“What the earliest scriptural-literary texts do is attempt
to find a language to come to terms with the contingency
of being.” —Amit Chaudhuri; Storytelling & Forgetfullness
________________________________________
A Skeptic on Stories of Whoknowswhat?
A story’s a trip through landscapes of malleable things,
or characters bent by other characters, shoehorned into imaginations
or pulled as a potter does a pot, drawing up water and clay,
the stuff of earth, forming it into free-standing somethings
into which we place or pitch our day’s most pressing dreams,
new bouquets set upon tables in rooms we inhabit among stars
A story is a universe skewed by future disharmonies no matter
how religiously we arrange their notes on staffs to create harmonies
appropriate to the moments of the day they were first sung, parcels
of hopelessness and hope, foresights, recollections, Jenga game blocks
assembled or razed as our needs see fit to salve a wound, raise a god, or
to twist instants into forms convenient to the top-dogs of an age, or
shaped sometimes into the tales of losers, yarns whose top billing
among surviving texts skewed by coincidence, or a thing even more
mysterious which bends the arc of future tales in the peculiar direction ofwhoknowswhat?
Jim Culleny
9/22/19, rev: 2/14/2026
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.