Dioramas and Miracle Fish by Candas Jane Dorsey
Introduction to Harvesting the Moon
When I was a kid, we had two cars: a 1949 Morris Minor convertible, and a 1961 Panhard Dyna. In one or the other of them, my family used to go driving. Weekends, we’d go out of the city, but on weeknights, we sometimes drove around other people’s neighbourhoods and looked into the lighted windows of cool houses we passed. Sometimes they were neighbourhoods like ours, and sometimes we went to rich areas, “seeing how the other half lives”. This was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when simple pleasures abounded, our city was small and trusting, and houses still had milk chutes. So it was still OK to crane our necks to see what art was on other people’s walls, what colours they painted those walls, and people still left their curtains open after dark, so we could see them walking and talking, playing or working, sitting at dining room tables or welcoming visitors into the living room, kids doing homework while adults read the paper or watched their clunky console TVs.
When I went looking for an image to define how I felt as I re-read these stories of Ursula’s, the image that came to me was of those drives, of passing fleetingly past the dioramas of other people’s lives, seeing momentary glimpses but imagining the rest of the narrative.
Maybe I thought of this because there are so many familiar objects in Ursula’s fiction. Maybe because my mother had one of those big old Singer electric sewing machines that the protagonists find in “Sewing Forgetfulness”. Or because I had intense relationships with platform-soled and coloured-suede shoes (“Airport Shoes” and “Sewing Forgetfulness”). Or because I feel I have handled or watched with fascination those same robots, toys, fish, or walked the streets where those same young hippies, drug dealers, would-be revolutionaries and tired streetwalkers formed my view of city life. But that’s all too simple an answer really. What’s familiar in Ursula’s work is often the most profoundly strange to me too: the city through the dream, the spontaneous mysticism, the bravery in the face of revolution, the urge to childbirth.
Maybe the amount of my own fiction that began by bursting through from dreams with colours unseen in the waking world has opened my awareness to how much of her fiction comes through those same mysterious doors. All of her work, whether realistic, futuristic or fantastical, has a tone of emerging from a dark mystery, as if it is reclaimed, sentence by magically-realist sentence, rescued, in fact, from a well of history.
If it is a well, an unfamiliar metaphor for me who was born and raised in a city, it is a deep, mysteriously-familiar well—but dark and dangerous too. It is the well where the giant cockroaches or the dying fish come from, the well in which, perhaps, one’s childhood friend once drowned. Or let the metaphor be the land, a field, a woodland prairie. If so, it is a land at once bright with sun and dark with the knowledge of what is buried there. I’m always surprised again that in her hands, the darkness remains deep, but not despairing, helping me understand yet again that dark journeys are simply part of life.
The people and things and times we love die all the time. Being born is beyond our control, but the rest of it is, in one way, all about dying. Parents, children, lovers, sisters, brothers, rock stars, saints, heroines and heroes, cats and dogs, entire decades, entire countries, entire worlds—they all disappear into what Samuel Delany called “the great rock and the great roll”. Our entire history is a vortex pulling everything down in a blur of memory.
Ursula Pflug knows a lot about that vortex. Her stories are full of sadness and loss, and yet, I feel as if they are returning to me so many things that life makes us lose. Reaching into the vortex of the past, Ursula comes up with an incredible salvage of heart, humanity, imagery and truth. The real stuff.
Sententiously I suppose I could just say, “That’s how art works, when it’s good—it’s paradoxical.” But really, that’s too too boring to say, and too far from the full truth. Even more, it’s a statement that’s put out there to defend me from the reality, from telling you the main thing. I admit, I’d love not to reveal the treasure I bring in my hand out of Ursula’s work. Sometimes I want to keep the core of my relationship with a writer a secret, you know? Maybe in case I break it, or maybe because I fear it will be stolen from me. But that’s what I’m doing here, isn’t it? Offering you the truth of my relationship with Ursula’s brilliant work. So okay, I’ll share.
Here’s the main thing.
The main thing that has me looking through those windows again, very far away from the here and now, whenever I read Ursula’s fiction, is some quirk of perspective that is special to Ursula, a tone, a sensibility that I perceive with some kind of literary synaesthesia as if it is a relationship to time itself. When I read a Pflug story or novel, even when (or perhaps especially when) it is about the future, I feel as if I never left the past, as if I were able to bring the past with me, to this moment and then to the future, not just as a memory or a dream, but as a way of life, a realisation of all hopes. The illusion that such possibilities exist is the great gift of Ursula’s genius.
It sounds simple enough now that I’ve said it, but if you think it’s simple, try and do it.
Ursula does it, and makes it look easy, but let’s not, you and me, be fooled by our own pleasure, or nostalgia, or satisfaction as we finish reading each story. Nor should you, dear Reader, who perhaps do not, as I do, spend time building the same sort of edifices in fiction, be fooled by the quiet, deceptively additive small sentences that make up the multiplex entirety. This is hard-won, dangerous, beautiful, revolutionary, world-changing work, and Ursula does it.
Ursula is willing to take risky forays into dark neighbourhoods and strange worlds, in familiar yet exotic vehicles, but not only that, she will bring us along and direct our attention to what can be glimpsed through strangers’ brilliantly-lighted windows. The process is even more entrancing to me than were those evening journeys when I was a kid in my parents’ care, because now I know how transgressive it is to eavesdrop on the secret lives of others, no matter how important it is for our future to make those empathic journeys.
To borrow some of her own striking words: “‘I brought a fish through the door, across the border,’ and watched the indescribable looks on [their] faces as she removed it from her pocket and unfolded it on the table where it began to swim in slow lazy circles. She knew then that all her training and all her defilement were to this one end, to be a translator, to propagate miracle fish, fish smuggled across the border from another dimension, another world, in her own community.”
How lucky that Ursula Pflug is willing to brave these frontiers and smuggle back what she finds, to share generously of her vision with us, so that we too may take home in our pockets these brightly-coloured miracle fish.