“We are narrative beings,” said Margaret Atwood, an author I revere, at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival last spring. Along with food, shelter, and sex, one of our most basic needs is to hear and create story. Fortunately, stories are everywhere. Two stories got their hooks into me last week, one where I had to fill in the pieces and another already fashioned into a magical narrative.

The story with missing pieces is about the crying men. Dropping off a friend at her condo, I saw a man sitting on the low brick wall outside, hugging his knees to his chest and all-out bawling, his sobs audible through the closed car window. The man was youngish, in his twenties or thirties, and a bit rough-looking, his fair skin sun-weathered as if he lived on the street. Possibly homeless, possibly mentally ill. And most likely harmless, though I took normal urban precautions and drove a little up the street to let my friend off.

The next day, I heard wailing and moaning coming from outside my condo building. I looked out and saw a man lying on the ground right under my second-story window. He didn’t move, he just lay on his back and moaned, his legs bent at an angle that I associate with chalk drawings of corpses in police dramas. Was he ill? Should I go out and talk to him? But part of the crying men story is my sense of vulnerability as a small woman. I thought of calling the police, but worried that the last thing this guy needed was to get picked up by cops. Fortunately, my husband was home. He went out, talked to the man, and gave him a hand to help him up.  The man slurred and mumbled as if on drugs, but he was well enough to stand and walk down the street.

In our relentlessly upbeat culture, it’s rare to witness such public pain. I keep thinking about the men, hoping their lives will get better. Then there’s my storytelling impulse, which, like other fundamental drives, is not about compassion but about a hunger, in this case for meaning. The storyteller in me sees the appearance of two weeping men in two days in mythic terms, perhaps as a sign of a wounded masculine in a time of massive shifts in what it means to be male and female. Or maybe the story has to do with the wounds all of us carry coming to the surface. A psychic friend says we’re transitioning into the Age of Aquarius, and it will ultimately be great, but it’s going to be rocky getting there.

The other story that came my way was about mythic creatures – elephant seals, massive animals that can weigh as much as 500 pounds. A friend and I discovered in conversation that we had both visited the seal rookery at Piedras Blancas, on the central coast of California between Cambria and San Simeon (the site of Hearst’s Castle). She happened to be there one day when all of the female seals formed a circle around another female. There was a gush of blood from the encircled female, and then she gave birth. The community of females stayed in their protective circle until the birth was complete. Afterward, the gulls performed their task in the ecosystem and ate the blood and afterbirth.

I heard about the elephant seal birth in between seeing the first and second crying man, as if the author of the life-book I was reading last week wanted me to connect them. Thinking of the two stories as related chapters, it strikes me that the seals instinctively know what to do when a member of their community is weak and in need of protection. In our human community, it’s more complicated.

What stories are appearing in your life? How do you use narrative to make meaning?

 

Tags: elephant seals, myth, narrative, storytelling

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 29th, 2013 at 10:00 pm and is filed under The Writing Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.