The House of Water - 1. Confession

Elderliness was wisdom until Science showed otherwise. The words of old men don’t mean what they used to, and for good reason. To be sure, we have seen much, but our tools of interpretation have dulled. Memory and fancy broke down the walls of their pens and mingle freely in our minds, at pasture, as it were. Cognitive ability peaks in the early twenties, claims Science. By thirty, the decline begins and everything soon goes to pot.

Story-telling is the real culprit, the real killer. Alas, you sigh, he has not retreated too far into senescence to answer my question after all. (Not your words. Pardon my paraphrase.) You are young, vigorous. You uphold a firm distinction between yourself and the things that drive you. You do not, as you put it, understand why I cannot die.

Because I am animated, is my answer. Animated: your generation would not think to ask—adjective or passive voice? I am not animated as in lively. You have seen me scowl at a bowl of cereal and dismiss a smiling nurse. You have seen me take ninety seconds to climb out of bed and call it a “good day.” No, I am not lively. But what if something were animating me? What if my body surrendered to entropy years ago, yet goes on driven by some other agent?

Story-telling, I say, is at work. We old folk spend our last years revisiting our lives in speech. But every telling of a tale changes it. One tells an original story only once. Every subsequent telling is not a telling of the original story, but a telling of the previous telling. Simulacra: copies of copies. The stories we tell are not the stories we lived.

And we tell our stories until our stories tell us. I cannot die because a story animates me, the most animating kind of story—a confession. If I sought immortality I could leave it untold, but that would be no kind of life, that would not be living. When most people imagine immortality, they imagine eternal youth. They do not imagine the story of a man who goes to a nursing home and, instead of dying there, watches it die.

Hocus-pocus nonsense, you say, the last plangencies of an old coot. You’re almost certainly right. But lend an ear to listen, or an eye (because this is a letter), or a heart (if that is the metaphor), to my story. You understand, I hope, why I cannot censor myself. You must read the unadulterated tale of a bridge and a house and some trees on a hill. What intrigue, you say, I can hardly contain myself! Alternatively, you swivel in a desk chair, you sigh and fix coffee for a long night of reading.

If nothing else, I hope to make you understand what a story does, what it makes possible.