Craft Thoughts: Carrier Bags and Primordial Soup
In the beginning there was no hero.
In the beginning, life rippled along the hot and murky shores of a wet and rocky world, alone.
Maybe there was divine intervention, a hand at play, I’m not here to argue against it, but first there was inert earth. Then, suddenly life in one cell. The first glimpse of infinity. Something very, very small and it got bigger. One cell, then later, later, two.
All the other bits, the bits about fighting for our survival, of nature red in tooth and claw, those were later stories, added for plot. The first one is a tide pool that couldn’t go anywhere, but it couldn’t be still either. The heat of the sun, of the rocks and salt and minerals of that ancient ocean pulled back and forth in the waves of a closer moon that waxed and waned. The primordial pot is stirred and something new is born.
The smallest thing in the universe and the most important.
Can’t you feel the primordial soup gurgling in your belly still? Do you not hear the call of the ocean waves? Life formed first in the shallow tide pool, the majesty of accidents taking shape. Every action a consequence of that first day and every gasp and attempt to grasp at staying alive since.
Here is the story of everything and it went not in a line, but stirred, swirled, pushed and pulled, rose, fell, retreated. It bubbled. It popped. It did not proceed according to precedent. It faltered. It failed. It went on.
Here is how we first learn to tell a story. First this, then that. Followed by the other. We are told that this is how life proceeds. We are told that with enough of these steps, first rising in action to the climax and release and then falling to a new statis, the plot will be finished, our characters transformed. This is the hero’s journey.
I have yet to see it this way. Mostly I meander, I return. I tread over and over the same paths. I have a new thought and when I have written it down, I see that I had the same thought three notebooks ago. The world turns, I am forced along with it. I am under no illusions that I will be the hero.
Ursula K. Le Guin describes her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” in an essay of the same name. She has curbed the idea, in part, from the “Carrier Bag Theory of Culture” which posits that the first cultural invention, that skill and moment that distinguishes us as the animals that make, is a receptacle, a bag or a bottle to hold what cannot be eaten right away or carried in the hands. It is the container that makes us what we are, that makes room for civilization.
This other thing we have been given, the hard bone, the stick, the spear, is only one kind of story. It was written for and about the Hero, it is the killer story, but there are so many others, and they could take so many shapes.
Beloved, award-wining, irascible Le Guin reminds us that, “A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” In her bag there will be room for all the things that delight and sustain us, that confuse or complicate us.
It can be populated not with heroes, but with people.
In her bag, just like in the first tide pool that held the ingredients, we will have our room to spiral, to tread. To begin without ending and end without beginning. When we unburden the narrative from the linear constraints of progress, we can leave ourselves to wander in and out, to sit and watch the sky change. We can sit by the fire, be allowed to linger.
You don’t have to throw that spear away though, it’s good for stirring the pot.
