One of the difficulties of this essay was always going to be how to handle such diverse material convincingly. Well, reader, a short disclaimer: none of the following is handled convincingly. Or rather, I am no longer interested in being convincing. You won’t find an evolutionary rationale or some justifying anthropology of primitive tools tying these thoughts neatly together. Instead, multiple voices call back and forth across time and space, leaving messages for one another – crumpled and fragmentary markers of existence and desire: a string of flags leading to some distant horizon.

In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula Le Guin lays out two different understandings of narrative. The first is more familiar: the heroic tale of conquest and the hunt, linear and masculine like the spear’s shaft and flight. It is simple and gripping – it stabs the point and brings it home. The second, however, is less recognisable: less frequently and easily told. This is the story of the carrier bag: pathetic, jumbled and meandering. The story of going down to the meadow to gather seeds and grain, repeated daily; the non-event of continued life – of sustenance – rather than the drama of death. The carrier bag does not give us conflict and resolution but demonstrates an on-going process. Things are continually added and taken out: words rolling over each other; different stories gathered by different hands joining and separating.The bag is the first tool, and it is the first story too. For what is a book but a bag, a chain of containers nesting like Russian dolls: ‘A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings.’ Understanding that narrative is more like a carrier bag than a weapon empowers us to create fictional or speculative worlds that reveal and reconfigure our own – following the bag’s own precedence in reworking the divisive representational strategy that has constructed a simplified, binary, exclusionary, and individualistic world.

In the spirit of its expansive generosity, then, I want to reconfigure Le Guin’s carrier bag. Reconfigure again, because through the pages of her essay the form is already a shapeshifter, at turns ‘a leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box.’ In my hands, it shifts once more: I cut down the cloth and stitching it back together to create something smaller, more intimate: a pocket. A pocket is more private than a bag: personal, hidden – secret even. Carried close to the skin, underneath one’s clothes, it sits somewhere between a garment and a container, genre-less and ...