At first I was perplexed reading “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid” by Michael Ondaatje, yet in reading “Paris to the Moon” by Adam Gopnik, I found a strange and surprising metaphor. Gopnik writes of a carousel that strongly contradicts the description of the typical carnival favorite:

            “The animals are chipped, the paint is peeling, the giraffe and elephant are missing hooves and tusks, and the carousel is musicless and graceless… A God-only-knows-how-old carousel motor complains and heaves and wheezes and finally picks up momentum to turn the platform around” (38).

Surely the carousels I am used to riding are colorful not chipped, horses not widlife, and sweet not silent. 

    All things considered, this carousel made me think back to how Sallie in Ondaatje’s piece lives her life. She seems to be imprisoned in the same lifeless cycle. A cycle that once was and has the potential to be alive again, yet remains dark, dreary, and disappointing. Sallie chooses to live a routine, never growing beyond the means of her house. It is as though she is the conductor of the ride who enjoys the stuttered spin of the carousel more than the possible success beyond the mobile platform. 

     In thinking of the physical appearance of the ride alone, I am reminded of Sallie’s plain, simple, and “ghost-like” nature. Even the animals prompt me to think of how Sallie took many animals in, but they almost always were “wounded” (Gopnik, 35) like the elephant and the giraffe. The music of the carousel, like the excitement of Sallie’s life is nonexistent.

    If Gopnik’s claim that “your life will be composed of hundreds of small things that you arrive at only by trial and error,” (46) than it is nearly impossible to argue that Sallie has much of a life since even her small moments are limited and redundant. I wish that I could have known Sallie in order to encourage her to escape the captivity of her carousel and risk riding a new ride!

    Writing forces us to peer into our past with a renewed purpose and a refined consideration for that which we already experienced. We begin to study the people, places, and things that we once skimmed over. This allows us to “see…with a new clarity and a new understanding and a new seriousness.” (Berry 7). Details that were once taken for granted are now grasped as significant. In a sense, writing drives metacognition, or thinking about our thinking.

    How often do we go through life passively, while writing compels us to become active participants in life’s experiences? It is not until we reach a point of retelling our stories that our eyes are opened to new details, developments, and deductions. In pursuing this further, if we do not commit our stories to ink, they just become faded memories (Pagnucci 72); more often than not a missed opportunity to record results in a missed opportunity to remember. There is always the potential to share our stories, but it requires us to awaken our subconscious by pushing past the obvious and addressing the obscure. 

    In a way, we pretend to be “alive to [the story] as never before” (Berry 7). We begin to question and make observations. What did we really see? Are there things we overlooked? Do we hear the words of the conversation the same now as we did then? Are our beliefs the same? We start making mental footnotes of all that our senses encountered as if we were revisiting the memory physically. In essence, just in remembering, we explore the memory by exposing each layer – the characters, the climate, the conflict, and the conclusion – as a writer would.

    Once again we are faced with the idea of metacognition. We are not done revisiting and rewriting our story until we have answered two critical questions: 1) Am I being true to myself? and 2) Am I being true to the memory? The first is answered by establishing and critiquing our “vantage point” (Pagnucci 77), while the second is answered by exploring and depicting the flashback. Ultimately, the answers to these questions are personal and debatable, yet it is our story so we are the ones who have the final say. Period, point blank, end of story!