E5: The North; S7: Who Am I? I'll Tell You

This week's episode starts off feeling fairly normal.A little memoir.A little storytelling.A song.A dead young man.Nothing too alarming.Then, gradually, things start connecting to other things.A story written at eighteen starts talking to a prose-poem written at thirty-nine, which starts talking to a song written at fifty-seven.A boyfriend becomes a symbol, then stops being one.A metaphor becomes a direction.A political decision becomes a psychological event.A move from one country to another starts behaving like a dream.A fantasy turns into an immigration story.An immigration story turns into a theory of identity.Then that starts unraveling too.The experience reminds me a little of the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.Not because it's frightening.Because you enter it believing you're moving through a piece of scenery.Then you gradually realize the scenery is moving through you.The colors change.The scale changes.Things you thought were stable start transforming into something else.A thing that seemed symbolic becomes literal.A thing that seemed literal becomes symbolic.A joke turns serious.A serious observation turns into a joke.A story about one person becomes a story about someone else.Then maybe becomes a story about you.Or maybe not.That's a large claim.I know.So feel free to hold me to it.But one of the questions running underneath this episode is whether there are experiences that don't arrive first as thoughts or feelings.Whether they arrive first as orientation.As movement.As a pull.As a direction.And if that's true, then there is always the possibility that something in your life right now—which seems perfectly obvious and completely understood—is actually still in the process of becoming something else.The North began as a short story I wrote almost forty years ago.I thought I understood what it was.Then I thought I understood it again.Then I thought I understood it again.I'm no longer so sure.That's where this episode begins.And, perhaps unfortunately for everyone involved, where it ends too.