Building Common Ground

New fiction writers are counseled never to attempt to write something "universal," but to write in the most detailed particulars, because in the alchemy of the fictional process, it is in the accumulation and seamless weaving of thousands of intimate and detailed individual particulars that we grasp the universal. A novel about Everyman doing Everything with Everyone located Everywhere will resonate with No One. Whereas a novel about Betul, born in Turkey, immigrant to a Toronto suburb in the 1990s, daughter of a divorced mother, going to the grotty Baskin Robins on the next street over on summer evenings with her big sister and buying her favourite chocolate mint ice cream in the waffle cone, talking about her dreams of becoming a famous singer one day--somehow, in these unique particulars, we are able to connect with her and discover an ineffable and incommunicable universality.

Something about the recent discussion at Bub and Pie's about particulars vs. universals didn't sit quite right. And that's why. Universals are discovered only in our particulars.

~~~~~

Grief

On the weekend, before Frances was here, I wandered through the shopping centre across the street from my new apartment. I was looking for a butter dish, and also for a refresher on the physics of Star Trek's transporter, so I stopped in at the Chapters. I checked out the magazines--no new Bitch yet--found a book by Brian Greene in the science section with what I was looking for, and browsed the apartment shelves in the interior decorating section. I picked up, and put down again, a book called The Other Woman (though I suspect I'll be picking it up again, at some point). On my way out my attention was caught by a table full of goofy gift titles. 38 Uses for a Husband, said one.

~~~~~

We'd like for there to be Universals. Universal Values. Universal Desires. Some Universal Bedrock of Human Thought, something we all believe or want. I don't believe it exists. I believe that the Human Universal is simply this: we all believe, we all want. The particulars of what and when and why are infinite. Even the most seemingly obvious has exceptions which make its use as a general rule dangerous, and potentially harmful.

I knew a woman online, once, who was a slave. Or she called herself one, at any rate. She identified as a "radical submissive" and believed she could only be happy if she were owned by someone who told her what to do. She did not want independence or freedom.

Whatever you think might have led to that, and whatever you (or I) may think of someone calling themselves in all seriousness a slave as a lifestyle choice (something most slaves, obviously, do not share), one could not know her or know of her work in writing about this experience and her community-building among other self-identified radical submissives, and believe that the desire for freedom is a human universal. There are humans who do not want to be free. There are humans who will break the law to avoid it.

~~~~~

Joy

Frances and I spent a few hours in the lake while at Ann's cottage. I had my camera, of course, and took almost two hundred pictures of her throwing stones in the water, picking "bulrushes" (they weren't bulrushes, but that's what she called them and I don't know what they are), and looking at fishes. I'd sit on the dock, then walk over the alternately sandy and mushy bottom to a set of two old wooden boxes piled haphazardly, one on the other, and sit on that. It was barely too high for Frances to reach. "I want to sit with you, Mummy," she'd say, and I'd lift her and place her beside me, and wrap an arm around her, lean in to kiss her sun-warmed hair, once neatly braided but quickly unraveling.

"Are you having fun?" I'd ask.

"Yeah."

"Good. I'm so glad we came. I'm having a really good time, too."

She smelled like insect repellant and sunscreen, sand and muck, sunshine and water; her slight frame leaned in to me and I wished that we'd never have to move again.

~~~~~

Every proposed human universal will eventually break down in the face of human variability. We do not all see beauty in the same places. We do not all put the same value on human life. We do not all agree, even, on what human life is. We do not all love and cherish our families, wish to have children and see them grow old in safety and prosperity, and want an end to war and slaughter. We do not all want to form an intimate bond with a romantic partner that will last throughout life.

In fact, I'll offer my own take on the human universal just so someone can come along and poke a hole in it: Humans make meaning. What humans do that no other animal does is look for patterns and, where none can be found, invent them. We create and impose structures on our experiences from the smallest to the largest in order to derive and invent meanings that give significance and satisfaction to our lives. All of our arts can be defined this way, only the structures themselves differ: music imposes sounds and repetitions, literature imposes narrative arcs and plots, photography imposes framing and subject choice, painting imposes framing and technique, poetry imposes rhythm and sound and image. What they each have in common is the creation of a structure, a form, a box; and the placement of this structure on top of a human experience that allows us to derive meaning from that experience. Even religion can be placed in the same category: a much larger structure, a much larger box, placed on the whole of our lives and the entire world that allows us to create a meaning for everything that happens, to carry us from birth to death in one more-or-less-whole psychic piece.

Human beings look for meaning and, where it does not exist, we invent it. We tell stories about our days and lives to each other precisely to allow us to reorganize our memories of those experiences in a way that makes sense, that allows us to find or create meaning in it. The conclusions we come to, the meanings we find or make, are radically different; but we all do this.

"Aha," you ask; "But what about the nihilists?"

Good point. Is the denial of meaning just another structure, another box, or is it a true non-structure? I don't know.

~~~~~

Pain

"So you think it's a ... I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce it."

"Craniosynostosis. Yes." The geneticist shifted slightly in her seat. "I'm fairly certain. It would explain her unusual features and small size. Though I'm not sure what to make of the wide-open fontanelle."

"Doesn't that mean skull surgery?"

"Yes. Generally. You would get the blood test to confirm the diagnosis and then we would discuss surgery. It is just cosmetic, only for aesthetics. It would not be required for health reasons at all."

"All right." I made my goodbyes, strapped Frances back into her navy blue infant carrier and lugged it through the hospital hallways, out into the obscenely bright sunshine, into the parking garage, and snapped it into the back seat. I kissed her forehead and stared at her unusual features, the ones that seemed to me only to be the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. "OK, baby girl, we're going home."

I sat in the driver's seat, did up my seatbelt, put my head on the steering wheel, and sobbed.

A few weeks later I would assist a nurse in pinning her to a gurney while another nurse used an adult-sized syringe to draw a full vial of blood from her celery-stalk arm while she screamed. She was ten pounds by then, and about four months old. I kissed her cheek and told her it would be all right, I was there, right there, even though it was my hands holding her down.

~~~~~

Or I could tell you that the day I got the first postnatal misdiagnosis was the worst day of my life.

Which convinces you more of our sameness? Which better reflects our common experiences as mothers (for those of you who are mothers)?

There is nothing I can assume that you and I share; no experience, no value, no desire, no ideology, no belief, no passion, no need, no love, no hate, no fear. All I know that binds you and I is the experience of being human; what we share is value, desire, ideology, belief, passion, need, love, hate and fear themselves. What led to them, what we do with them, how we react with them, how we resolve them, will be different, nearly always.

How do we find that common ground? By sharing our particulars. If I can communicate my experience clearly enough, with enough detail, with enough particularity, then I can make you understand the love, hate, anger, fear, joy, grief, pleasure, desire, anticipation, or disappointment that resulted. Then we can know that no matter how different we are as individuals, no matter how different our particulars, our individual experiences, there is something underneath that is the same. This is the insight and the psychology that all of literature is built on. Minute detail upon minute detail is built up into a tapestry that is individual and universal at the same time.

~~~~~

Love

M was driving me home past my curfew. The winding upwards street was dark and quiet, and his small blue car struggled as it always did. A few houses from my guest-family's he pulled into a small parking area. We talked for a few minutes, I can't remember about what, then he said, "Ich liebe dich" (I love you). His face was tense and anxious.

"I love you too," I said, and his face opened up, he smiled--grinned. "Das kann Ich nicht glauben" (I can't believe it), he said, over and over, and kissed me. Over and over. It was considerably later before I unlocked the front door and walked quietly upstairs to bed.

~~~~~

My name is Andrea; I am a thirty-two year old, white, straight, formerly married mother of one gorgeous little dwarf girl who lives in Southern Ontario, Canada. I work in the environmental field for the federal civil service. I have been a type 1 diabetic for fifteen years, and have had asthma for ten. I'm a feminist, a witch, and an armchair anarchist. I'm tall and on the slim side of average. While my parents were born strictly blue-collar I myself had an upper-middle class upbringing. I like to know how to do things, so pick up hobbies from crocheting lace to boxing, cookie-baking to carpentry, scrapbooking to novel-writing. Reading and writing are my first loves. I'm a former fundamentalist.

Listed in this way, the particulars inspire no feeling of common ground (unless you share them). But this is not because they are too particular, or that there are too many particulars; it's because they are not particular enough. Not detailed and individual enough.

Where you and I can meet despite our differences is by sharing our differences. Where we can find what unites us is by describing what divides us. It's amazing, frankly, and fully befitting such a contradictory species: it is by sharing our particulars that we discover the universal.

Posted by Andrea at August 21, 2007 6:18 AM under The World

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