Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero and the ‘Hidden Presence of Others’

Michael Ondaatje‘s Divisadero is a wise book, elliptical and allusive in his distinctive style, one replaying close, attentive reading to its many lovely, lyrical lines, too many to excerpt and note. Here is one that hones in on a truth already known to those who create:

Everything is biographical…What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.

Not only are our creations the result of borrowings, imitations, outright thefts, our writings voice-overs of once-read texts, but we ourselves are composites and mosaics. We bear the impress of our encounters, the mark of those we meet; every lover, every friend, every enemy, every parent, every sibling, every teacher, leaves their stamp. Read a writer, you read everything he’s read; talk to a human, you talk to humanity.  We present a distinctive take on our encounters and our histories; we digest and assimilate and repackage–to get all industrial, just for a bit–all our inputs.  But peek around the corner of the persona presented to you and you see a long trail, stretching off into the distance, populated by people and events and markers of many kinds, literary, cultural, artistic, and sometimes even traumatic.

Sometimes these histories of ours are clearly visible; sometimes we carry them around on our sleeves, available for all to see; sometimes the scars are visible and worn with pride. But sometimes we are puzzled by the presence, within us, of something whose provenance seems mysterious. So we attempt to excavate: sometimes by writing, sometimes by looking for the nearest couch and an interpreter with a notepad.

We imagine ourselves self-made, creators of these living, walking works of art we embody. We are that to be sure. But we are aided and abetted by collaborators; those who, with their chisels, put in a touch or two here or there, or with their brushes, added a dab here, a flourish there. So there is accretion aplenty on us; layers and layers of deposited sediment, pushing down on those that came before, compressing and morphing them with their own distinctive pressures.

The texts we embody are not just read by many, they are written by many. And that couch and the interpreter can help us read it when we are confused by its contours, its plot developments; we might need a translation manual, a decrypting key. We imagine we are familiar to ourselves but precisely because of our complex histories, we might become unrecognizable in just that zone of presumed knowledge.

And thus this strangeness can be pleasurable too; we can surprise ourselves, find novelty in that which we imagined contemptuously familiar. Perhaps that is why we push ourselves into encounters with the novel, trusting that in our responses to it, we might find something else about our perfectly strange selves.