Finding the Root
by Ginny Fite
Several years ago while driving to the supermarket, a thought flashed through my mind with the speed of a ping pong ball passing through a vacuum: Our memories aren’t facts, they aren’t the truth, but just the story we tell ourselves about who we are.
I walked through the supermarket in a fog, thinking this idea through. Our memories aren’t time-stamped, although we feel they are because they’re organized to support our own ongoing narrative about ourselves. We invent this narrative from selected moments out of the continual barrage of sensory data around us. Memory is created by the magic wand of self needing to separate from the vast other.
And, like the two-year-old who suddenly says “I went on a train with grandma” months after the event, we need language to name the images we recall. The minute we name them, we are writing our own story. We piece that together with the stories other people tell us about ourselves. The ego is a patchwork of these stories, a fiction perhaps.
I tested this idea on several people. They looked at me oddly and stepped away. We cherish our memories. They are articles of faith we believe in. We’re sure they happened exactly the way we remember them. They’re the snapshots of our lives we keep in a mental scrapbook and string together in a vivid movie we watch without the help of any device. Our senses trigger them. A whiff of cucumbers, scallions, and sour cream, and my grandmother materializes in front of me, sitting at the kitchen table, eating her lunch, light from the window behind her making a halo of her white hair.
About a year ago, a handful of short stories in a first person voice began knocking on the door of my mind, insisting that I take them down. Prior to this moment, all my fiction was in the third person. I was working on a ghost story, deep into finding the characters, and didn’t want to stop, but the stories were insistent. After writing down four of them, I realized I was exploring the interplay between memory, identity, and narrative—my old idea.
The stories came in no particular order. Trusting that my brain had been working on these for years without me, I kept asking what’s next and a new story would show up until there were seventeen of them, of which “Finding the Square Root of Everything” was one.
There were days when I felt I was pulling my soul out through my nose. And then it stopped. I had the clay. Now, I had to make the pot—shaping, detailing, and refining to find the true shape of each one. Writing, I learned, is an incantation, a prayer that clears the mind and then story emerges as if it had always been there waiting for you. Like a memory you forgot.
I walked through the supermarket in a fog, thinking this idea through. Our memories aren’t time-stamped, although we feel they are because they’re organized to support our own ongoing narrative about ourselves. We invent this narrative from selected moments out of the continual barrage of sensory data around us. Memory is created by the magic wand of self needing to separate from the vast other.
And, like the two-year-old who suddenly says “I went on a train with grandma” months after the event, we need language to name the images we recall. The minute we name them, we are writing our own story. We piece that together with the stories other people tell us about ourselves. The ego is a patchwork of these stories, a fiction perhaps.
I tested this idea on several people. They looked at me oddly and stepped away. We cherish our memories. They are articles of faith we believe in. We’re sure they happened exactly the way we remember them. They’re the snapshots of our lives we keep in a mental scrapbook and string together in a vivid movie we watch without the help of any device. Our senses trigger them. A whiff of cucumbers, scallions, and sour cream, and my grandmother materializes in front of me, sitting at the kitchen table, eating her lunch, light from the window behind her making a halo of her white hair.
About a year ago, a handful of short stories in a first person voice began knocking on the door of my mind, insisting that I take them down. Prior to this moment, all my fiction was in the third person. I was working on a ghost story, deep into finding the characters, and didn’t want to stop, but the stories were insistent. After writing down four of them, I realized I was exploring the interplay between memory, identity, and narrative—my old idea.
The stories came in no particular order. Trusting that my brain had been working on these for years without me, I kept asking what’s next and a new story would show up until there were seventeen of them, of which “Finding the Square Root of Everything” was one.
There were days when I felt I was pulling my soul out through my nose. And then it stopped. I had the clay. Now, I had to make the pot—shaping, detailing, and refining to find the true shape of each one. Writing, I learned, is an incantation, a prayer that clears the mind and then story emerges as if it had always been there waiting for you. Like a memory you forgot.
Ginny Fite is the author of the Sam Lagarde mystery/thrillers Cromwell's Folly, No Good Deed Left Undone, and Lying, Cheating, & Occasionally Murder. Her chapbook of poems, The Last Thousand Years, was published by Loyola College. The collection of linked short stories, Stronger in Heaven, of which "Finding the Square Root of Everything" is part, was long-listed for the Santa Fe Writer's Project contest. Her degrees are from Rutgers University and Johns Hopkins University.
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