There is advice available for writing about the improbable. The more improbable something is in real life, the greater the set-up should be in your writing. Improbability makes it harder to believe something is true. It needs anticipating.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about while watching photos of the LA fires on my news-feed. Reading the updates from my colleague about evacuating their family. Hearing the discussion about Musk’s salute at Trump’s inauguration. The improbable happens. Anticipation of it is a luxury sometimes only afforded in fiction.
There’s a striking painting in the National Portrait Gallery called ‘The Final Submission in Fire and Ice‘ by Raqib Shaw. It’s a self portrait showing the artist burning a handwoven Kashmiri shawl. He set fire to the shawl and other belongings the year he made the painting, in a period of bereavement. In the painting, he stands in a fictionalised landscape of ice.
The fire and ice are in opposition. The painting is arresting. It speaks something to me of the bewilderment and confrontation of loss, of the elements of our lives that don’t fit neatly together. As a work of art it feels improbable.
This week I read Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Gilead’. There’s a line early on in the book that goes:
“Well, we spent a good many days on the edge of disaster, and we laughed about it for years.“
I like it. It feels like a non sequitur. It seems like the line is glib, but it isn’t. It captures the tragicomedy, the serious-farce of what the narrator is recalling. Like Shaw’s painting it’s a retelling. A retelling of a landscape of contradiction – fire and ice, loss and creation, disaster and survival.
I’m reminded of Joan Didion’s words about how we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Writing about the improbable isn’t just about crafting believability, but about helping us make sense of a world that defies our expectations.
The improbable, it turns out, is just reality wearing unfamiliar clothes. We experience something more about the truth of living in our encounters with a world where the improbable keeps happening.
I think that’s what I love in Shaw’s painting and Robinson’s line. They don’t try to make the improbable more believable, but they confront us with it. They offer depictions of the space where fire meets ice, where disaster meets laughter, and where the improbable is actual.
thejoyofrachel 