“Since any human touch can change you.”

That’s a line from James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work. It  hit me like a ton of bricks who  had invited a ton of cinderblocks to the me-hitting party. The quote is on page 69 near the bottom of the page, housed in a paragraph about homosexuality, attitudes and fears about homosexuality in America, and masculinity. The first part of that line, “…simply involves a terror of human touch…” also struck me as being this immense and powerful thing.

We fear touch. In America, especially, this is true. We call it respecting personal space, though I know this is not true. I know it is not true because if it was, why would so many strange men maneuver themselves into my proverbial bubble and then call me a bitch when I tell them to back off. So it is not respecting personal space, or maybe it is, with people they deem worthy of it, with whom they do not try to assert dominance. Maybe that terror is justified for some.

Part of the American fear of being touched has to do with the space we occupy. Last year in one of my anthropology classes I interviewed a woman from Trinidad and she told me they didn’t have the personal space we do, part of it coming from the sense that they are trapped on that island together, that no matter where you go, everyone knows you and your family and has known you and your family for a long time. The United States is bigger and people pick up and move around it constantly. Here you have the option of distance from others, both emotionally and physically.

Human touch is basal. There were experiments conducted in the 40s where no one would ever touch the babies in the study to see what would happen to them if they grew up without touch. Not being touched changes you. It makes you hard. Being touched changes you too. And that’s the thing we fear. Any human touch means they have gotten close enough to hurt us, both physically and emotionally. We have a visceral reaction to touch.

I’ve always been attracted to the eccentrics of the world. I’ve always been fascinated, even infatuated, with the artists and the poets and the musicians, those who don’t take cues from established societal norms. I see these people as visionaries. Growing up in a small town of about 2,000 people, I didn’t get much exposure to these kinds of people. I knew they existed… I had read books by Jack Kerouac and Henry David Thoreau, I had seen films and heard music from the counterculture movement of the early 1960s, I had seen old pictures of family members in their prime and wondered why their compelling eccentricities had vanished. I had very few opportunities for first-hand exposure in my tiny town, but there were a few exceptions. Over the years I’ve had encounters with some incredibly inspiring people.. well… inspiring to me, as someone who has a deep affection for those who deviate from the norms. To others, these people may be viewed as lost souls. These are people who live in caves, people who actively practice Chinese medicine, people who write constant poetry. To me, these people ARE poetry. Poetry leaks out of their pores. They can’t help it. The way that they speak is rhythmic, frantic, prophetic, musical. One of the most influential of these eccentric visionaries, so far in my life, is a wild-haired man named Bob Israel. He’s one of the craziest people I’ve ever known, in the best way imaginable. I used to see him almost every day, roaming the streets in a way that seemed aimless, but for all I know, he could have had some greater purpose that far exceeded anyone else’s understanding. He probably did. He seemed to be in a deep meditative state while he was walking. He walked incredibly slow, slower than anyone else I’ve ever seen. It probably took him at least an hour to walk one block. At frequent intervals, he would suddenly stop walking and turn his head to the sky, dreamily pondering the clouds. Bob Israel played piano. That’s how he made enough money to live comfortably (sort of). I don’t remember how I met Bob Israel. I’ve known him since I was very young. He knew that I loved music, and he knew that I played music. Every time I ran into him on the street, he would talk to me about the beauty and the importance of music. He was overwhelmingly passionate. And his passion was overwhelmingly contagious. After our conversations, I would walk home, stealing constant glances at the clouds, humming and listening to the music of the world. To me, Bob Israel is the definitive eccentric artist. He doesn’t live according to anyone else’s standards. He spends his life inspiring those who are open to what he has to say. His life is poetic and passionate. It was Bob Israel that made me realize that I want to live the life of a passionate artist/poet/musician/writer. More than anything, I want to inspire others with the copious amounts of inspiration that I get from the world around me.

The cobblestone  and brick-laid roads were the first thing I noticed that gave me the feeling I was now participating in an adventure. They felt real, not like some easily distinguishable recreated town in Disneyland but a real tangibility felt in the chilled air and my disorientation. Tattoo parlors, record stores, and bars seemed to be the only establishments harboring life inside, apparently each with their own dress code. Google Maps seemed only to get me more lost in these hills, through damp alleys and sharp hairpin turns. Getting to the bus station was proving more difficult than my phone could communicate.

Had I been there in the daytime, the cold, consumer-industrial façade of this place would not have been able to hide under the cover of darkness; I would not have been so enchanted that my excitement drove me past my fear. (I would later come to see this town for what it was with its highway overpasses and immense interior shopping centers that actually served as named roads and a throughway for pedestrians.) Fortunately I was shielded from those concrete images and able to maintain my magical air and wide-eyed ardor.

“Do you know where the 538 bus comes?” I asked a unassociated (dissociated) string of locals, one after another as each one in the shuffling procession left me with no more than a shrug as they disappeared into a smoke cloud pluming from their own blue mouths.

I had made it, after navigating throngs of these northern denizens on one of the microcosmic road-malls with many quadruplets of suzzball teens, finally to the station. But I was too late and had missed the last and only bus to my country-road destination. In a moment of divine deliberation I was just able to board the second-best that would at least (or really, at most) take me halfway to where I needed to go.

I got off at the correct stop after more than a few moments of apprehensive uncertainty regarding my location. I knew not where I was, but my direction was clear: eight miles down the road. Boots were made for walking.

Winter time in England is the land of lonesome darkness, or just a four o’clock sunset, depending on your mood. Though it was only six-thirty, I might as well have been paused in a void of night. Down the road I walked, with its muddy banks and thorny trees with eyelevel branches waiting for a union. My dinky headlight set to flash when I saw the faraway country drivers careening over the hills of this hair-width country road. Otherwise: lost in the stillness, the darkness, the stars, the chills, and the thought. Found in the land unknown.

I didn’t do a particularly good job of writing a memory yesterday. Though the question “what can a story accomplish?” Has been making gears in my mind turn.

The way I grew up I feel that stories don’t really accomplish much of anything and if you want to serve humanity you pick up some other profession like a fire fighter or a doctor. However since I want to devote my life to story telling it would behoove me to develop a more positive attitude toward my craft. I deep down believe stories can have an almost (I don’t know why I wrote almost I mean actual) medicinal effect on people but I’m ashamed to admit it. I considered many film, writing and acting programs before finally choosing Evergreen. I chose Evergreen not because it would be the most prestigious but because I think it will make me a better person. Am I a better person since I started coming here(?) That’s debatable but I want to and I want to make something that will resonate with people.

Further thoughts as the future unfolds.

There is a feeling I get while out in the woods. The kind of feeling you get when you think someone’s watching you. It feels wrong. You move around, trying to shake off their gaze. Remove it from your skin.

I find myself out on these trails in the woods by my house, and every so often I’ll glance out of my peripherals, expecting my eyes to catch something. As my suspicions grow, so do my responses. My neck starts to twitch like it wants me to turn around. To make sure I’m alone. Whenever I stop and look off into a treeline, studying the decay and growth of the forest, my mind plays a trick. It imagines for a split second, an animal. Yet, animal sounds too domestic, too kind of a word for the things I picture. ‘Beast’ fits the conjurings my mind falls prey to.

Sometimes they’re wolves, watching me from a distant ridge. I can see the bow of their heads when they slow their pace. Stalking you with long, keen faces. Watching you with eyes which make you think their intelligence rivals your own; that out there in the woods, they would win. Sometimes it’s a bear on the pathway behind me; lumbering with a body made of muscle and hunger. Once, it was a mountain lion, shoulder blades hunched up into its back as it crouches. I know that it’s not real, but I still like to imagine.

It started when I was a kid. Some kind of goofy scare tactic. I played the game with myself for the same reason people watch horror movies: a part of me liked being scared. When I was young, I would imagine these frightening things and amp myself up. The pulse in my neck would leap faster and faster like a plucked string seconds before I would finally turn around to call my own bluff. They were products of an overactive imagination and one too many trips to the natural history museum.

These fear-fueled fantasies were child’s play, akin to a dark hallway at a friend’s house you had to navigate on your way to the bathroom. But the basis of those imaginings have grown with me as I’ve aged. I still like poking at my fears. Writing is one of the mediums that allows me to do that, and thus the reason for taking this program.

This memory of mine probably has little to do with the main project, but it is reason why I am here. When I was young (around the age of 3-4), my siblings and I love recreating scenes from mobies that we have watched. One of our favorite movies that we acted out was Jurassic Park, especially the opening scene involving the man falling from top of the cage and the velocirapter. We would recreate this scene by flipping over our toy chest, pretend the chest was the cage, one of us got to be the raptor, one was the the guy that got attack, and the third one got to yell “Shoot her! Shoot Her!” We would do this  over and over again, switching roles each time. Movies and television were an inspirational source for our imagination.

So when I was 5, I watched Toy Story 1 and really enjoyed it. I asked my dad how they made these Disney movies, they look like fun. My dad replied “With Animators”

“What do animators do?”

“They spend all day making drawings for the movie”

At this point I’ve already been drawing up a storm on whatever I can find. “Draw All day? I want to do that!” And from that day forth, I wanted to be an animator.  So here I am, finishing up my degree in animation and taking this class to further my skills in visual story telling.

I believe that insofar as a theory (or even just a term) is useful, it needs to be specific.

One manner of building a theory is by establishing a dichotomy, such as Baldwin does between “story” and “plot.” But he doesn’t really develop this. Plot “must prove a point” and “the aim of story is revelation.”

This is poetic and evocative—but ultimately mumbo jumbo. 

I don’t think it does anybody any good to make “story” a mystical, transcendent property of a pile of words or reel of images—some sort of greater spiritual whole hovering on the far side of the meager, merely functional parts.

A story is simply a sequence of events which pertain to a subject. This series of events is “plot” and plot makes no sense (to people) without a subject who (say) gets the crap beat out of them but ends up kissing the sheriff in the end. “Good” stories are measured not by how they conform to a tradition, or how firmly they resolve their issues—but by how powerfully they effect us, how they defy our expectations, elicit our passions, expand our ability to sympathize with the experience of others.

Now—there’s the story, and then there’s how the story is conveyed. This we can call “discourse” or the performance of the story. Here’s where we get into the poetics of telling and showing, the artful unveiling of events and intentions, the wide array of f-stops and backdrops and the clever use of corporate props.

These two things—story, and discourse—are the two major units of the storyteller’s craft. Both branch out into a huge-ass milieu of styles and tropes and genres (which are just recognizable constellations of said styles and tropes). 

I’m not saying that narrative (in the form of a .doc or a .mov) does not address the wide gamut of human experience, from the social to the personal. Narrative I believe is the most efficient means of conveying human experience.

I’m proposing that we can explain how it does this without resorting to ambiguous terms.

Being clear with our terms in no way limits our ability to study how exactly a story or movie effects us. In fact, I think ambiguous and poetic theory just muddies the waters; though I admit it can feel inspiring—but that’s a storyteller’s trick.

Baldwin, in the end, is telling us a story—more or less about story.

Here’s the first part of the story I’m working on this quarter.

The first thing to know about me, if I am to tell you this story, is that I’m the outcast of my family. Maybe not fully an outcast, but not fully part of the family either, not a red-headed stepchild, but a red-headed stepmother in a family where everyone else has black hair. I am the frivolous one, not stoic like the rest. I talk and make messes. I keep animals and make art; I write and sometimes tell secrets. I am not as fit and as perfect as they are. I like who I am and I’m glad that I am different but I also sometimes wish that I fit in. They make sure I know that I don’t, and I keep trying.

The Holidays are challenging for a lot of families, mine included. My family is large and not everyone is invited to everyone’s house. Divorce and children growing up has spread the family out a little. Thanksgiving means that each of my kids, and grandkids go visit and have several Thanksgiving Meals; Grandmother’s house early, Dads or parents, and finally ending with my house- Grandpa’s house-late evening.

But this year was an exception, the dinner circuit started with Grandpa. My responsibility usually falls into providing a few snack and drinks at the end of the evening, this year I got to cook the whole meal. I cooked and cleaned. I worked for days to get ready. Hoping that this time, this dinner, I would finally fit in, at least hoping that I would be included in the conversations (I’m usually ignored; it is after all Grandpa that they come to visit).

Thanksgiving morning arrived and I was up early. The table was set and everything was ready. I was expecting a little over 30 people to come in to eat. I was anxious and desperate for everything to go perfectly. I tried so hard to make it happen just right. Only the last minute things needed to be done. Mostly the dogs had to go outside, to be out of the way.

Another thing you should know about me, I have 4 dogs- labs and I have chickens as well. I do keep them separate. Oh and I have a deck and a door to the back yard in my bedroom.

Just before 2:00, the front door opened and the family started to file in. The driveway and the street in front of the house were full. Grandpa rushed to put the dogs out. Quiet, subdued greetings were directed towards Grandpa, and I started to put the food on the table. Everyone was seated and the eating had just started, when there was a loud scrambling noise from the back of the house, from my bedroom. I quickly excused myself and calmly went to see what was going on.

I opened my door and my room was full of dogs. No not just my room, my bed! Muddy dogs, rolling around and drying themselves off! I managed not to scream and started shooing them outside. I found one in my bathroom, barking at the shower. I chased him out as well. Then in the muddy bathroom, I discovered what had brought the mob in. I had a rooster in my shower.

And in-laws and disapproving family in the dining room waiting for their dinner. I quickly shut the shower door, leaving the rooster right where he was. I looked around at the mess and quickly shut the bedroom door as well. No one should need to come into the bedroom and everyone was waiting as I walked calmly and with dignity back to the quietly talking family, waiting for me to finish serving their meal. All the food made it to the table and Thanksgiving Dinner continued on its way. It was going well; everyone was eating and enjoying themselves. Then it happened. The rooster crowed, and crowed again.

I ignored it, hoping that he would stop, that everyone would think the noise was coming from outside. But, he didn’t and they didn’t either. One of the grandsons loudly asks why there is crowing from my room, as he runs to open the door. He goes to the bathroom, following the sound and finds the rooster in the shower. Of course he has to yell. “Cheryl’s got a rooster in the shower!! Come See!”

The family couldn’t ignore the opportunity to see what strange thing I had done now. They filed in, noticing the mud filled bed, the clutter that I had gathered from the rest of the house, and the rooster in the shower. It was deathly quiet, no one said anything, and they just looked; looked at the mud and the mess and the rooster. As the last of my husband’s sons walked back out of the bathroom, he turned to me and said “Don’t chickens shit a lot”?

With that comment, Thanksgiving dinner was over. Coats went on and goodbyes were said. The family went on its way. And what did I do? I had done everything I could, the meal was perfect, and the table looked great. I had failed again and yet I couldn’t stop laughing. I think that rooster was the highlight of my Thanksgiving Day.

It was sometime during middle school. I feel like it was during the school year. I remember that the weather was pleasant, either spring or early September.

I was walking with Quinny, Nathan, and Elsa, my closest friends then and probably today. We all lived in the same cozy neighborhood of middle class families, five or so minutes apart from each other’s houses. Naturally we spent time together as a group and we were walking down to the park to the small coffee shop that had been recently established there.

After crossing the busy road, we headed to the wooden bridge that went over the train-tracks which separated the rest of the town from the park. The bridge connected to stairs which curled down to the ground.

I don’t remember what we were talking about, only that it was light and cheerful. Maybe Elsa and the guys were laughing about people they knew while I tried to understand the context. They had known each other since early childhood, and I joined their group in third grade. But they could usually make me feel included.

In the back of my mind I had something to look forward to. I’ve been that way, where if there’s something exciting waiting for me in the future, I can be more engaged in the present. Elsa and I were going to see a romance film I’d never enjoy now.

We had begun to descend the spiral of stairs and I noticed a man, mid thirties, at the bottom of the stairs. He seemed like he was waiting for someone. I had a funny feeling and as we descended and I caught him looking up at us, watching. Immediately I wanted to go another way. But I didn’t say anything. Once we reached the ground he was there, facing us. He stepped forward.

“I’ve just lost my dog. Have you seen him?”

I didn’t hear the rest of what he said as a cold wave rushed over me. Alarm bells were ringing. When I was taught about ‘stranger danger’, asking about a lost dog was the classic line of the abductor. I became instantly very afraid of him, and unthinkingly I backed up to the stairs. My friends calmly talked to him, but I hurried up a flight of stairs, staring down at my friends, willing them with my eyes to come with me.

It was strange. I was completely consumed with fear, only wanting to run away from the situation, from that man. Funny enough, I recall one of the thoughts that went through my head was I won’t be able to see the movie with Elsa (if that man abducted me of course). I didn’t register that I was with three of my friends in an open space- a safe public park. For some reason I don’t know, I had been terrified that something awful was going to happen.

Eventually I couldn’t will my friends with my eyes anymore and I called to them, yelling at them to hurry up the stairs to where I was. I remember being scared at how shrill and panicked my voice sounded as I yelled to them.

After a moment, apologizing to the man that they hadn’t see his dog, my friends came back up to me. At that point I sat on the stairs and broke down, crying. I’m not sure what I was crying about, but I couldn’t have stopped it. My friends comforted me, telling me it was okay. They saw I was afraid and didn’t judge me. They made sure I was fine before we continued to the coffee shop once more.

I had calmed down when we were in the coffee shop, talking and laughing with each other again. I looked out the window and saw the man. He was standing beside a woman and he had a dog on a leash. There had been nothing to be afraid of, I thought. I felt embarrassed, but said nothing to my friends about what I saw out the window.

Today I still don’t know how I was able to forget how safe my situation was, even if the man had been a dangerous person. The fact that I was with friends in a safe park had disappeared completely from my mind.

In the end though, I was able to go see that silly romance movie with Elsa.