Synecdoche

The probable genesis of the association came from editorial focus placed on Brian Fagan's emerging work on the emergence and scope of the ancient people, the Cro-Magnon, some of whose remains were found in an excavation for a railroad station on southern France. While walking Sally in the upper reaches of Hale Park, you come upon the sight of a group of ladies taking their ease, sitting atop the rock fence, refreshing themselves with bottles of Avian water. Your thoughts go back thirty thousand odd years to a group of Cro-Magnon women, drinking water from a sewn animal skin, having worked harvesting nuts or berries in the perpetual search for food, perhaps a giggle or two, a gossip or two, but also some valid information about where to find more nuts or which mushrooms to avoid, in other words something of life enhancing information. Later, they'll go home to their family group and hear tales from the men about migrating herds to follow and possible sources of rocks that can be chipped into scraping tools or flaked off for spear and arrow points.

With no written language, interconnectedness was a major way of passing along the culture of survival. Hearing elders talk of creation myth and stories of hunting and travel also passed along the basics of human and animal behavior. Make no mistake about it, our ancestors, even without a written language, had an enormous amount of information to carry round with them, share with others, and assess. We did not get to where we are on the backs of uninformed people. It may at times seem to us that we did, but this is a cynical illusion; we got where we are because we followed the ones who knew and felt and told stories.

It seems almost like no thing at all for you to be thinking that the women you saw in Hale Park could return home or some wi-fi hot spot to Google for information or check show time for a film, or catch a streaming video of the most recent debate. They could also get recipes, order take-out food, or book a reservation at some restaurants while their husbands or boyfriends could check for football or soccer scores, check the market (such as it is now), or catch streaming reports of CNN. They could engage in checking out blogs, the major point so far being the relative ease to connect with and exchange cultural, scientific, or spiritual information with individuals they know only by sign-in names, individuals they may have never seen but in some ways know as well as some of their real-time friends and acquaintances.

We have come some distance from merely passing information about places to camp, tide charts, herd migration, fishing information, and bird migration. We have gone from which animals are easiest to domesticate to bragging now about how many miles per gallon our hybrid or smaller zoomer get.

We have moved from information to cautionary tale--old Fred, he ate one of those and was toast in fifteen minutes--to admonishment--mind, you need to let your yak have some water once in a while, or, be careful when hunting the woolly mammoth because they can kill you with those horns--to accounts of exploits, technical advances, and how to connect spiritually with the world about you.

From all this information, there were men and women who found ways to weave the information in narratives that not only informed, they engrossed, entertained, made the hearer feel something special, indeed, made the hearer feel special. From the past came the then equivalent of Horatio Alger success stories in the form of ways one of the ladies took some splinters from an elk bone and fashioned from them needles which she used to stitch hides together for clothing or for shelter. From the past came the forbears of those among us who are taggers, brash teenage artists who left signs of their clans or family totems painted or etched on rocks for all who passed by to see.

We story tellers got to be who we are through a bumpy, precipitous road in which we may have been ridiculed or ignored until our predictions, our depictions of the events about us came to be seen as possessing truth, even for trying to define that most abstract of traits, truth. We are exaggerators, transgressors, transducers, betrayers, prophets. We even brought in stories from other groups, other tribes, other languages. Herodotus is often credited with being one of the first if not the first historian. Forget Epictetus then, if you believe that. Forget also the men and women lost to us who told the stories that passed from camp fire to camp fire across the ages and continents before there was thought of writing down or incising or inscribing words and symbols on what passed for paper.

This is not meant to be a story or a definition, rather a call to accounting among the us of the tribe, the storytellers. What do we bring to the story that helps it live. What do we bring to emotional information that makes it as stunningly beautiful and respectful as the drawings of animals found on rocks and walls and incised on remnants of bone and, later, on shards of pottery? How can we possibly match those sweeping, evocative lines of red ocher and possibly even animal blood that join with the charcoal and soot compounds making up the artist's view in the drawings and carvings that remain from those days. Whose hands and words from the past do we touch when we take up a story from the past and make of it something other, something of us?

Heresy is the introduction of change or challenge to an established order of belief. In order to be successful and memorable, writers, story tellers need to present their vision with the awareness that persons they might not even know or ever see will suffer what we think of as hurt feelings or disappointment or possibly even outrage from said vision, simultaneous with other persons they might not even know or will ever see find inspiration and energy from exposure to said change or challenge.

To name only two within our midst, Margaret Atwood and Eric Blair aka George Orwell, she with The Handmaid's Tale, he with 1984, hurt feelings, caused outrage. Each author set forth in story form a cautionary tale of what we could become if we have not already become so. There are those in our midst who have given us Babar, the Elephant, as well as Lyra Belacqua, each a delight to many but similarly a threat to others.

Some days back, you wrote of the domino theory and the notion of story being a series of triggered events, consequential movement to or away from something or someone. Similarly, with this you intend to cautionary tale that advises the author what to do if the story does not progress, seems to stop of its own accord.

Move the heresies closer together.

You are a storyteller, not an appeaser.

What question will you pose today? What rug will you grip by its edges and tug today? What established system will you describe today?

Golden Oldies

There is a restaurant at the corner of State and Valerio, built about an impressive ficus macrophelia. In its current incarnation, the restaurant is known as IHOP, which decodes to International House of Pancakes. Native Santa Barbarans and those of us who carpet-bagged it in back in the good old days remember it as The Blue Onion. The food was good then.


If this were the estimable Harpers' Magazine feature, Index, I would have the percentages at hand, as in percentage of Santa Barbara population over the age of fifty who have had one or more joints replaced by the tall, elegant John Gainor, M.D. Indeed, I would be a part of the percentages. Ah, times change. During my callow youth in Los Angeles, a cosmetic plastic surgeon built a name from rebuilding the noses of young ladies. Most males of my contemporaries, to their credit, were looking at other parts on young women; a group of us were looking for and finding significant lack of bump in the bridge of the nose or an overall slenderness that gave us to conclude that there went a Newman nose. Now we see the effect of John Gainor. Even as I made this observation at coffee this morning, Steve Beisner, editor of the Inkbyte blog, flexed his right arm. Shoulder, bicycle accident, he said, mimicking Vladimir Nabokov's description of the death of Lolita's mother (picnic, lightning). In my Saturday workshop, Bruce Paine has a Gainor hip, and that splendid actress, Christine, has a Gainor knee.


Hardly anyone outside Santa Barbara knows about ABC-Clio, which is short form for American Bibliographical Center, Clio Press. Clio of course is the muse of history. Part but not the entire reason I no longer work for ABC-Clio is related to the fact that hardly anyone outside Santa Barbara knows about it, but that is another matter, a long, perhaps rancorous matter, off the subject of my observation that it sometimes seems that everyone in Santa Barbara except persons in the real estate profession has at some time or other worked for ABC-Clio. When the discovery is made, there is a moment of pause, a moment of reflection, a moment of wondering. Admission of having worked for ABC-Clio is like admitting to having been married once or perhaps even twice before, or if that comparison doesn't work, of having been a conscientious objector while the country was/is at war. ABC-Clio is a perfectly reputable publishing venture, and it has published some remarkable things that librarians, academicians, scholars would find useful and admiral. Like any publishing venture, it attracted quirky individuals such as myself to work there and rise up the Peter-Principle ladder; as well it brought some notable authors as well as some quirky and downright disagreeable ones. But those are not the issues; the real issue is the number of persons who have been employed there, how long they stayed, and why they left. Although I have not worked there since being fired in 1980, the secretary to the President still sends emails in which she speaks of the atmosphere that permeated the halls, as though it had been sprayed from some room freshener. "Weren't those the times?" she asks. And one of my assistants, who left long before me, still remembers my birthday, and refers to "those remarkable days." I still see the man who hired me and who I replaced, when he took an early retirement, a widower now, owner of what appears to be a permanent hobble, but somehow radiant of an inner spine. "You lasted longer there than I thought you would," he remarked last year. Sometimes in the Y hot tub or on a late night run at Von's market, I see one of the librarians, who left in order to write books with a mystical bent. "You left your chakras wide open," he laughs the sound of one Zen laughing. And there is Tracy, whom I see every year at the Writers' Conference and who worked at ABC-Clio years after I had left. "I mentioned your name once," she reported, "and there was dead silence except for one man with a beard who has an office but is never seen in it."

Would ABC-Clio have worked anyplace but Santa Barbara? Perhaps there is an answer there, a metaphor, a throughline. How do you rationalize wearing a striped necktie with a hound's tooth jacket? the publisher once asked me. I have never in my life rationalized what necktie I wear, I replied, and that was the beginning of the end. My end at ABC-Clio.

You also qualify as someone with tenure in Santa Barbara is you remember the days when Mom's, the Italian restaurant near Cota and Union was actually a restaurant, not a boutique, and Mom actually prowled the kitchen, occasionally muttering things about Arnoldi's, the restaurant across the street with whom Mom's family had been feuding for some years. "How," Mom wanted to know, "can they call that--that mush--split pea soup?"

And there was a roller skating rink next to an equally defunct restaurant called Talk of the Town, and there was not only a greasy spoon diner on Coast Village Road called Gino's, but it had a lavish mural, depicting many of the locals. I came along a tad too late to be included on the mural, but there, riding an elephant bareback, was Helene Merchand, who indeed kept an elephant in the enclosed pasture across the street from what has become the fortress inhabited by Oprah.

One of the things that impresses you about Europe is the permanence of places and things. Some of out activities during WW II seemed to fly in the face of this permanence, but it was rather nice to be nudged just so by Brian Fagan and told, mind, you're stepping on Jane Austin, and when you asked a particular publican if, as the sign on an ancient ceiling beam advertised, Christopher Marlowe bunged his head at this spot, he smiled. "Probably not. But he might of."
Things are not so permanent in southern California nor the Central Coast, nor, for that matter, farther north, say San Francisco, where few of the locals remember Market Street's nickname, "The Slot."

All things are a flowing, sage Heraclitus says,
And a tawdry cheapness shall outlast our days...says Ezra Pound in Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.

Things do change. To remember some of them before the change is splendid; doing so helps impart atmosphere to text. It also serves as a reminder that you are in transition from one time to another, giving you pause to wonder if when persons hold the door open for you at, say, Peet's coffee and tea, they are doing so from politeness or recognition that you are in transition.

Having a memory of people and places is akin to walking around with a power stick of history.

L.A. is change incarnate; Santa Barbara is close behind; much of the British Museum is wired. If archaeologists move quickly enough, they can score some goodies at building sites. And you, with your power stick of history; you are memory, strolling into the wind.