Narrating Presence

Learning to love the world is an activity that requires the cultivation of the skill of being present in the world. In being present in a place and with a people one learns the stories that constitute that place and those people, liberating them from being "those people" to become particular people like Lorna, Emma, Ted, or Michelle. It is this activity of "storying" that Murat Ates has embarked upon in volume two of his Life Fire Prose collection of short stories.

An occasional friend, Ates confessed in a letter written on the inside of the cover to me that this book attempts to be "a little more loving." Ironically, I think he might just have succeeded. 

I say ironically because the stories that Ates tells are the confessions of a man who has tried his best to love and be present, but time and again has faltered. He does not hide his pettiness in the frustration he experienced that day in Stella's. He does not attempt to justify his failure to be a friend to William in spite of William's rejection of his love. He does not rewrite the end of his Spanish travels for the sake of a good story, but instead invites us in to the gritty reality of being present with strangers and friends who give and receive hard to hear truths. 

Ates narrates his own loneliness, vulnerability, and quest for love and, on a filler page between stories, asks his readers to decide if he has found what he went to Spain to find. It is a question asked in jest, but the answer is the key to his entire booklet. Ates has indeed found in Spain what he went there to find, just as he has found in each of these stories what he was looking for. In trying to love the world, Ates has found that this is not possible in the abstract, but rather must be narrated in the particular encounters he has with particular people both in his ordinary business in Winnipeg, and in his accidental encounters abroad. In his prologue, Ates ponders the nature of sharing his stories, worried that in some way the telling of these stories abstracts and blurs the events themselves. Yet, it is precisely in this painful process of reaching deep down to share these stories that Ates develops a grammar of truth that begins to reveal to himself and his readers a way to love the world.

In order to love the world - as it seems Ates has been called to do - it has been required of him to love the concrete world that he experiences in all of its glorious particularity. Life Fire Prose is both his confession of false and misdirected love and his redemption. Ates is redeemed in his quest to love the world because through these stories he has learned to see the world as it is and not as he might will it to be. In sharing these stories with us, Ates teaches a grammar of truth and love that invites us to pay attention to the world as it stands, to love what comes, and to repent in truth when we do not.




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