First Lines, Last Lines

Short version: As an exercise, start a story with one “found” sentence, and end it with another:

First sentence:

I ask your forgiveness.

Last sentence:

I am a mountain tiger.

Note: The italics as presented above don’t have any significance; they aren’t meant to emphasize the text, nor do they indicate that these lines are spoken by someone.

Extra credit: Involve in the story, in some way, the image of the woman at the left. She may be a character in the story (either the “I” in the first and last lines or someone else), perhaps the story will be about the work of art itself.

Report back sometime before Labor Day.

Long version:

The Missus and I met online in the early 1990s, in a forum on the erstwhile CompuServe Information Service (CIS). The forum was called the Literary Forum — LitForum for short, or sometimes just LF. It’s still online in slightly modified form (on the Web, of course), and now called the Books and Writers Community.

One of the “folders” (discussion topic areas, or sections as we used to call them) at LitForum is called Writers Exercises. At that time, all those many moons ago, LitForum had no such section; we first set up a section by that name in 1992, I think.

The idea behind the Writers Exercise section was (and maybe still is, I don’t know) to agree on some sort of monthly gimmick, device, activity to trigger the creative instinct. (For instance, we decided once that we’d all write a story on the subject, “Members of an online community/bulletin board/forum are dying.” On another occasion, we all tackled the task of writing a story in nothing but dialogue, start to finish. We wrote sonnets. And so on.) Over the course of the month, we’d share the results with one another, discuss ways to improve them, and perhaps post revised versions as well.

One of our earlier exercises (maybe even the first) required that we all write a story beginning with the same first sentence and the same last sentence As an additional twist, one of us (John L. Myers, still toiling in the LitForum vineyards) selected the actual first sentence from one book, and — completely independently — another of us (c’est moi) selected the actual last sentence from another book.

Wasn’t easy, y’know? The sentences which JLM and I chose (and which I can no longer remember) weren’t especially exotic or even idiosyncratic in style, but all kinds of things sprang to mind across a wide range of “exercisers.”

(By the way: The Missus’s first published story, “The Caretaker,” began as her contribution to that exercise. We just checked its printed version but, alas, she’d cruelly changed the opening and closing lines.)

This Running After My Hat exercise is simplified: Both the first and last sentences were written by the same author. In the same work.

In fact, they’re the only two surviving lines of the author’s only work.

The author was the woman whose image appears at the top of the post. Her name was Ginevra de’Benci; this portrait (oil on wood panel, 1479-1479) was painted by Leonardo da Vinci.

The Missus and I encountered this painting during our visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, a few weeks ago. From the National Gallery’s description of the work:

She was the daughter of a wealthy Florentine banker, and her portrait — the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas — was probably commissioned about the time of her marriage at age sixteen. Leonardo himself was only about six years older. The portrait is among his earliest experiments with the new medium of oil paint; some wrinkling of the surface shows he was still learning to control it. Still, the careful observation of nature and subtle three-dimensionality of Ginevra’s face point unmistakably to the new naturalism with which Leonardo would transform Renaissance painting… Ginevra is modeled with gradually deepening veils of smoky shadow—not by line, not by abrupt transitions of color or light.

Other features of Ginevra’s portrait reveal young Leonardo as an innovator. He placed her in an open setting at a time when women were still shown carefully sheltered within the walls of their family homes, with landscapes glimpsed only through an open window…

Ginevra’s face is framed by the spiky, evergreen leaves of a juniper bush, the once brighter green turned brown with age. Juniper refers to her chastity, the greatest virtue of a Renaissance woman, and puns her name. The Italian for juniper is ginepro.

But for us two writers, the most intriguing portion in the writeup was this:

A single line of her poetry survives: “I ask your forgiveness, I am a mountain tiger.”

I’ll be blogging in the meantime. But sometime before September 1, I’ll be back with my own crack at this exercise. Maybe you will be, too?