[Video: the “Red Room” scene from the last episode of Twin Peaks. I’ve adjusted the starting point to begin at what’s relevant to this post; if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, you can stop it at about 2:04.]
I have zero training as a typist, but type pretty fast anyhow just from, well, practice. No doubt someone with real experience would look over my shoulder and wonder why I use my pinkies (or whatever) so seldom, why I make my fingers reeeeeach so much, and so on. It all works out pretty good for the most part… except when I’m sort of flying along, tappy-tappy-tappy, and looking at some source material rather than at the screen, and one or more fingers drift just a littttttle bit to one side. What results looks vaguely like English, and if I check the keyboard I can trace it back to see, Oh yes, the left hand got out of sync there, or just the index finger or thumb.
I had one of those moments earlier today. The word I was typing in a comment box: manuscripts. What actually came out: nabyscruots.
Which, oddly, fit the context. That’s exactly what the damn things are sometimes. It’s not quite right, this nabyscruot. Maybe if I poke at it a little it’ll turn into a real manuscript.
It occurs to me now that this is actually the voice in which The Muse speaks: she doesn’t speak to artists and writers in our native languages, but in a sort of nasal, distended voice which sounds almost like gibberish unless we listen really, really hard*. Which would explain why it’s so difficult to answer the seemingly obvious question, “Where do you get your ideas?”… and so frustrating to try. If we answered honestly, our listener — many times, at least — would have to strain to “get it.” It’s so much easier to speak in metaphors and plainspoken shortcuts, the equivalent of the subtitles in the above video.
People ask me where I came up with the idea for the book I’m working on now. I tell them, “truthfully”:
- I’d just finished writing a mystery. While working on that book, I’d read mysteries almost exclusively.
- The first non-mystery I read afterward was Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils.
- Visiting a Borders store in New Jersey — the first Borders I ever went into (and it’s now one of the ones about to close, sigh) — I decided I wanted to follow The Old Devils with a classic which I’d never read.
- Thinking, as I wandered into the back left corner of the store: Huh. There’s one. How come I never read Le Morte d’Arthur? Wonder if it’s at all like all the other King Arthur stuff I’ve ever seen? Wonder if it’s at all like that movie the Pythons did?
- …
- “The [first-draft] End”!
But that’s pretty misleading. In fact, I have no idea how I connected all the pieces (including not only The Old Devils and Le Morte d’Arthur, but ales, motor homes, archery, and the rest of it). I just listened, really, really hard.
But we can’t just say that, can we?
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* Or think of the old Lassie TV show. The dog’s barking frantically, almost apoplectically, jumping up and down and falling over, and all the thickheaded human can say is, “What is it, girl? Did Timmy fall down the well? No? You hungry? You wanna go for a walk?”
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P.S. Here’s the backwards-talking little man from that Twin Peaks episode, explaining how to talk backwards — before, of course, the sound and video editing crews step in to play your backwards-talking voice backwards. (Got that?)
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
I haven’t even read this yet, but had to comment that yesterday – yes 12/21, also – I was having a discussion of a need for a Twin Peaks “reunion” of watching with our sub-tenants. Who knew that you would be thematically correct?
whaddayamean says
nasal and distended. teehee. what a fine point to put on that.
John says
brudder: We’ve push Twin Peaks at so many people now that we’re running out of potential converts. When we loan the boxed DVD set to someone, or show it at home, people most often get no further than that very early shot of Laura Palmer’s body (Pete Martel: “She’s deeeead. Wrapped in plastic“) and start looking around for Exit signs.
Right around now, 20 years ago, we’d just entered that awful series hiatus after the revelation of LP’s killer. (I read somewhere that Lynch never wanted to reveal who that was, but had his hand forced by the network. Sigh.)
John says
whaddayamean: I just wanted to emphasize that it’s no picnic for The Muse, either. She’s always straining: to make herself heard in the first place and then, once heard, to be even remotely understood. :)