From whiskey river:
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire since the word go. — Annie Dillard
Sometimes using the Web loses all its charm, because you’re too focused on problem-solving.
You need the answer to a question, say, about some damn thing or other that’s locking your computer up, and you don’t know if it’s Linux, or a video driver, or that cheese Danish which inadvertently fell from your mouth (of course it was inadvertent; you wouldn’t do something that stupid on purpose!) — where you’d parked it for a moment while swapping in the RAM upgrade, you just needed two hands for, like, three seconds — fell, as I was saying, into the guts of your computer, and when you went to scoop it up it just sort of schmeared across the surfaces and into the guts of what seems to be a satellite’s-eye view of two hundred silicon-and-plastic-and-steel skyscrapers waaaaay down at the end of a SimCity “game,” the boring part where you know you’re going to have to call down an earthquake or tornado or a major tax hike, inciting SimRevolution, just to keep from falling asleep with your hand on the mouse and dragging an entire suburb across the mountains.
At such moments, it’s easy to be overawed by the fact that Google actually returns close to 9,000 hits when you search on the words linux, video, driver, cheese, and danish (using The Missus’s computer, of course, since your own, at the moment, has as little to do with computing as it does with, say, dishwashing). It’s easy to be flat-out annoyed by that, in fact. Doesn’t Google know this is serious? You need an answer, damn it! An answer. An, as in one. You don’t need random attention-deficit Google-musings.
At such moments, congratulations, jerk: you’ve forgotten what the Web was like in, say, 1996. No Google. No MSN. No Yahoo. Very little, in fact, except the primo contribution of the Web to human communication: hyperlinks.
You’ve forgotten the unexpected pleasures you can get from simply hop-skip-jumping.
About a week ago, I stumbled across the blog known as “Seven Impossible Things to Do Before Breakfast.” (And I’d thought “Running After My Hat” was an ambitious blog name…) It didn’t take me long to add it to the Je Ne Sais Quoi… blogroll category, over there on the right. And one of these days I’ll do a post about it.
This post, though, is about a surprise I got from simply following a link — or rather, a couple of links: from the most recent 7-Imp entry, to a post on another blog by someone named Haven Kimmel. My curiosity was triggered simply by the phrase “The Sopranos.”
Now, I’ve almost lost my sense of surprise that wonderful New York Times bestselling writers have been doing their work for years, quite successfully, with no help at all from my wallet or even my admiration, let alone fanboyishness. Almost, but not quite. And so I can’t help asking the question: Where has Haven Kimmel been, where did she come from, and why haven’t I heard of her before?!?
Okay. I sorta understand. But now I’ve got some catching up to do (and you may, too).
In the meantime, I’ll refer you to an early post on her blog — or rather to its title, “Haven’s First Law: Never Quote A Better Writer Than Yourself.” Because I’m about to quote, very briefly, from her children’s book Orville: A Dog Story
Orville barked and barked against his chain. And right in the middle of a long summer day, when he had barked about how he was really a good dog in a bad mood, and how he missed that one-eyed doll, and how there was something so terrible about the feeling of a chain against a neck, everything changed, because a girl with cotton-candy hair moved into the little house across the road and Orville fell in love.
And then, just because I don’t trust you to follow the above link to her “Sopranos” post, there’s this:
…perhaps things were slightly askew in my psyche, because in an e-mail exchange between three friends I was asked to name off the top of my head (seriously! think fast!) how I would choose to die if I only had twenty-four hours. What would I do, spend my last day hysterical over my motherless children? Try to see the Seven or Ten or Eight Wonders of the World? God, no. I answered as honestly as humanly possible. I said, “I would want to spend 24 hours with Tony Soprano and then I would want him to shoot me in the heart.”
Ha!
My weekly favorite selection from the incomparable whiskey river (which daily seems as unlike a blog as it’s possible for a blog to be):
It Was Like This: You Were Happy
It was like this:
you were happy, then you were sad,
then happy again, then not.It went on.
You were innocent or you were guilty.
Actions were taken, or not.At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
Mostly, it seems you were silent – what could you say?Now it is almost over.
Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.
It does this not in forgiveness –
between you, there is nothing to forgive –
but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment
he sees the bread is finished with transformation.Eating, too, is now a thing only for others.
It doesn’t matter what they will make of you
or your days: they will be wrong,
they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man,
all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.
(by Jane Hirshfield)
A number of things I’ve come across in the last week have reminded me — at a time (yes) when I really should be concerned with ending a story — just how little it takes to start one. In particular, they’ve reminded me of the way in which implied story lines radiate forwards and backwards, starting from a single moment captured in a painting or photograph.
First, there was my post of the other day, about Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus painting and the W.H. Auden poem which sprang from it. What makes this a “story” as opposed to a conventional landscape is the precise instant crystallized in that tiny little area of the bottom right corner. We can imagine what must have led to that moment: the construction of the wings, the warnings from Daedalus, the over-confident youth rising and rising and rising toward the sun. We can see some other things happening during it, of course, and imagine other things which we can’t actually see (such as Daedalus, watching horrified from a shoreline). And we can guess about the moments to follow, from the immediate (the long, panic-stricken but then silent sinking of a feathered figure to the bottom of the sea) to the more remote (the wasteland of Daedalus’s life to come).
Then along came some posts over the last few days on the writing in the water blog. The innkeeper there, marta, recently acquired a scanner; she’s begun to post old family photos, taking off from each to ruminate about the stories it tells, fails to tell, or tells incompletely — and the stories it might have told instead (if the world and the people in it were different).
So while I was thinking about these things, it occurred to me that visual “moments” aren’t the only ones from which stories might branch, forward and back. Musical ones can work that way, too.
I don’t mean obvious story songs — shaggy-dog stories or Broadway show tunes, for instance (the latter of which can be associated with specific points within the show’s plot). No, what I’m getting at is songs, especially short ones, whose lyrics suggest with a quick few brushstrokes more — sometimes much more — than the words themselves say.
Like marta’s (or anyone’s) snapshots, like Fall of Icarus-style paintings, these songs fall into a category we might call “shadows on the wall.” A shadow is not the thing it represents, of course; but our eyes have been trained to see in certain shadowy shapes, or portions of shapes, the corresponding fully-fleshed 3D objects projected, darkly, on the wall. In the same way, shadow-on-the-wall story starters — images and songs — mark the edges of a plotline or a relationship, and let our minds fill in the gaps.
At the time these (not exactly earth-shaking) revelations came to me, I was in the car; in the CD player was Carly Simon’s Torch
A 1948 science-fiction story by Alan Nelson is called “Narapoia.” (And no, smarty — whoever you are — I did not read it when it originally came out.)
It’s an entertaining enough premise: a man visits a psychotherapist, showing signs of an unusual disorder:
“I don’t know exactly how to explain it to you, Doctor,” the young man began. He smoothed back his slick black hair that shone like a phonograph record and blinked his baby-blue eyes. “It seems to be the opposite of a persecution complex.”
Dr. Manly J. Departure was a short severe man who made a point of never exhibiting surprise. “The opposite of a persecution complex?” he said, permitting one eyebrow to elevate. “How do you mean — the opposite of a persecution complex, Mr. McFarlane?”
“Well, for one thing, I keep thinking that I’m following someone.” McFarlane sat placidly in the big easy chair, hands folded, pink cheeks glowing, the picture of health and tranquility. Dr. Departure stirred uneasily.
“You mean you think someone is following, you, don’t you?” the doctor corrected.
“No. No, I don’t! I mean that while I’m walking along the street, suddenly I have this feeling there is somebody just ahead of me. Somebody I’m after. Someone I’m following. Sometimes I even begin to run to catch up with him! Of course –there’s no one there. It’s inconvenient. Damned inconvenient. And I hate to run.”
After a couple of visits, the patient confesses to another symptom: non-hallucinations, you might call them — hallucinations which turn out not to be hallucinations at all:
“I’m afraid I’m beginning to be troubled with hallucinations, Doctor,” McFarlane finally volunteered.
Dr. Departure mentally rubbed his hands. He was back on old familiar territory now. He felt more comfortable.
“Ah, hallucinations!”
“Rather, they’re not really hallucinations, Doctor. You might say they were the opposite of hallucinations.”
Dr. Departure rested his eyes a moment. The smile disappeared from his face. McFarlane continued:
“Last night, for instance, Doctor, I had a nightmare. Dreamed there was a big ugly bird perched on my short-wave set waiting for me to wake up. It was a hideous thing — a fat bulbous body and a huge beak that turned upward like a sickle. Blood-shot eyes with pouches under them. And ears, Doctor. Ears! Did you ever hear of a bird with ears? Little tiny, floppy ears, something like a cocker spaniel’s. Well, I woke up, my heart pounding, and what do you think? There actually was an ugly fat bird with ears sitting on the short-wave set.”
Dr. Departure perked up again. A very simple case of confusing the real with the unreal. Traditional. Almost classical.
“A real bird on the short-wave set?” he asked gently. “With blood-shot eyes?”
“Yes,” McFarlane replied. “I know it sounds silly. I know it’s hard to believe.”
“Oh, not at all. Not at all. That type of visual aberration is a common enough phenomenon.” The doctor smiled soothingly. “Nothing to…”
McFarlane interrupted him by reaching down and hoisting the carton onto the desk. “You don’t understand, Doctor,” he said. “Go ahead. Open it.”
The doctor looked at McFarlane a moment, then at the brown box which was punctured with air holes and tied with heavy twine. Disconcertedly, the doctor cut the string and folded back the top flaps. He leaned over and peered in — then sucked in his breath. Pouchy, blood-shot eyes leered up at him. Floppy ears. The up-side-down beak. An obscene-looking bird.
“His name is Lafayette,” McFarlane said, tossing a few bread crumbs into the carton which were quickly devoured with a noisy, repulsive gulp. “He rather grows on you after awhile, don’t you think?”
(You can find more information — including the complete story — easily enough on the Web, if you’d like to follow up.)
By now you may wondering what this might have to do with writing, per this post’s title. Glad you asked…
For reasons which I’m not sure I could articulate, I love this drawing without reservation. (Click the image for a larger version.) It’s from a page in 2007’s Edward Gorey “Page-a-Day” calendar and I’ve kept it around on various computers, trying without success to make it work as a desktop wallpaper. (Icons are inconsistently legible when layered over it.) Perhaps I must get used to just knowing about it, without ever using it in some way.
(If there’s anything guaranteed to p!ss a writer off, it’s knowing about something which can’t be used.)
The painting above was done by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in 1558; its title is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. (You can click the image to see a larger version.) It looks unremarkable, on first glance: a fairly typical (albeit expertly done) late-Renaissance rendering of a fairly typical pastoral/nautical subject. A — yes — a landscape.
But Icarus? Where’s Icarus?
Just in case you don’t know the Greek mythological story, here’s Wikipedia’s brief version:
So then. In the painting, Icarus must be falling. Perhaps in that bright sunlight-glowing area of the sky, just right of center; such an intensely lighted area certainly draws the eye… No? Then maybe it’s what the shepherd is looking up at — after all, he’s placed dead-center in the painting, so he must be important. Right?Daedalus fashioned a pair of wax wings for himself and his son [Icarus]. Before they took off from the island, Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea. Overcome by the sublime feeling that flying gave him, Icarus soared through the sky joyfully, but in the process he came too close to the sun, which melted his wings. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms. And so, Icarus fell into the sea…
Well, no. Here’s where Icarus is:
Per whiskey river:
As incredible as it sounds, an unhappy man does not realize that happiness is better than unhappiness. Knowing only his own concealed anguish, he worships it, which is the same as self-worship. – Vernon Howard
Sound familiar? It will if you listen in on enough writerly conversation: it’s the sound of writers who aren’t writing.
The Missus and I live in a smallish subdivision some distance away from downtown. Nonetheless, the area around the development is all within City limits — except for the development itself, which for whatever mysterious reason has never agreed to annexation. We (TM and I) refer to it, privately, as The Principality — because it’s so much like a Monaco situation, y’know?
Anyhow, recently The Principality’s governing body (a/k/a the neighborhood association) voted to establish one of those “neighborhood crime watch” programs. You know the deal: neighbors look out for each other, particularly alert to the possibility that miscreants of one kind or another might be breaking into homes or cars and so on.
Not that we personally know of any such incidents. (I’m not saying there have been none — just that we’ve never heard of any.) …Oh, wait, yes, I’m sorry: a neighboring subdivision had its entry sign stolen. Other than that, nada.
But as we all know in the post-9/11 era, unseen threats are everywhere. In fact, a given imaginable danger is magnified in direct proportion to its invisibility. Kind of If there’s no evidence of wrongdoing, you’re just not looking hard enough.
So we have the new crime-watch thing. One key element of which, apparently, is the appointment of “block captains” to coordinate the crime-watching efforts of neighbors who live along a specific stretch of roadway. Our own block captain recently mailed us a two-page flyer providing some details. The following is, I believe, a critical excerpt (emphasis in the original):
…As your block captain, I will be asking for you to provide phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, which will allow two-way communication between neighbors and the neighborhood crime watch program. The exchange of this information will allow members of the community to provide and receive timely information regarding suspicious events and observations that have occurred. As an example, we recently had neighbors report a suspicious vehicle parked in the area. Through our communication, we also learned that the County Sheriff’s office did locate the vehicle and identify the occupants. Although on this occasion, the occupants of the vehicle did not intend to commit a criminal activity, through the effective reporting and communication of our neighbors, the individuals most assuredly would have been apprehended, had they committed a crime.
Got that? “Had they committed a crime.”
And if they didn’t, in fact, commit a crime — well, it’s their own fault they got “located” and “identified.” After all, they were in a suspicious vehicle, the dumb bastards! I’ll tell ya, what’s this world coming to when everyone can’t afford a decent, respectable, non-suspicious car?
Just got back from Chris & Jess’s wedding weekend…
The Missus and I stayed at a lovely hotel in DC, the Sofitel on Lafayette Square. The bathroom was especially well appointed, and among its attractions was the mirror over the sink — which, as I understand it [cough], had obviously been designed by someone who sometimes needed to apply makeup. What made it suitable for this activity was the lighting: the mirror was a large square, and every single edge was brightly lit.
At first, though, it sort of disturbed me to use the mirror but I couldn’t quite figure out why. I just wanted to conduct my business (none of it, I hasten to add, involving makeup) and get the hell away from it. It just sort of… sort of… creeped me out.
Then I realized the problem.
To wit: see anything unusual here?
