Writing Lightly: The Metabolic Rate of a Story
by Kelly Gray
Recently, I watched a short film about the making of a mushroom documentary, and the equally brilliant and trippy filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg said something that has stayed with me, “. . . a mosquito on your arm, which has a little drop of blood, looks at the hand that’s coming toward it in slow motion and has plenty of time to fly away because its metabolic rate, its life span, is much shorter than ours. And our lifespan is much shorter than that of a redwood. Our reality is not the only point of view, and that’s exactly the beauty of cameras and time-lapse cinematography. It’s basically a time machine.”
I started to think about relationships as having their own metabolic rate. Stories too might have their own metabolic rate. Some might start fast and end fast, like a seeing a comet in the sky out of the corner of your eye, and others may seem to predate and extend past the time we physically get to spend with the other person or narrative, like a memory of a mountain that we know we can return to. I wanted to use short form writing to hold something as large as time, and to use language and imagery in quick bursts to explore a relationship that expands into the past and future. The use of the fox and paintings within the story act as invitations for the reader to step into this way of thinking.
When I began writing “A Picture of a Fox,” it was a love letter. It was also a story about the ways we try to capture time. Probably like most folks, much of my personal suffering is centered around time; will I have enough, how will I spend it, what time have I lost, and how to make peace without knowing these answers. When my partner is painting, he is paying attention to and observing that which is fleeting, which we have in common. I did not want this piece to heavy, but light, foxlike.
I often work towards my reader experiencing sense of place and the relationships we have with the non-human world without directly being told the entire story. As a writer, you have access to so much, and you are often obligated to keep most of it in your back pocket. We live in the forest. All windows face trees and within the trees are passages and tracks and trails left by the seasons, animals, decay, and rebirth. The soil is very present, even when you can’t see it because of the redwood duff, because everything in death falls to the forest floor and is then reborn again, pushed back up. The fox is only one expression of the forest, and when you live with foxes, you hear and see their cycles. This morning, I heard the mama fox wailing, as her kits have finally left their den, and she is bereft, calling them back to her. They will not come back. You cannot hear her cries without knowing her pain, which is like all of our pain, held by the tightening container of time. Yet, she is part of a lineage of foxes. When she and her partner die, another pair will move into their territory. They will use the same paths and eat from the same family of robins. In our lifetime, we will see this happen every few years, because the foxes have much shorter life spans than we do. Our home sits inside a tight ring of redwood trees, and these trees, the second generation from the original redwoods that were slaughtered to build the city to the south of us by colonizers, have seen four families raise their children, live their lives, make their art beneath their boughs. These trees will outlast my daughter’s children’s children, unless climate change burns them out. And even then, their roots will persist and grow saplings from the ashes. My back pockets are full.
I did not want to weigh down the story with numbers, too much natural history, and exact questions, even though I was shuffling through them as I wrote. Around 3.6 million years ago, grey foxes became their own distinct candid species. Now, they climb trees and hide bones in them to mark their territory. They are the only candid species with retractable claws, which is due to evolution. Evolution is simply collective bodies changing through deep time. Redwood Trees are clocked at being 240 million years old. When you type into Google “redwoods older than,” one of the first things that comes up is, “Are redwoods older than Jesus?” People also want to know if sequoias are older than flowers and spiders. Humans have so many questions.
This year I am 45, my partner is 46. I want to know how much time we will have together, and sometimes this not knowing makes me weep in frustration. We met during lockdown. Our sense of time together has always had a bending, tilting quality. Sometimes we joke that we are older than dirt. Even when I am weeping, I find great comfort in this, knowing that dirt is constantly being born, as are my stories, his paintings, and the fox babies up the hill. We try to walk lightly, to live deeply.