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Clay Stories




Stories are like clay.  They can be manipulated and shaped, presented from one perspective then moulded to another. 

I was once a radio journalist, telling the same stories over and over, every half hour for hours on end.  The trick was to tell the news a different way each time, so that listeners would think something ‘new’ and had happened, even if it had not. Revising and editing, every time I left the booth, I took each story in my fist, crushed it into a ball and started over.  “Three children killed in house fire; two survive.”  “Two children survive housefire that killed three siblings.”  “Fire chief says smoke detectors would have saved three children …” And, so on and so on, so there’d be a “fresh” story for the top of the hour.  

In my second career as a government speechwriter, I found myself working with clay again.  I would create a verbal sculpture and then, over and over, other civil servants would suggest a tweak here, nuance there, moulding it to suit their agenda, agonizing over the deeper meanings of each word. “We can’t say ‘improved service’! That implies the service wasn’t good to begin with.  Please change to ‘enhanced’.” Each level of the approvals process, further manipulating the clay.  

It’s too bad people aren’t so malleable.  Oh sure, we tell each other different versions of our story, but we can’t demolish our true selves and fashion something new with a little water and a miniature spatula. 

The story I told my therapist was a comedy. She helped me see it’s tragic elements.  We all react to the buttons installed in childhood.  We yearn for respect and recognition from parents and older siblings.  We seek the teeth to match our wounds[1].

We are human, made of flesh, bone and electrical impulses. We are not made of clay, but we do spend our lives trying to reshape ourselves and the world around us.

We muddle through life partially-formed and half-baked.




















[1] Writer Kenneth Tynan as quoted by Peter Gabriel   

      Photo Credit Jeremy Mark Lane
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  1. UnknownMarch 7, 2019 at 5:09 PM

    I enjoyed reading your story again afer hearing you read it . Keep up the great work .

    ReplyDelete

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