-
5. The Country of the Mind
- TCU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
P A U L E T T E J I L E S P A U L E T T E JI L E S was born in Salem, Missouri, and graduated from the University of Missouri with a BA in Romance Languages. She is the author of the best selling Enemy Women, a novel of the Civil War. Her latest novel, Stormy Weather, is set in Texas. Paulette lives on her ranch in the Hill Country west of San Antonio. 81 Mary Hughes T H E C O U N T R Y O F T H E M I N D I L I V E O N A H I L L T O P in the Texas Hill Country, and in all directions I can see for several miles. From the front porch I look east into the valley of the Sabinal River and the small town where the post office is, the general store, the feed store, and the steeples of the Methodist and Baptist churches lifting above the live oaks. From the back, to the west, the view is of another valley and a range of hills, and at night there is not a light to be seen in all of that stretch of country. I think of this as the front of my mind and the back of my mind. From the front is daily business to be done and mail collected, a three-mile trip to town in the pickup, and greeting people I know. It is a social world where I sing in the Christmas cantata or attend a benefit for Tim who operates the cedar-clearing machine and who broke his leg, or maybe shattered would be a better word, so money has to be raised for a serious operation. They had some fair scratch bands playing old country and western songs in the park alongside the Sabinal River under giant live oaks, colored lights, and barbeque , and by midnight there was enough to pay the surgeon. In the back is all that uninhabited geography; although I know there are houses far back in the folds of the hills it seems perfectly uninhabited. It is a landscape you would think of walking out into with a feeling of joy and release and imminent danger. It is a different world, like the world of writing and the telling of tales. The country of the mind, which has a tenuous and variable attachment to the daily existence in which we find ourselves, appears and disappears like rain in a NO T E S F R O M TE X A S 82 [54.165.122.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:17 GMT) dry land. Sometimes I am singing my heart out in a cantata with twenty other people, and other times I’m perfectly still here in this small house watching cloud shadows move over the hills to the west like the images and plots that occur in my head. These images and plots are ancient, mythic, but perpetually renewed. It is like a kaleidoscope, with a limited number of pieces but an infinite variety of combinations. Like most writers I am refreshed and encouraged in my work by other writers more than anything else, because literature is its own landscape. But every story takes place somewhere , and that somewhere matters. The only thing I can compare it to is the work of the artists of Altamira who painted their Paleolithic bulls on the cave ceiling, overlaid one after the other, learning from other artists, using the stone as if it were their canvas, yet taking advantage of the convolutions and projections of the stone itself to produce bulls, horses, and reindeer that were almost in bas-relief. So when I write it is the same; I learn from other writers, my stories take place in the imagination first and foremost, yet the stone and the mountains, the rivers and the highways, the live oak and agarita and Spanish oak of a real Texas make them a bas-relief, and like the kaleidoscope of mythic forms, the combinations and variations are without end. Every writer comes upon places and times and people that are striking, sometimes amazing, and you know you have no place for them in any story that has as yet occurred to you, but like most writers you have a sort of mini-storage place in your memory where these images will stay until needed. Maybe it...