On Proprioception, the Sixth Sense of Storytelling

The first time one of my closest friends—let’s call her LL— visited my house in the small northwest Philadelphia neighborhood where I lived then with my family, she came in the door, gave me a hug, and said: “Sorry I’m an hour late, the Waze directions were bad, and I think maybe you should go out and repark my car for me.” We’d only known each other a couple months at the time, but I’d read her work and loved it for years, and I was just a little cowed by what I perceived to be her genius, and above that, I learned quickly, she is just good. A good person, a kind person, and a talent. So I demurred: “I’m sure it’s fine!” I said, a little too confidently. Ours was an impossibly narrow and steep block, so tight you risked hitting the cars across the street with your driver’s side fender when parking on the right-hand curb. I told her one more time it would be fine. We sat down and had a drink, and then another, and then my wife came home and said, “Oh, my god, you should see this parking job someone did down the street.” LL looked sheepish. I handed my wife my drink and went outside and halfway down our block was LL’s car, at an eighty-degree angle to the curb. In front of a fire hydrant.

Which is all to say that this friend of mine was and is a genius, and while in her stories and novels characters might travel across lands near and far, swim below the waves with nearby fishes but avoiding nearby sharks, in the real world her spatial reasoning is… not good. “A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much,”  once told a group of students she was visiting, “wrote me that she had learned from  that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real; and she believes that this is connected with our having five senses. If you’re deprived of any of them, you’re in a bad way, but if you’re deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren’t present.”  in one of his famous prefaces is more specific still: “My job as a writer of fiction is to make you see, to appeal as accurately as possible to the visible, and that is everything.” I do not think he meant “see” metaphorically, given the way Conrad qualifies this claim in the rest of his preface. I think he literally means to privilege the visual in writing. But if or blind old  or blind old  or blind old  or , blind from syphilis, could dictate their work and evoke images of all kinds long after their sight was gone, even the ostentatiously bad parallel parker employs that sense of proprioception in her work.