Good Fences Make Good Symbols

This morning as I was doing my writing warm up routine a symbol blew into my mind tailed by a full-blown story. It was so clear—this was how I could write about the difficult subject of we/they, exclusion, shunning, in a simple story about a person putting up a fence between him and his neighbor. Yes, I know, this is not an original symbol or story (hello, August Wilson and Robert Frost) but in the moment I was enchanted by the image and the tremendous power it held. I noticed myself having this idea, also with excitement, because for the longest time I didn’t understand what a symbol was, much less being able to think of one myself. When asked about the symbolism in a novel my answer was always a shrug. Even when it was right in the title—The Golden Bowl, The Wide Sargasso Sea, Giovanni’s Room—I didn’t get it. The upside of this was a fairly regular experience of being hit by revelations during mundane activities. Oh, a sunset, a monkey in a Chinaberry tree, an opthamologist’s instruments, a white whale, I get it! I was using symbols myself but unconsciously, couldn’t think one up, but symbols have volition, they want into stories, so I’d place one inadvertently and be told about it by someone more sensitive to that nexus of power. Then here came one, as I was looking out the window. A few days earlier the neighbor behind me had added an extension of the chain link fence that ran the length of our yards (a bane for thirty years now). A sparkling new chain link gate. I knew why. The local deer passed from the lowlands of my yard to the higher ground behind me through that gap five or ten times a day. Sometimes a little herd would rest on either side of the fence in copses of bushes and according to a signal I couldn’t discern all jump up shivering at the same time and gallop to meet up in one yard or the other. (I have said this before but I will say this again—I live on a very busy county road truck route and the fact of so much wildlife in my yard is a symptom of human encroachment into old habitats; that sad story.) The gate seemed one more huge unwelcome sign for the animals, and they read it and responded by racing frantically back and forth along the fence for several days and then…fading away. Which was the point. Not everyone is okay with all the droppings and the chewed down plants, or looking onto their terrace to see deer staring into the living room. I like it, and I also feel obligated to provide a safe space when the evil road is just a couple of dozen feet away. The fence interfered with me, too; who I am if not a home for animals? Raccoon, o’possum, skunk, chipmunk, squirrel, bird, fox, raptor, coyote, feral cat…they all abide here off and on. I imagine them exhaling as they realize they are not going to be chased or shot at or gassed or poisoned. They will find water here, and a respite. They leave lessons, the deer most of all. Is there any gentler creature? I have spent hours staring into their eyes and feeling my whole inner being rearranged by the gaze of sheer innocence. I feel—

But this is about symbols, not deer. The idea of the fence and the story attached to it arrived full-fledged, and I wondered how. I went back and did my best to trace what led up to the lightning bolt and saw that my thoughts had become intertwined with emotion, and that combo saw that the whole swirling mess could be summarized by one neat thing, in this case a fence. The thing became imbued with significance via my own emotion about what it meant to me, and those two coughed up a story. (When I say I saw the whole story, I mean I had the illusion that I saw a whole story!) The fence was a locus of a lifetime of thought and feeling of observation of being left out.

Emotion + association over object = symbol

At least that is one way. Tell me others. Do you think symbols need to arise organically or can you pick one and add it in? What is your favorite use of a symbol in literature?