Oct 4

Stella saw ghosts. They are the ghosts of the dead on the Goat Island, or in another way, a part of the crystallized past of Stella.  She never thought about going to the mainland before, since she “never saw any reason to go”. She saw her granddaughter off to the Mainland to go to high school and she knew that “Jane was gone for good”. She understood there was a world outside, but she still wanted to stay in the island—froze with it. It’s not only in the physical way, but also in an emotional way: she is surrounded by her past—on her way to the Mainland, with all of the dead people she knew, and then she dead. She was frozen in the past, in the old spacetime: she never made it to the Mainland, and everyone she loved in different times appears all at once. She was frozen with them, the moment she left the island. That is her crystallizing outside the flows.

Within Harvey’s concept of relational “spacetime”, I want to focus on his belief that “They [space and time] fuse into spacetime. Memories and dreams are the stuff of such fusion”. After reading King’s “The Reach”, I believe the story of  Stella Flanders and her loyalty to the island supports Harvey’s statement. Stella experienced life on the island before there was any communication between the mainland and the island. Personal lobster boats had to be driven to the mainland for islanders to cross the “Reach”. Considering this point in time, Stella grew a tremendous connection to the island. I believe, she actually adopted the island’s physical characteristics into her own daily feelings and actions. In other words, King repeatedly writes “she did not cry” which reflects Stella’s tough-as-nails attitude, similar to that of the island’s tough and harsh environment. As time passed, Stella continued to live on the island, experiencing happiness, love, sadness death and loneliness. She never wished to cross the “Reach” until her final day because she was used to the close-knit bonds and relationships between each islander; she was used to the space that felt like home; she was used to the daily pace of life (time) on the island. And her memories of husband and friends and the stories she carried on to her children and grandchildren dynamic and multi-layered. But the spacetime of which Harvey speaks of, gives her memories and dreams some clarity.

Goat Island fits into Harvey’s description of spacetime, where, “matter and processes do not exist…or even effect it.” The island is a figure of how a a place can be stuck in this process of the fusion of space and time. Separated from the mainland, Goat Island exists as its own world, largely unaffected by what goes on across the reach. As the mainland has spent years developing and advancing, Goat Island has spent the same time unaffected by these factors.  This is especially relevant for Stella Flanders, who has never gone over to the mainland; she explains how this is due to her feeling that she has never had a reason to. I think that this is a product of how spacetime has influenced her and Goat Island as a whole. For Stella, it is impossible to separate the space that Goat Island takes up, and the time that she has spent there. The psychological feeling of the reach growing smaller, is also due to the compression of space and time.

 

 

Goat Island to Stella was life itself. Everything that she could have ever needed was on Goat Island and saw no reason to leave. But when Stella crossed over The Reach to go to the mainland, she also crossed into a type of spacetime. The Reach caused the past memories and friendships that were created from her life on Goat Island to reappear. She saw her dead friends and husband, and was even given a hat after her’s blew off by her husband’s ghost. The Reach acted as a sort of limbo between the real world and the afterlife. The friendships and memories that Stella made on Goat island, which were thought to be gone forever, resurfaced. When Stella left Goat Island, she left her life and crossed over into a space where time and space did not matter – spacetime. The space after spacetime, or mainland is the afterlife.

Harvey’s point that “an event, process, or thing cannot be understood by appeal to what exists only at some point” is very applicable to Goat Island, as Stella’s experiencing in trekking across the reach is a perfect example of spacetime.  Her illusions represent how space and time are never separate or stationary, but rather always moving and entangled.  While her reminiscences appear to be simply of the past, they seem to defy the rules of space and time altogether.  In terms of space, her venture is not only from the island to the mainland, but also from living to the afterlife.  In relation to time, Bull tells her it is time to go to the afterlife and she replies “yes I will, yes I did, yes I do.”  The use of different tenses here shows how she is not simply stuck in one dimension of time, rather as Harvey would put it: in a “field of flows.”  Although this can all be seen as a fantastical story, it does show how our perception of reality ties together all of our memories and experiences.  For someone like Stella living so secluded on an Island, it makes sense that the people she was close with in the tight knit island community are those who come to her at such an emotional moment in her life.

King’s story offers us a glimpse into the spacetime of Goat Island only as Stella sees it; in other words, we know only what Stella experiences or can remember, which we quickly learn isn’t very reliable. We are therefore challenged to draw a comprehensive image of Goat Island based exclusively on the limited testimony of a woman who remembers little and sees ghosts. Given Harvey’s definition, we may therefore consider Goat Island to be a “field of flows” and Stella’s experience of it a small crystal. We learn that just in Stella’s lifetime, the island has seen its share of flux: bitter winters that give way to mild summers, decades of fruitful fishing industry that wax and wane with time, birthdays and deaths and children who move away. Yet despite its ever-changing face, Stella holds onto it for dear life because it is what she knows. This is powerful: how does she continue to find such comfort in the recognizability of a place that is so different now from when she was young? I think considering this question helps us understand her ghosts. She wants so much to hold tight an era that has passed. It is, like the bit of water between her and the mainland, a Reach. With this in mind, it is no coincidence that the literal Reach between Goat Island and the Mainland freezes at the same time Stella’s mind begins to conjure ghosts.

In fact, we should be especially cognizant of Harvey’s use of the word “crystalized” as it relates to the frozen reach as a motif within the story. When Stella encounters a frozen bird on her back porch, she immediately recalls her last similar experience, and although she says “Frozen” out loud, King writes, “something inside her [speaks] another word.” Here, frozen takes on dual meaning. Literally, here is Stella holding a dead bird, smack in the middle of the second coldest winter in her memory. But more than this, an experience that has for so long been held still, unmoving in her memory, rushes back to her, like a river just after thawing.