I cannot stop listening to the album “AIMS” by Vienna Teng. Its chiming, restless nature has me obsessed—every song is a plea, or some kind of entreaty, whether it’s a shout or a murmur. I’ve even introduced it to my husband, who also loves it. We’ve listened to it on long car rides, we’ve listened to it driving to the grocery store. I’ve put it on in various forms while home. I wake up with songs from it stuck in my head already. I even play it while I’m writing.
I can’t say what it is about the album on a technical level, only a metaphorical one. I don’t have the ability to dissect music like I do a short story, or a poem—I don’t know what instrument makes what noise, nor do I know much about the theory of it. I think there’s a certain joy in that—there’s something about being able to like something without knowing how it works.
This is not how I typically live my life. Once I have something in my claws, I eat it down to the bone, like a chicken wing, even if it means encountering gristle. I am exhaustive with things that I’m curious about. I want to know everything about everything. I collect knowledge like some people collect Hummel figurines, and my memory is a chamber with a one-way door. I peer in at the knowledge through a one-way mirror. It’s getting crowded in there.
But sometimes there’s just things I don’t know anything about. For example: math. I know a lot about theoretical math and the implications of some mathematics, but when it comes to actual numbers? I’m an idiot. I am sometimes convinced that my brain is plagued by dyscalculia, or “number dyslexia,” as a friend of mine once erroneously put it.
There are other things I know virtually nothing about. Electrical engineering, for one. Construction, for another. Hunting. Fishing. Asian language and culture. Baking. Oh my god—the one time I tried to bake a pound cake (supposedly the easiest thing there is to bake), it came out wrong. My husband looked at me strangely when I presented the final product: it was leaking butter from the bottom, and completely raw in the middle of the cake. I can kind of bake cookies, though I prefer to just eat the dough. Cooking, another one! I can cook—following a recipe is generally easy for me, but coming up with my own recipes? Forget about it. The only things I know about food really have come about as a by-product from my day job at the supermarket.
When I was a kid, I used to write reports on things that I was curious about, voluntarily. My poor mother, besieged by pages and pages of information on wormholes, black holes, event horizons, singularities—I would have benefited, I think, from a more modern approach to education, something more along the lines of the Montessori philosophy, wherein I would have been able to direct my own learning, explore different avenues of my own volition, rather than sat down and told I needed to read something. I know most kids probably wouldn’t choose to read 1984 on their own, or any other work of classic literature, so there is something to be said for a curriculum, though? Not sure how I feel about that.
What I do know is that I wrote those reports because I wanted to investigate something, but also because I wanted to communicate what I had learned—and wanted to pass it on to someone else.
Nowadays, when it comes to writing, it’s as though I have realized there is a way to communicate feeling as well as facts. It’s a bit a trickier, though. You have to marry these feelings to a story, to keep the audience interested, otherwise they have no interest in your writing. And whereas I might be a good writer, I’m a terrible storyteller.
When I tell someone about my day, I tell things out of order. I narrate odd elements, like the buttons on someone’s jean jacket, the same jean jacket that they were wearing when I had a fight with them. To me, these elements seem important—to others, they might seem useless. Someone might roll their eyes and impatiently ask me to “get on with the story” or “get to the point.” It’s because this is how I live my life, like a magpie, constantly gathering bits of information (even if they seem useless now, maybe they won’t be later) and storing them up.
This, too, is how my stories write. Extraneous images, details, make their way into these fictional realms, and sometimes clog the story as I go—sometimes making the telling positively sclerotic, where I lose my way entirely and the story dies a hideous death, unfinished forever. Lately, I have been trying to pare back these details, to find the story beneath, but this feels anathema to me. So maybe I’ll lean back the other way.
Or maybe I need to investigate what a “story” is. Maybe write a report on what a “story” is. Or maybe—just maybe—I need to lower my standards for what I think a “story” should be, and allow myself to explore what it could be?