Creation Myth: Such Are The Days Of Our Lives

As many of you know, I recently spent a week at Chautauqua Institution (you should Google it--it's pretty amazing), my little slice o' heaven here on Earth.  I always try to go during "Literary Week," during which Roger Rosenblatt invites 5 of his friends from the writerly world to be interviewed for an hour in front of several thousand people, after which they also read from their work.  Hey--I can't let all of my schoolin' go completely to waste.

This year's group was comprised of Tom Brokaw, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, Jules Feiffer (I didn't even know he was still alive, and he was fabulous, especially given that he's 85), and Paul Muldoon.  During the conversation with "Liz," as Rosenblatt called Ms. Strout, the question arose, since writers, consciously or no, draw so much material from the "facts" of their lives, how many of those "facts" may be wrong.   How much of what we remember about our lives, how much of what we know to be true, really happened that way or, indeed, happened at all?

What we remember of our lives may, in fact, be fiction:  Life as a novel, if you will.  And a novel whose main character may be based on fact, but perhaps fictionalized my the author, if in fact we're writing our lives ourselves. It seems a little weird to think of it that way, but I've certainly experienced it.  As I sit here writing this I can look up at a picture from the Bellows Falls Times of me sitting on the arm of my great-grandmother's chair.  The photo appeared in early August of 1961, as I was about to observe my 8th birthday and Arabelle her 94th, both on August 12.  Until I dredged that clipping up a few years ago, I would have sworn to, and indeed marveled at to classes I taught, the fact that I used to sit on the lap of someone born during the Civil War.  Close, but no cigar, General Grant: turns out she was born in 1867, then, not 1865, as I had always remembered it.

There's no great harm in that mistake, of course, but it does make me pause to consider what other things I "know" that may be wrong.  Mis-remembering the year my great-grandmother was born doesn't change the essential truth of my life in any material way that I can see, but are  there other facts or stories that do?  I've personally, seen and read in ostensibly non-fiction articles, instances when other people have very different recollections of events than I, or others who were there, do.

But we all know, don't we, that there's a difference between truth and Truth?  That's what makes novels, "fiction," superior to me to nonfiction, to "the facts."  Truth is made up of so much more than fact:  it's comprised of facts, or at least of "truthy" things, as Colbert might have it, but also our processing of those facts, mixed with emotions, sensations, feelings, intuition.  The result of such processing, ideally, leads us to an understanding of the great commonality which grows out of particular experience and unites us all in our collective humanity.  For instance, the fact that I misspoke the year of my great-grandmother's birth does not take away from the larger point I was trying to make, that the past is NOT way back there, but right here, still affecting all of us.  Often, commonly-accepted facts actually get in the way of the Truth, as we see again and again, perhaps most glaringly in the fairly recent past in the justification for invading Iraq.  As Thoreau said, "Read not The Times, read the Eternities."

Anyway, among the songs it's a fact that I'll be choosing from:

A Bedtime Story                                                                  Danny O'Keefe
Boomer's Story                                                                    Ry Cooder
Every Picture Tells A Story                                                 Rod Stewart
Farewell To Storyville                                                         Danny O'Keefe
Love Story                                                                           Harry Nilsson
Love Story                                                                           Stephen Stills
Philadelphia Story                                                               Wild Colonials
The Story                                                                             Brandi Carlisle
The Story In Your Eyes                                                       Moody Blues
A Story Within A Story                                                       Pat Metheny
This Story In Me                                                                  Tanita Tikaram
What's The Story?                                                                Grant Geissman
Deeper Truth                                                                        Ben Arnold
Give Me Some Truth                                                           John Lennon
We Meet, We Part, We Remember                                      The Holmes Brothers
All Of Your Stories                                                              Jesse Winchester
Five Short Stories                                                                Weather Report
Hand Me Down All Stories                                                 Robin Holcomb
Hard Luck Stories                                                                Richard & Linda Thompson
New York Stories                                                                Grant Geissman
Short Stories                                                                        Leo Kottke
(Someone's Been) Telling You Stories                                Dan Fogelberg
Stories We Could Tell                                                          John Sebastian
Stories Don't End                                                                 Dawes
Ugly Stories                                                                         Josh Rouse
Wond'rous Stories                                                                Yes
Low On Memory                                                                  Mike Andrews
Memory Motel                                                                     Rolling Septuagenarians
Memories                                                                             Van Morrison

Hope you can join me, and we can compare notes afterward about what really happened, on Tuesday from noon til two on the fabulous WOOL FM, 91.5, or at  www.wool.fm on the webs.

But if I'm not me, who am?