NEEDLING

I cannot concentrate on my short story. The theme is Abandonment & fear of Abandonment. Uhm... procrastination? Or an unconscious acting out of my theme ON the writing of the story itself? Or just laziness? Probably the later. I took a salt bath – hot water + rock salt – instead, one of my favorite activities, and read Chapter 4 of the gospel according to Mark. Why? you ask... I’ve recently bought the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley. The other day I read the story “The Gospel According to Mark” published in the collection “Brodie’s Report” (1970). I’d read the story a while back, and enjoyed rediscovering it recently.

Actually, today I started in the middle of Chapter 3, line 31, of the G.A.M.:

Jesus and His family. 31 His mother and his brothers arrived, and as they stood outside they sent word to him to come out. 32 The crowd seated around him told him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside asking for you.” 33 He said in reply, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And gazing around him at those seated in the circle he continued, “These are my mother and my brothers. 35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother to me.”

It’s been a while since I’ve opened this book – and I don’t remember my years of Catechism well enough to remember what was taught to me on Mark’s gospel – but it sure sounds as if some stories of immaculate virgins aren’t really followed through in this passage. Just a small problem in continuity? Maybe I’m one of those bad seeds J.C. talks about later, that’s been thrown in the thorns and in the weeds, and thus cannot grow (i.e. see the light.)

(Side-note: J.C. abandons his family for the sake of his disciples and his preaching...)

In my story, a young man feels abandoned by his girlfriend and asks a stranger for help, while a grown man, the stranger who was asked for help and couldn’t give it several years later, tells the story of the young man to another man. He doesn’t know why he’s telling the story because he feels the whole incident to be quite banal, which it was... at first, he just wants to make fun of the young man and have a funny story to tell, and that’s the principal reason for him telling the story to his friend... but then he realizes that he’s telling his friend his own story and how he feels abandoned himself... but he also realizes that he cannot say all these things to his friend without sounding trite or full of self pity... how do you describe a feeling of being abandoned by life, by whatever we call spirit and soul? So the man cannot finish his story and misses the point altogether. The story falls flat and he feels stupid. They have another beer.