The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

Yann Martel

In what oyster did I want to be the grain of sand?

My words always have a way of meaning to me what I feel. If I say that It rained today in bent droplets, that might mean many things to many people, but to me at the moment it means what I meant. Without dipping into complete relativism, words and especially stories are containers of meaning, but meaning that is supplied by the user, only stories to affect the meaning supplied--they have a way of turning what is green into blue and brown into purple, or maybe they take what was green and give you Bach's Goldberg Variations or again maybe they take that brown and out comes the saddest moment of your life up to this point. The idea is that stories have a lot of power, but only because they have to become a part of you in order for you to enjoy them, use them, or even hear them.
I can never tell stories like Yann Martel. He has more webs than I and a broader vision than my own, yet I can enjoy them. Whether he catches you from your stomach and ties it to your brain in its most logical part or whether he tickles your toes and then you find out that he was actually tearing apart the way you understood your complicated little life, it makes no difference; he has a force in his stories that is hidden behind their trickiness. But surprisingly, it's not a trickiness I resent. This is perhaps because he lacks sarcasm.
So I'll settle for my own sad brand of story telling, heavy with its sarcasm, out of control, so full of passion and fervor that it begins to aspire (sadly) to Kazantzakis. What I learned though, from Martel, was that stories can use logic to defy itself.