eoe-0605.014 riding the jeweled elephant
(LOS ANGELES, POSTED JUNE 23, 2005)
(for some reason, the moon has been extra-bright as well as extra-full these last three mornings. partying for the solstice, i suspect. he wakes me up at 4am, shining in my window like a siren, like a song, like a searchlight, like a new ghost. i slide open the balcony door and his presence fills my room. i become radiant. we kiss. we sing old songs together. we talk deep into the day.)
i feel utterly captured by armistead maupin’s definition of himself as a writer and his writing process at the very beginning of the night listener:
i’m a fabulist by trade, so be forewarned: i’ve spent years looting my life for fiction. like a magpie, i save the shiny stuff and discard the rest; it’s of no use to me if it doesn’t serve the geometry of the story. this makes me less than reliable when it comes to the facts. ask jess carmody, who lived with me for ten years and observed this affliction firsthand. he even had a name for it—the jeweled elephant syndrome—after a story i once told him about an old friend from college.
my friend, whose name was boyd, joined the peace corps in the late sixties. he was sent to a village in india where he fell in love with a local girl and eventually proposed to her. but boyd’s blue-blooded parents back in south carolina were so aghast at the prospect of dusky grandchildren that they refused to attend the wedding in new delhi.
so boyd sent them photographs. the bride turned out to be an aristocrat of the highest caste, better bred by far than any member of boyd’s family. the couple had been wed in regal splendor, perched atop a pair of jeweled elephants. boyd’s parents, imprisoned in their middle-class snobbery, had managed to miss the social event of a lifetime.
i had told that story so often that jess knew it by heart. so when boyd came to town on business and met jess for the first time, jess was sure he had the perfect opener. “well,” he said brightly, “gabriel tells me you got married on an elephant.”
boyd just blinked at him in confusion.
i could already feel myself reddening. “you weren’t?”
“no,” boyd said with an uncomfortable laugh. “we were married in a presbyterian church.”
jess said nothing, but he gave me a heavy-lidded stare whose meaning i had long before learned to decipher: you are never to be trusted with the facts.
in my defense, the essence of the story had been true. boyd had indeed married an indian girl he had met in the peace corps, and she had proved to be quite rich. and boyd’s parents—who were, in fact, exceptionally stuffy—had always regretted that they’d missed the wedding.
i don’t know what to say about those elephants, except that i believed in them utterly. they certainly never felt like a lie. more like a kind of shorthand for a larger, less satisfying truth. most stories have holes in them that cry out for jeweled elephants. and my instinct, alas, is to supply them.
not only am i a member of the jeweled elephant school of fiction, i also belong to the jeweled elephant school of personal journalism.
the difference? one is truthful. the other is factual (if tailored). both involve storytelling--the mythologization of experience.
fiction is revisionist history. fact is metaphoric. the jeweled elephant is my spirit guide. he is the moon. there you have it.
unlike armistead maupin, i hunt the jeweled elephant. he is not a mistake, a misfiring instinct, an affliction or a flaw. he is my vision. he hunts me.
riding the jeweled elephant. rhythm. diction. image. pacing. hunger. simplicity. pain. depth. joy. reverence and irreverence. torment. whisperings. temporal irony and recursiveness.
the road. the journey. the city ahead.
the do-er and the thing done.
there is my writing process.
now you're wise to me.
namasté
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RESOURCES
text of eoe5-005 riding the jeweled elephant © 2005 by richard kearns. text from the night listener by armistead maupin, © 2000 isbn 0-06-017143-x.
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