole he complained to the hermit crab. “Aren’t they all?” said the crab over a cigarette break from this story. He was standing with the jellyfish and the jellyfish is still blowing smoke rings from his perfect dirty mouth. All my stories waft out in smoke rings.
Very clever said the fisherman blowing ever more out to see what kind of fish were in this corner of the ocean. “Mostly jellyfish,” the jellyfish said, lighting his next cigarette with his last cigarette, truly the sign of a problem.
The size of this minuscule glistening sardine-like creature the size of a thumbnail is a theme of this story. The size of the moon when it is very far away is indeed also a theme in this story. A story can have many themes and that’s what might make it truer. What is the theme you are living right now? That is also the theme of this story.
The story of the sea is the sea of this story…but telling a story should be so simple! We do it every day! We recall the past so why is it so hard to retell the future? The future is written on the sea in every wave, one jellyfish whispers.
I even ride out to the Rockaways to learn more about what this story is and end up watching the surfers. “HEY! Do you know this story?” I yell, but they only hear the ocean.
Anyway, the little sardine kid put up a good fight holding on to that fisherfolk. "I am not a rock!” he shouted to the fisherman but his small sardine voice and the sound of the sea crashing all around the boat and the mistral wind hollering at them both made for a nuisance to their communication.
The fisherman reeled in this giant fish but when it landed in the boat it was a clam. “Stupid Clam,” said the captain who was the only fisherman in the boat opening a clam, realizing the clam released a sardine inside, and, poking the little thing, prying it from its shell, seeing its fins, seeing its legs, he shouted:
“Stupid sardine looking thing,” and was about to throw it back but the sea creature stinking of seaweed and cheap wine and clamshell, the creature the size of a thumbnail, the size of a sardine but...not a sardine, but with a head the size of a pearl, the size of the moon far away, squeaked back, “NO NO! Ouch! You’re hurting me! Quit poking me.”
“I have seven children and can’t keep you,” said the grosly grizzled old fisherman stinking himself of seaweed, salt, bait.
The sea creature said “I will make you rich if you will make me comfortable and feed me whatever it is you feed your children. I’ve been socked away in cheap flats in different shells all around this sea. I’m living on cheap wine with squid and if you take me in I’ll give you pearls upon pearls. I’ll give to you all I have, but you know man, I can’t eat pearls. Everything is free here in the sea but it’s a slim time and all of this you see (points to all of his vey little self) is not a cannibal.
The Fisherman, the grisly fellow is desperate too in this story’s beginning . A slim time at sea is a slim time on land.
“Seven children!” the fisherman repeats. His breath is so close, so cold. “Do you know how many teeth that is not chewing on morsels of food chattering in the chill of a rickety house on stilts by the sea? I can’t bring home more teeth, even your tiny teeth. My walls have crumbled down. I can’t bring you home and did you say pearls?”
And And And I did.
We are still far from the shore and an ending.
I can tell you what might happen from here, but only if we can call this the beginning.
The sardine boy gives the fisherman pearl after pearl and the fisherman gives the sardine boy a home and a little bed in a matchbox. The fisherman feeds him. The fisherman cannot believe how much the sardine boy can eat. The sardine boy becomes miraculously chubby with his new regimen. He becomes a bigger sardine with a fin on his back and sweet chubby little legs. He watches as the fisherman becomes quite rich in this story. The fisherman who now owns a fleet of boats and hauls in all the fish and even sells the shells of the sea to make roads. A fisherman's who hauls enormous nets to drag every living thing to his now enormous boats, who is cruel now, even crueler, who treats his employees and wards terribly, who makes everyone feel lowly and undervalued, who tells them they are lucky to have work at all, you know the feeling.
He makes the chubby sardine boy his tiny accountant now and the fisherman really becomes a mogul. Eventually he doesn’t need Sardine Boy’s services, his bookkeeping got funneled to a much larger outfit than one tiny Sardine like creature could handle. And as he begins the process of forgetting the sardine boy, especially all the ways in which the teeny but kind Sardine Boy had helped him, he discovers he can’t even remember the Sardine Boy’s name. The Sardine Boy’s name is lost even to us.
The sardine boy of course, like any of you without a name to anyone you’ve ever loved, becomes detached, sad, more lonely than he can recall, lonelier every day.
Sardine Boy decides to call a meeting with The Fisherman and so on a Sunday the Sardine Boy and the Fisherman meet at the cove where it they first came ashore. The Fisherman wears such fancy things now and thinks they are together to discuss a new monument he wants to erect for himself in the town’s piazza and which stone to choose, marble from Carrara like Michelangelo? Or Pentelic like the Greeks?
Sardine Boy in his little suit, which the fisherman created for him to hide his little fin, speaks first: “There is trouble afoot if you keep being so cruel—you cant go on like this, or you can, but nothing good will come of it ,” pointing to the few numbers of fish left in the sea and the large numbers of treasure and in an act of really forgetting, the fisherman becomes sour. He picks up and empty clam shell and slams the little chubby sardine boy shut. He locks the shell with a piece of net from his pocket and throws him back to the seaweedy sea from whence he began, forgetting him forever.
And now I am forgetting too, this vague feeling lingers that an ending isn’t the end but another beginning.
I write to my friend Amy about it and from here we get really real and we find out how we might end.
DEAR AMY,
I think it’s too real somehow. It’s something happening in the real world. And where is the magic or where is the point or can this even be an ending? There is spilled ink everywhere literally, figuratively, you name it! I’m not sure anyone will want another story in the world that is so brutal in its cruelty and realness but does it feel like a old forever tale of greed and asserting our lowest meanest selves on those who don’t deserve it? The world right now is so difficult to overlook for me. For you?
Maybe it needs a mermaid —like a less sad less little Hans Christian Anderson mermaid big enough to guide something magical in the story, big enough to encompass Sardine Boy in his ancestors, an interloper, another kind of fairy.
Maybe the fairy mermaid is the one to find the sardine child again and again, perpetually thrown back to sea, the lost and then found and found and lost sardine boy—forever and again, an eternal folktale of an eternal something. Maybe the sardine child is changed. Maybe it isn’t for me to say. Or maybe not a mermaid, a shrimp? Both and none, the way I think of everything else in this, my, marine layer.”
LOVE, Deb
Amy quickly writes back:
“Oh Deb. Are we not all magical chubby sardines thrown back into the sea, and also the ones who do the throwing?”
To which I say at once, yes. Yes.
You can find out how I end up telling the story here.
And see how Leigh Hopkins of Khôra Magazine published (the shown above) The Sea as the cover of Khôra’s November issue along with my notes about it.
I’ll be teaching two story workshops to welcome Spring. in my little rogue art school called The StoryCamp Disco: a short fun one called Story Of, Story And on March 29th and another amazing full Spring Story Weekend, Saturday and Sunday, April 13th & 14th! Send me a note if you’d like to get on the list for either!
I love hearing you read this Deb! What a wonderful weaving of the too-muchness, and too, the making it into something other. Sometimes it feels too hard to come up for air and see anything straight. I love your paintings and your tellings. And your Donkeys — I am sure they will lead you back to somewhere.
PS: The Pearls and the Tiny Teeth! We have a Pearl with Tiny Teeth (we call them this, specifically) and I was listening to you read whilst, in the rain, I dug up daffodils that stretched into the path up to the woodland. I felt you near, catching a glimpse of our Midnight Grump and her tiny teeth that never actually bite but threaten us, laughing on the other side. I do not know why I am rambling on about this. I hope you'll forgive me.
The evocations and limitations of our ability to be human - to be more sardine and less fisherman. The necessary sabbatical from life. The images that you evoke to create equality with the seacreatures - the smoke-ring blowing jellyfish, the invitation of a fairy or mermaid, the lack of beginnings - or endings. Reminded of Beginnings by Susanna Juliusberger (seminal book of my childhood) and selkies and their legends. Like mermaids, a refusal of the human. Who would really want to be human right now? To hear this in your voice is such a dream - thank you for your words, your voice. (This isn't very coherent, but your words are).