Real Doors

There’s a fountain that I’ve deduced must have existed.  

It stood in a corner of my dad’s garden.  It was stone, and had a broad, tree-like base, from which sprouted a carved castle.  This castle had miniature windows in its miniature towers, and a door that I remember constantly trying to open.  Actually, that’s the wrong choice of words: I knew it wouldn’t open (it wasn’t a real door), but I think I checked every once in a while to make sure nothing had changed.

The stone castle had a moat surrounding it, which, when I was very small, actually contained water.  I mostly remember this moat being dry, though, because at a certain point the gears that allowed the fountain to circulate liquid stopped working.  So the fountain I remember had a dry gulf around its castle, a trench, an abyss; and there was no bridge across it.

Moss worked its furry way into all the small nooks and crannies of the building.  Into the hollows for the windows it went, and into the tiny cracks between the “cobblestones”  in the ramparts.  It was the lingering traces of this moss that convinced me, a week ago, that the castle had been real: there’s still a half-circle outline of its base, in moss, on the ground where it once stood.

When I was still fairly young, the base of the castle cracked, and my dad got rid of it—took it to the dump, most likely.  I’ve had other things on my mind for the last fifteen or twenty years—so it might not come as a surprise to know that, staring at that half-circle of moss on the ground, I was flooded with an incredulity that the fountain I’d suddenly remembered wasn’t something I’d made up.

            It must not have been a dream.

            Some people are blessed with exceedingly sharp, detailed memories of their childhoods.  Agatha Christie was one of those: I’m reading her Autobiography right now, and she’s already filled up two hundred pages with description of her life before she turned fifteen.  Greg is another one: he’s told me all the facets of his favorite childhood game (it involved Legos, and was called, I believe, “Hobo Escape”).

My memories of being a kid, on the other hand, are spotty at best.  I know I had a wonderfully happy childhood—but I also know that I focused most of my attention on books, and those are the things I remember.  There was a time when I could have told you the author of every book I’d ever read.

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            This is a line from my poem “The Murk-Journal (or Once Beyond a Time)”, which is very good, and, in a perfect world, would be published soon. 

And the door in the valley, creaking there free from going anywhere

           

Doors: doors that open, doors that don’t open, doors that open but don’t lead anywhere, closed doors that, if opened, might lead somewhere Other (with a capital O): isn’t that what imaginative fiction is all about?  Ursula K. Le Guin says that fantasy, as a genre, is a cluster of metaphors that we keep re-hashing because they seem to reveal something important about our cultures, or epochs, or identities.  Thus a British professor of Icelandic Studies invented, during World War II, a war-ravaged Middle Earth where chaos could be defeated with one profound nonviolent gesture: letting go, ultimately, of an enchanted ring.

            Seems rather pertinent, historically, doesn’t it?

For me, the most important metaphor is a door

creaking there, free from going anywhere, that wouldn’t open.

The harder I try to visualize the fountain, the less I can.  The door to the past is usually closed, just as the passageways to many of life’s possibilities are usually closed—which is why we have imaginations.  Maybe I’m a storyteller because I’m afraid of being limited to one lifestyle or point-of-view, and thus, to a certain extent, immobilized. 

Maybe I’m a storyteller because I’ve always wondered what lived in that fountain, behind the closed doors.

We keep the important lessons of the past with us, at least, even if we don’t always remember where we learned them.