Progress of Stories

by Laura (Riding) Jackson

  Arista Manuscript herself neither slept nor woke up nor ever ceased to watch. 'In this way,' she explained, 'nothing is sudden to me and I feel no pain.' From this you must not understand that she did not suffer. She was, be assured, a woman of extreme sensibility. Only, she did not experience pain. It might be said that for whatever befell her she was prepared. Because of her peculiar way of living she saw every unworthiness long before it reached her. Her spatial medium was knowledge rather than fact. When therefore I say that she felt no pain, I mean that she felt more than pain. She brooded.

  THAT WORKSHOP

  IN the workshop nothing is happening. There are no results. Results are the work of the workshop turning into works or happenings because someone walks into the workshop and Sees. Someone walks in; but of course doesn't see everything. Only the whole world walking into that workshop could see everything. But the whole world does not see and so it does not walk into. If no one walks in, nothing is happening. If someone walks in, something is happening. The rest is the sentimental background, or god, of the something, as authors, for instance, are the sentimental background of literature.

  Eyes are to come closer than feet. Feet are the whole world. Eyes are someone. The whole world walks into that workshop and sees nothing and so does not walk into. Someone walking into that workshop leaves his feet outside. What of his eyes, which do not see everything? He leaves these outside in the workshop.

  FINALE

  A Later Story: CHRISTMASTIME (1966)

  THE story that follows, the only one in this book of later-time writing, was written for informal Christmastime presenting to friends. In considering it for inclusion in Progress of Stories I had an uneasy awareness of an attraction that the book can have for contemporary taste as modern fiction of a high degree of stylistic sophistication. Those who have adopted the book as an example in this tradition have, I think likely, read it in obliviousness to a motif pervading the whole; the tragic sense of what all stories can hold is not exiled but kept suspended in discreet reserve from the story-telling mood and scene. This story should help to unsettle the impression that I incline to stay at removes of icy intellectuality from the emotional potential of the stories I tell, by the taut closeness to the close-to-tragic happy ending of its portrayal of how human refusal to despair year on year renames itself hope.

  I imagine the Angel of Immediate joys and the Angel of Future Joys and the Angel of Past Joys all coming suddenly together at the turn of the year, when the paths of happy memory and happy expectation, and that of present happiness, suddenly meet and merge. An abrupt encounter!—for none of the three Angels had been thinking of the others: they tumble into one another—but save one another from falling, the joys they had been carrying, in great armfuls, spilled upon the crossways, mingledly . . . What now?

  "Glad, glad!" all the people cry out—all cry out except the Angels. "Oh, I am glad!" everyone says—except the Angels. The people tread on the spilled, strewn joys as if on a carpet of flowers, scarcely putting feet to ground.

  The people do not know why they are so glad, whether because of old, remembered joys, or joys hoped-for, or joys of the time-being or the moments that just were. All the joys seem the same: "Is this not as much happiness as may be?" they feel. And, almost immediately, they are at a loss, yet do not know this.

  The Angels, too, are at a loss; and they know that they are so. The festive moment of the people obscures the further way, the fourth path, the Unknown. To whom, the fourth path? They hover at the edges of the celebration, watching how the people go joyfully round and round, and crisscross, and back and forth, tasting the thought of joy with indiscriminate zest—from then to now to later to then to later to now to then, mingling times, mingling joys, in bewildered step. "Ought we not to be doing something to help the people?" the Angels ask of one another by exchange of bewildered looks. What next for the people? ("What next for us?")

  Suddenly, before the faces of the Angels show any fretful appearance, the people weary, are heavy with themselves— comprehending as little why they weary as they comprehended why they celebrated and were so light with themselves. And they depart in the fourth direction, the way of the Unknown!— in straggling numbers, their step still bewildered, but as those going where all must go because there is no other way.

  Where to, the Angels? They gather up the spilled joys in their separate kinds with the prompt touch of the knowledge of one's own—which, flower-like, freshen in their arms and as from a not-mortal fading. Where next?

  The crossways had darkened and shrunk with the departure of the people in the direction of the Unknown. There was no past or present or future, only the Unknown, and no light to lead the way but the first imprints of the people's feet glowing faintly on the new road, the mark of the first slow passion of their advance, misdoubt struggling in them with curiosity, curiosity with misdoubt.

  The Angels felt the clutch of fear: the people's joys! ("They will need their different joys . . .") They hurried after, and soon they too were lost from sight in the Unknown. They will find their separate paths again as the people begin again to divide their happiness into its ages. The scene is invisible. But time, the order of knowledge, has been restored. Truth has its clock again.

  SOME STORIES IN REVIEW

  I have found the early stories presented here so deeply settled into themselves that it would have been impossible for me to change anything in them, had I been troubled, in preparing them for republication, by features seriously faulty to my later eyes. The case is not always so, or necessarily so, where a writer reviews earlier writings. Stories, once published, are the most resistant to revision of all kinds of writing. They are not composed, as poems are, or essays, but constructed, made of pieces put together: changes could have destructive consequences. They are more fragile than they seem, for all the labor of construction that goes into them. None of the stories in this book have been revised in any respect.

  In the case of only one story included here, a story of very early date, did question arise with me of a possible change, and that was as to a single word used to describe someone appearing incidentally in it. The narrative was in first-person form. The word was intended to suggest a tendency to spiritual franticness; it troubled my reviewing appraisal, however, as being of a slapdash specificness out-of-key with the intention. But I have made no change, and I have abandoned the idea of a correction-note lest it offend as insistence on the degree of exactitude that is vexatiously termed 'perfectionism'.

  Quite outside my indisposition to doing anything that might upset the functional weights and balances, pressures and leverages, of story-structure, are desires prompted on later reading of some stories for arranged reprinting to provide glosses reporting on my later thought on general implications or propositions embraced in the particular story shape-of-things. Where I have done this, the story as textual actuality remains intact. In the case of two sequels to 'A Last Lesson in Geography', which was reprinted in the magazine Art and Literature (Paris), 1965, the first printed there after the story-text, the second, of 1974 writing, kept for possible reprinting, the two together make later readers companions to my later experience in the field of thought in which the scene of the story was laid. They are shared increments of my renewed living relationship to the story, extending the lease of relationship into which it binds readers and myself: they should not be unwelcome.

  SEQUEL OF 1964 TO 'A LAST LESSON IN GEOGRAPHY'

  But eventually it became harder and harder to be playful in learning the lessons remaining to be learned. For the more one learned, the closer one got to the reality. And when one got to it, all the things of which one had learned proved to be relative to one another, so that one ended up knowing the reality only in part, only in this way and that way, never in the whole. The more we perfected our knowledge of things, the less and less we learned, indeed: the more we learned, the less we knew. The closer we got to the reality, the more we needed to know. There is only one way to know the rea
lity, and that is to be it.

  Now, the She of Us who is such an important character is this story was, of course, for all her being the Token of the whole in our midst, relative to the He of Us who is such an important character of our story. The relativeness of the He of Us to the She of Us as the Token of the whole, or Messenger of reality, is the essence of the story as far as it was taken. There was left to tell how it further went, and first as to the obverse relativeness: how, when the He of Us at last reacted to the She of Us as the Token of the whole (and not as the Token of Himself), and accepted reality's Message at Her hand (instead of going on being the Messenger of Himself to Himself), she gradually became less and less She—even as he was becoming less and less He. And thereupon She and He gradually became I and I, I, I . . . Whereupon, I, I, I, I . . . began to rise to its infinite power, We.

  Just when we become We is of one parcel with the question, just when one becomes I. It is for You—which is the same as small-letter we—to give the answer. There is only one way to know the reality in the whole, and that is to be it, and only one way to be the reality, and that is to speak it. The finish of the story must be left to you to tell.

  SEQUEL OF 1974 TO 'A LAST LESSON IN GEOGRAPHY' (HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED)

  "There is only one way to know the reality in the whole, and that is to be it, and only one way to be the reality, and that is to speak it." Rereading these works of my sequel, I am moved to comment on my presented thought about being the reality. I meant, and mean, this in no sense of appropriation of the reality in one's being, of scooping it into one's identity. One might say, there's only one way to know life, and that is to be it, and only one way to be it, and that is to manifest it. I do not conceive of 'reality' as something of loose nature to get into one's grasp of apprehension, and to translate into terms of oneself. My 'be-it' is a being-it in the sense of being of it—a making oneself into what it is, so that one is expressive of it, and expressive of it as an all-distinct 'something' of an all- distinct nature, into which one translates oneself. This sequel may help to clarify imagination of the scene of being in which 'we' becomes 'We'.

  In 1971, the story 'The Fable of the Dice' was read by an admirer of it at a London meeting of members of the learned professions (The Science Policy Foundation, Third International) attended by him, as pertinent to the general theme under discussion, 'The Predicament of Man'. The course of discussion was later covered in a book of this title. Feeling that the sense of the story had probably got lost in the environment of the proceedings, I prepared some comments on it, which were included in the book's notes. I shall reproduce here only a small part of them, mainly what sprang new to mind in fresh contact with the story after many, many years. I distinguished between the attitudes of the inhabitants of the town doomed—with its inhabitants—to destruction, and the exception to them of the attitude of the old woman not under the spell of the misty-minded old men who gambled away the time till fall of doom: all, the old woman excepted, opposed chance to certainty, in a state of continual destruction, while she refused to submerge the reality of her being in the inevitability of a coming catastrophe. She puts it on record, I wrote, "that there's more to this matter of how things go, disastrously, or non-disastrously, by the canon of events," than gambling accommodations to ill-fate and good-fate possibilities. Her position is neither one of cynicism nor naïve self-confidence. She holds on to the actuality of herself. This much, surely, readers of the story can deduce for themselves: it is all there. The increment of renewed thought-life, in terms of the story, that resulted from my attempt to clarify the terms for its appearance in that book ought to be shared with the readers of this one.

  The storyteller does not insist on completing the story . . . The story is, as it were, waiting for its 'things'—the persons, the characters—to become fully real and bring the story to a live end—give it its truth.

  Only four other stories, besides those on which I have been reporting, have been subjects of published comment by me in my later writing years. These are four that I chose for appearance in the magazine Chelsea, issue 35, published in early 1977, the entirety of which consisted of selected published and unpublished writings of mine. These four are the last four stories of Progress of Stories. The comment on 'In the Beginning' adds to it, in its buoyant disregard of the scantiness of its buoyant material, an outlining frame for all stories upon this great theme—as necessarily, in their unavoidable playfulness in some of their features, to be brought together in solemnizing correlation. I cannot think that this later view of the story would be other than helpful to readers of it, it having been helpful to me in my understanding of it.

  ON 'IN THE BEGINNING'

  What do you think of this little depiction of…? But first, you ought to be asking me "Beginning of what?" Having put the question for you, I shall answer it: the beginning of appreciation of the absolute inevitability, the necessity, indeed, of having, the obligation to have, even, a point of view about the entire setting of human existence, the 'where' of human life. It all calls for a point of view about itself. Who else will form one? Of course, once this forming of a point of view about 'the world' begins, there follows a growth of such points of view, in numbers of individual ones, and in enlargements of common tendencies of individual ones into great dominating ones that seem to settle, for people, a lot of uncertainty as to what the right point of view is. Of course, such simplifications settle nothing. The safest procedure is to start at the beginning of one's individual dealing with the inevitability, necessity, in the manner of our little Miss, and keep moving straight along on one's own line of decision as to what to think of it all until one's line meets up with other lines, all meeting up with one another. Such is the spirit of this little story's story of the world: avoid bent lines—either bending one's own or letting a line of many bends run itself along one's own a while and persuade one that one's own line ends in it. My story is not, you see, a simple fancy—or a simple anything. I was its author, but I am here writing in part at least as a fellow-reader. Telling you what I think of the story, reading it now. Then, off to our different lines of decision, about it, and all else— till the lines meet.

  The comment I wrote for the Chelsea collection on 'Eve's Side of It' may, to readers' first-thought, seem tedious excess of glossarial remarks. Why not leave the old story to the tender mercies of its readers' best understanding, and keep my second-thoughts to myself as belonging to the author's private problems of judgement of the effects of a piece of writing—or to Criticism? My first answer to such a question would be: "As I had to presume readers of these stories to be with me in the writing of them, the bond is a perpetually cemented one. I have not put this out of mind, come to regard the stories as if they existed in the vacuum of history: we are, by them, alive together—and I do not speak so, contemporarily, in mere literary sentiment."

  ON 'EVE'S SIDE OF IT'

  I should like to provide this little story with a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue would warn readers against trying to see the story as a feminist interpretation of the Creation followed by a feminist analysis of the historical situation—the life of men and women (according to feminist argument) up to the point where it ceases to be a mere course of changes that did not ever amount to any general, permanent, pervasive change in it, the original masculinist concomitants of the Creation circumstances remaining the great Flaw. The epilogue would remind readers that they had had this warning in the prologue—for they would have forgotten it, in the inveterate manner of readers of reading as they pleased, and not as they were supposed to read. Yet, apart from the difficulty of winning the reader's kindness to the author's intentions, such twin provisions would, indeed, probably arouse suspicion and induce belief that what one said the story was was not just what it was.

  The author is not supposed, according to The Rules (for the telling of stories) to put in an appearance in a story, or too near a story to remind of its having an author, as a First Cause operating from outside th
e story—unless it be a fictive appearance. But stories are not what they used to be. The rules are not what they used to be; or, rather, it has become intellectually fashionable to substitute a law of spontaneous narrative for The Rules, which outlaws sequential pertinence as unnaturally life-like. When something is intellectually fashionable, it commands, if not respect, fear: if you do not treat it as a deliverer from the oppression of now knowing better, you will be thought intellectually unfashionable.

  The tolerant attitude to confusion characteristic of these times is favorable to experimental procedure and thinking: there shapes itself, in the confusion, the premise, inspiring faith in experimentalism, that all procedure, and all thinking, from the beginning of thinking and procedure-devising, have been experimental, for want of the possibility of their being otherwise, and that the best to be effected is, therefore, that which is the most experimental. Thus is it that, in contemporary story-writing, the question, where the author is in a story, whether on the outside looking (and writing) in or on the inside one minute and on the outside in the next, or broken into two author personalities or more, that work in shifts directing the working personnel (the story-characters), is not necessarily asked at all.

  When I wrote this story, I believed in the reality of stories as description of some of the unknown content of life that answers honorably to the affectionate desire for knowledge of it all, under deprivations of various sorts that limit the quantity of such knowledge available, in measure proportionate to the desire. The belief has not left me. I hold the concern with making stories, having stories, using them for maintenance of the imaginative loyalty to the sense of life as of a busy fullness in its general forces as exemplified in the personal living of it, and a perfect correspondence to this fullness in its content of detail, to be important to human sanity, and general being of intellectual good heart. And the dissolution, in these times, of love-of-story, longing need of it for the exercise of desires not only of life-devoted mind but of the hopeful soul, in a characterless appetite for employments of the faculties of sympathetic attention in whiles of habitual idleness, I view as being of very potent general demoralizing effect upon the spiritual fortitude of human beings.