ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN

When I was in the English department at Penn State as a student in the early 90s all my writing teachers were into John Barth, but I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand why someone would want to write about writing while writing something else; it seemed academic, clinical, too much science.

But years later in Seattle I saw a first-edition hardcopy of Lost in the Funhouse and thought maybe it was time. It wasn’t.

It sat on my bookcase until earlier this week and when I picked it up something fell out, the sales receipt from a bookstore featuring first editions, probably out of business now — the date in elegant, handwritten script read 4 Dec 2001. The 1 was written Euro style with a serif at the top extending left, like an ear hanging nearly all the way to the ground that looked like a sagging 7, but wasn’t.

I tried to remember buying it from the date, imagining where I was and why I would have picked it up then, an impulse buy on my lunch hour when I was working at Starbucks and would take the shuttle to Pioneer Square and wander over lunch sometimes, to day-dream.

Dawn asked what I thought meta meant recently, and I said it’s the writer stepping out of the story to comment on the story’s creation, as a way of showing how the story of creating the story is as much its own story, and how the two are connected.

With social media and technology what they are, metafiction has become more a part of our lives than ever: we’re constantly stepping outside the frame to capture ourselves in it, and the story of how we document our lives is as much a story now as the story itself. But as we step outside the frame, we’re straddling two worlds and cease to exist fully in either: like tourists on an Alaskan whale-watching cruise with our cameras out trying to catch the breaching whales as proof we were there, we miss the reality just beyond our lens and it makes me wonder, were we even there at all?

The sales receipt was a piece of art, as far as receipts go: it had old-style script with the store’s address and an illustration of the historic building where it was located, although I couldn’t tell for sure, I couldn’t recall if it was my memory that made it so, or just my imagination. Ten dollars was a lot to spend back then on a book I felt I should read, but wound up taking 15 years to open.

Because it was post-9/11, I was able to place things pretty well: being in corporate communications at the time, that was our focus for many weeks, for all the associated fall-out from the New York stores, for the company trying to show its support in myriad ways to workers and customers, the obvious fear of what it would do to the economy, followed by fears of anthrax, everyone realizing they’d never feel the same when a jet passed; the act was larger than itself, a symbol.

I was supposed to fly back east for a fraternity reunion but deep-down didn’t want to, and felt I had an excuse now, I wasn’t up for flying. Instead, I used one of my personal days for a three-day weekend to climb in the Olympics with a new friend I’d met at work named Brad who also climbed, but didn’t talk about it as much as I did, yet had done a lot more.

It was the trip I messed up my shoulder getting caught in slide alder and Devil’s Club in an avalanche run-out bushwhacking with my ax when I probably didn’t need it; my arm got caught in some branches and I was pissed off and tired, and my body twisted forward with the weight of the pack but my shoulder and ax stayed fixed in the branches, and it’s never been the same since. The body takes a lot longer to forget these things than the mind.

Because it was early November we didn’t have much light, but there was already a lot of snow, and not another soul in sight. And we’d gotten a late start, so Brad didn’t waste any time once we got to the trailhead: we were going for two summit attempts Alpine style of adjacent peaks with ominous names like Gunsight Pass, Mount Mystery, Mount Deception, but got neither, largely because of me — Brad disappearing up the switchbacks as we got higher, the dark coming on and the snowpack getting thicker, and I kept thinking about a warning at the trailhead of a cougar sighting, how the drawing of it looked like a Wanted sign for a Western outlaw, and how quiet it was crunching through the snow — and by the time I caught up with Brad it was an hour or so later and he was sitting on his backpack smoking, looking like he’d been waiting there for me for some time.

Dawn and I talked about Brecht, the fact the actors would remind the audience it’s a play they’re seeing, not real, and why he did that: he didn’t want the audience to give over to their emotions and forget their reason; that’s what they’d done with Hitler; Brecht wanted to separate the experience of theater so it could be enjoyed from a distance: the actors would hold up signs explaining the plot before the scenes started; often there was no ‘fourth wall’ separating stage from audience.

The book is hard to read and I’m not sure I like it. It’s one of those books where sometimes I’ll set it down to talk to my kids and when I come back to it I’ve lost my place but it doesn’t seem to matter, I was lost from the start.

And maybe that’s the point, that’s OK with Barth: the very first chapter has a tear-out to make your own Möbius strip, he’s making his point right there, it’s non-linear, non-orientable, it bends but still stays connected.

I don’t remember buying the book, though must have. Like so many scenes from my past that present themselves as real but lack the full context, the story, they’re like fragments of a dream where it’s hard to tell what’s real or imagined, and why we even bother distinguishing between the two.

Bertolt Brecht Platz, Berliner Ensemble (February, 2016)

Categories: musings, writing

Tags: Brecht, Climbing, creative nonfiction, existentialism, John Barth, Memoir, meta, metafiction, metaphor, metaphysical, pacific northwest, postmodern literature, Seattle, theater, writing technique