In college, I knew a boy from classes who listed as his interests "beauty, and details, although they might be the same thing." Like most things about him, it struck me as pretentious. We took writing workshops together. His only details in fiction were words people never used, so I ignored everything he ever said. I've never forgotten those interests, though, driving past fields of cows and oil wells, hearing a woman complain about photographers, reading the secular accounts of miracles in The Fingerprints of God.
I've been listening to Bob Dylan lately, mostly his longer songs, his stories: Hurricane, Like a Rolling Stone, and Brownsville Girl. The latter is over eleven minutes. I've heard it a dozen times this week and still don't know what it's all about, except for the permanence of details--anecdotes. A western movie starring Gregory Peck resurfaces again and again in Dylan's mind. He loses a woman he loves. He encounters poverty, and gunfire, and all he remembers is Gregory Peck and the way people moved. I doubt the story was very original, but no one said innovation is haunting. I think maybe the ordinary things impact us the most. I think the flippant stories we're told every day are shaping and clinging to our minds, that the history of our lives is recorded in conversation.
A woman two apartments from me has shared many stories; her name is Sherry, and she talks with urgency, like the things she says can save me. She's borrowed from my kitchen a dollar, Sprite, phone call, and ketchup, and her mother moved out recently, and she picks through the dumpster for potted plants or shelves made of balsa wood. I think that's beautiful. I am trying to record the stories of others, their little life histories, and I suppose mine.
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