Repair Shop – A Central Problem of Life
Lisa Martin’s A Story Can Be Told About Pain is bookended with Shiloh’s voice — a researcher on the pine beetle working at a remote station in B.C. She begins, “Let me start by saying I have failed to do what I set out to do, which was to explain to myself a central problem of life: how something ruined might be restored, how something dead might be revived and saved from extinction — or, at the least, how one might begin the work of salvage.” This book, though, delves into the central problem of life by coming at it from many angles, piecing together, knitting, stories from all those around Shiloh. Our own story of pain includes the stories of so many others. And maybe that’s always some of the answer — that pain is the central part of every life. Looking at the pain of others explains your own pain in ways that endlessly looking inward cannot.
Near the end of the book, the character Madeleine ruminates: “Isn’t this just life? Always more to learn, no matter how much you’ve learned already, no matter how much work you’ve done.”
Well, there are reviews coming in on this novel, and I suspect there will be many more. Lisa’s interview with Grant Stovel on CKUA can be heard here.
My own review is that I’ve dog-eared about 50 pages. :) I read the first two thirds of the book very slowly. The language is very fine, and the characters seep into your dreams intermittently. Then yesterday, I sat on the deck in the sun and under the ship-like clouds which cast shade on the pages here and there, I read the last of it all in one sitting. It’s a big book in that it carries a lot, it holds. It asks a lot of those unanswerable questions about how we are the way we are, how grief and pain shape us, and shows us how we might map our own way through a life dotted with pain, with a gentler eye, with grace, even. Pain can never be understood as just one facet of a life.
On a personal note, ASCBTAP begins with Shiloh’s father dying in a small plane crash. My own dad had a piece of a propeller on his desk always, which I would pick up and put down often, as a child. It was from a plane crash that he survived, walking out of a forested area with the pilot. This shard always seemed a symbol of other possible existences. A place of imagination, the what if, of life.
So Lisa’s book might seem to be the opposite of a beach read or a summer read, but it’s actually perfect for this season. You can dog-ear the pages, underline the sentences imbued with experience and wisdom and poetry. You can overlay your own map of pain and grief onto this one. You might find it healing. I did.
I’ve written fairly recently about Lisa’s academic work here. And yes, we go out for drinks about once a month along with the wonderful Kate Boorman. So perhaps I’m biased when I tell you this is a “must read.” But also, it just is. So.
On a bit of a tangent, I’ve always liked the word pain. I type it a lot because of the word painting. We all know what pain means and feels like. The etymology of the word isn’t surprising. The word paint comes from the root “peig — to cut, mark by incision.” And the verb, paint is interesting to think about:
mid-13c., peinten, "represent (someone or something) in paint;" c. 1300, "decorate (something or someone) with drawings or pictures;" early 14c., "put color or stain on the surface of; coat or cover with a color or colors;" from Old French peintier "to paint," from peint, past participle of peindre "to paint," from Latin pingere "to paint, represent in a picture, stain; embroider, tattoo.”
Anyway, all of our stories have pain points, moments that come alive as images, perhaps. We always joke in my small family that you don’t get a painting without pain.
When I think about telling stories, I always refer to Anne Bogart. She says:
“I believe that how I describe my life matters not only to my own experience but also to the experiences of others. What is the story I am telling? Do I choose to say, “My life sucks?” Do I choose to say, “Life is great?” Or do I swing jaggedly from one to another? The choice — if I am lucky, rigorous, and attentive, enough — is mine. But in order to “wright” a good narrative, I first need to create the kind of ego that can create one.”
Maybe the choice isn’t so much to say my life is great or it sucks, but the choice is to be rigorous and attentive. To say, I’m going to look at all of this material and handle it with love and care and just go on trying to create the conditions that hold all of who you are. And this is an ongoing affair, the creating of conditions, requiring a wild and gentle imagination, a rigorous tenacious capacity for love of who we are and who others are, too.
Anyway, don’t you love a book that gets you thinking about the deep stuff of life, the small profound bits, the strands and rivers that run through us all?
The themes of damage and repair in Lisa's book resonated for me, given my current manuscript in progress titled, Repair Manual for the Soul. So I’ll end with one last quotation from A Story Can be Told About Pain:
“When a landscape is damaged, it repairs itself over time in more or less predictable ways. If there is a fire, a year later the understory starts to grow up again. The forest floor fills with fireweed, paintbrush, goldenrod.
Which species grow depends on conditions, but something always grows.
You can count on that being true.”
