The architecture of stories fascinates me but I think of it in terms that are organic rather than designed, springing from a mental landscape. And sometimes, truth be told, I miss the landscape of the desert. So here's a reprise of an old post about cliff swallows in New Mexico and the creation of story, maybe because I want to return if only briefly to a moment that was purely joyful, purely sufficient unto itself. Those moments feels rare these days. The world intrudes far more than it seemed able to do just a few years ago.
The cliff swallows nested just down the road from where I lived in the desert. I'd been watching them every summer for over a decade.
All those years, I'd drive past, slow down to glance at the swarms of birds overhead, feel the smile breaking out on my face in the way that bird-swarms make a person smile. Then I'd go on my way. I'd think, I ought to stop and take pictures. Really. Someday I will.For some reason it sank in at last that those somedays didn't just stretch forever into my distance, so one day I decided to act on my impulse.
The swallows came pouring out with flapping wings and shrill, squeaky cries, perhaps in response to me and my blundering around at the foot of their cliff palace. Life just burst out from that rock. In contrast to the extravagance of sound and motion, look at those nests. How perfect they are, a whole community on this rock face, built one little dollop of mud at a time, flown up from the riverbank a couple of miles away.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFvKurr6dFI?rel=0&controls=0&showinfo=0]
What can we learn from swallows about form and structure? A lot, I think. There's a deep sense of the organic and whole about this little colony of homes, each little cavity containing a bobbing beak or two. Nothing wasted. Everything with a purpose. Who needs heaven? Perfection is right here.
Think about building memory. I no longer live down the road from that cliff. The birds in my neighborhood are different ones, the cliffs in the region volcanic rock rather than sandstone. But the little mud houses painstakingly clustered on the cliff face evoke a place and a time--and they return me briefly to the person I was then. Story builds that way too, with that kind of care and concern for setting and context, space and sky, river and rock, that intensity and life force driving the whole endeavor.