Double Indemnity

Some days ago you wrote of the almost persistent duality arguing for possession of a character, a condition given great visual interpretation by such mimes as Jacques Tati, Marcel Marceau, and on this side of the Atlantic, the redoubtable Bill Irwin. You could hardly expect to write a scene without bringing such dramatic duality to mind. True enough about your observation that all characters believe themselves right, these mimes are instructive because of the way they bring to the stage a lurching duality, where the audience can see the tug o'war.

Comes time now to bring two or more characters on stage the better to enhance drama, the better to bring forth the rigor of counterpoint, orchestrated with Bach-like acuity. One character alone merely fights the should I this or should I that encounter, admittedly in a small arena--the arena of self--but more about that in a moment or two. Two or more similarly afflicted characters bring forth the dramatic equivalent of counterpoint, which is to say subtext. The gap between what a character says and what the character actually feels/believes,'thinks/wants. The gap between Oliver Twist saying Please, sir, may I have some more, sir? and Thanks, no more for me.

One character on stage alone for too long has two major fall-back positions, the How had it all begun? retrospective evaluation of the events bringing him to this sorry state, or the other state, the delusional state in which the audience begins to recognize it is involved in a conspiracy with the author at the expense of the single character, who does not seem aware of the delusional atmosphere. After a time, we begin to suspect that Don Quixote is deluded and Sancho Panza a pragmatist. If we read far enough into the narrative, our opinions of each become blurred. They become excellent, shifting points of reference, points on which we may construct a story. It is arguable that the master and slave characters in Aristophanes The Frogs were the spiritual and dramatic brothers of Abbott and Costello, of Martin and Lewis, of Rowan and Martin. Not to forget Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, because they have brought the pairs of opposites full circle to the point where Felix Unger can leave a note on the refrigerator he shares with Oscar Madison, signed with his initials, F.U. More to the point, it is instructive to look at the definition of each individual and the chemistry produced by the difference between their personalities. Therein lies the yeast for story, for invention, for discovery.

Thus is it a good thing to take two or more characters on a metaphoric journey to the Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily, at which point they will be forced to steer a path between Scylla, a formidable monster, and Charybdis, a yet more formidable one. From this extraordinary gauntlet of monsters, we have the trope of being between Scylla and Charybdis, which means moving away from one menace or, if you will, one inner conflict, only to become beset by another. In The Odyssey, the goddess Circe counsels Odysseus to stick closer to Scylla as being the least dangerous of the two. By the time Aeneas came through the Straight of Messina in The Aeneid, Circe had once again changed her mind about Scylla (don't trust goddesses or Republicans) and reduced it to a precipitous outcropping, whence between Scylla and Charybdis became transmogrified to Between a rock and a hard place, which is the place for readers to see their principal characters lodged. Characters who are not in tight spots tend to lose their appeal. An illustrative comparison comes to mind: A character who is not caught between some rock and some hard place is like an individual relating to us his or her dreams in great detail. We cannot wait to escape those great details.

Start then with two or more characters, individually conflicted, coming in contact with one another in a tight situation: Emma Bovary caught between her boredom with her life and her sense that the fictional world of romances will provide excitement. Consider Huck Finn on a raft with a runaway slave. Consider Nora Helmer caught between an intransigent culture and a patronizing husband. Consider the occupants of the stagecoach in De Maupassant's Bouile de Suif. Consider Charlie and Terry Molloy in a taxicab in On the Waterfront.

See where that will get you.

Better yet, see where it will prevent you from diverting to.

The Inner Captain Spaulding. Hooray! Hooray!

For some time during recent weeks, I've been playfully occupied by the notion of a time when the world was less populous than it is now, a time when such remarkable characters from the traces of available classical literature didn't opt for a particular career so much as they were called to it by a direct summons from a god or goddess, a calling forth that probably led to the cration of the Muses, who no only presided over various of the arts but recruited as well. One of my favorites, as recently noted in these vagrant postings, was Hesiod, called forth not only to serve the gods but to write about them, catalog them, become in a sense their historian.

By the time such things got around to me, the muses were pretty busy and had a broader selection from which to chose than back in the days of eld. More than likely, instad of responding to a specific call from a specific muse, I was made aware of a cattle call at which I could audition, hopeful of beig chosen for something.

I've already spoken at some length about having been called by those estimable works of he who called himself Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi. It would not be accurate or fair to list Roughing It or The Innocents Abroad, because I'd already been called by the time I came to those and accordingly looked to them. It would be accurate and fair to add to the list of calls one Captain Geoffrey T. Spaulding and accordingly the vehicle in which he appeared, the motion picture Animal Crackers. By the time the character of Captain Spaulding had emerged from the psyche of his creator, one Julius Henry Marx, he had acquired greasepaint eyebrows and mustache, and had affected the forward bend of the upper torso, over the euator of the waist line, the right hand balled into a fist and placed at the base of the spine while the left hand swung freely.

Captain Geoffrey T. Spaulding became my muse, calling me to a task away from the serious notions of literature I'd begun to see in work I admired, singing a Siren song I thought was calling me forth to the pursuit of rigorous intellectual pursuit, scholarship, and, dare I say it, research.

Captain Spaulding is a difficult pole star to follow he is subversive of the goals I was pledged to follow. For some years I fought to disassociate myself from my inner Captain Spaulding with the growing tendency toward pomposity, which is one of the many things the "real" Captain Spaulding seeks to subvert, with quip, irony, outrageous puns, and a kind of 27/7 reduction to absurdity of all about him.

I think it may be safely ventured that where matters of pomposity are concerned, the pompous one is always last to make the discovery.

This is not to suggest a middle of the road course between the better works of Mr Twain and Captain Spaulding, because middle roads quickly betray themselves for being what they are--a pathway where the view is only moderate, safe, and populated with fast-food restaurants.

It takes study, patience, experiment, and a bit of the samurai's discipline to heed the call of your inner Captain Spaulding, to arrive with your own version of the chicken walk, the grease painted mustache and eyebrows, the samurai's vision of himself within his chosen terrain.

So far, it would appear that I have borrowed the eyebrows they sprout like weeds in a Summer garden, advertising my approach, warning that I am not to be taken for middle of the road. The years have brought other attributes, tools to clink about in my tool kit. I know this much: It is too late to turn back. I will have to make it on the bushy eyebrows and a few outrageous puns until the carpenters arrive to supply the finishing touches.

Pigeons, Pigeons, in Holding Patterns

You think the air traffic at O'Hare is scary, at LAX is beyond belief, at JFK is an impossible jumble.

You think that and you're undoubtedly correct. It is, after all, waning months of 2007, crowding in on, gulp, 2008. More things up in the air, more persons in flight. More purpose. This is not to gloss over the agendas of Neanderthals and Cro-magnons, bursting out of the Ice Age. They had just as severe a case for survival as we. We, at least, have MacBooks and North Face jackets, and sensible shoes. But as you trudge forth each day to where your car is parked, you cannot help but notice the warning signs.

Pigeon poop.

There are multifarious reasons, not the least of which is that our survival causes more pigeons to be up in the air, in holding patterns, waiting, oh waiting for clearance to come home and roost.

I have it on good if not impeccable authority that a professional juggler can only keep eleven objects in the air at one time. Try to get a twelfth dish or ball or whatever else the juggler fancies and you are doomed to be up to your rear end in broken pottery. I believe there is no limit to the number of pigeons you can have circling above you, waiting to come home to roost, their poop on the bonnet of your auto being one evidence of their holding pattern.

One such pigeon wanting to land is a November 9-11 pigeon, a weekend intensive workshop on point-of-view for writers. This will require a syllabus, if I am to go forth prepared, showing examples of the various points of view; the vision is not unlike Talmud in which voices of authority argue, sometimes across generations, their interpretations of the thing we see before us and which we agree to call The Human Condition. It is a syllabus I will prepare because I can't not do so; it is a way I have of setting things forth in much the same way it is Ishmael's way of signing on a ship when he is overcome with melancholia. I sometimes wish I had melancholia rather than the need to set things forth because melancholia is a tidal thing that can ebb and flow under the influences of love or enthusiasm or change of scenery, while the need to set things forth is merely a need to set things forth. Ishmael has his oceanic, tidal flow; I have the constant sound of fluttering wings circling above.

We will see Nick Caraway arguing on behalf of Jay Gatz, aka Gatsby. We will know about Huck Finn in the unlikely event that we have not read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and we will certainly agree to call Ishmael whatever he asks us to call him.
We should also consider the Talmudic litany in Madam Bovary, a veritable tsunami of points of view.

We must consider also our own work, the raucous multitudes of clangorous harmony, circling within our imagination, waiting to be noticed, named, set forth on note paper, transferred to screen, processed, and printed. Points of view, all of them, wanting to be heard, wanting to be believed, genies in a bottle, wanting to be freed from their confinement and let loose in the early November air, where they will do their best to convince us of the absolute correctness of their position, of the Platonic ideal of their vision, of the Socratic force of their logic.

What Comes First, the Chicken or the Ego?

Such was the early nature of my vision that I naturally supposed plot came before anything else, giving way to individuals, characters, who would take on traits and abilities even as I was taking on the kinds of traits and abilities my teachers wrote about in less-than-friendly terms on my report cards.

Since all of the things I truly enjoyed, whether it be the rather unruly, Mississippi-like path of Huckleberry Finn, or the sclerotic excesses of Ivanhoe, had plots and I wished to apply for membership in the writers' club, I thought plot was an absolute necessity. I even thought that the men and women who wrote stories had some remarkable gene that allowed them to pluck forth from the cosmos or ether a complete plot before they began writing. Not only young, foolish.

Some years, a great many reams of paper, and a number of typewriters later, I experienced what I thought was an epiphany but which was really only being thrown off the horse one time too many. Following the easier-to-assimilate course of epiphany, I reasoned that I would mosey up to plot via characters about whom I already had some sort of inkling. For the next years--relatively productive years, I might add-- this got me out of the slush pile and into the acceptance pile to the point where I actually had a bank account and assignments that openly admitted my tools were words and ideas. There was a minor setback the one and only night I actually dreamed a full-blown plot that, come the morning, did not seem ridiculous. I think I remember which novel that was, but I can't be sure.

Later still, I moved to the plateau of thinking it was neither plot nor character that provided the opening velocity but voice, which is to say the tone, attitude, and spirit of the contentions that would be played out in such narratives that I produced. Voice has been the big one for me over a long span, but earlier this evening, while pursuing Sally up the modest upthrust of Hale Park, toward a stone fence that reminds me of strolls in Devon, my mind wandered beyond the girding of loins for the fast-approaching writers' conference where I lead the late-night fiction workshop, wandered into the later reaches of this year, November, to be explicit, where for the same writers' conference, I am to lead one of the so-called intensive weekend workshops. My theme is to be point of view: who's telling the story, and why?

Whoops. I may have abandoned voice, which I dearly love, in favor of the more prosaic point of view, the one or ones through whose eyes the story is experienced. This may be genuine--dare I say it? evolution. It may also be that I've just come by a small, wonderful camera, which, given its size, has versatile and effective capabilities. It is a Lumix FX-30 with an ambitious Leica lens, reminding me as I heft it and pour through the instruction book of the focal-plane Leicas I used to be responsible for dusting and cleaning during my tenure after school and on Saturdays at The Brighton Way Camera Shop in Beverly Hills. Point of view is nothing less than who is holding the camera, and what that camera sees because of how and where it is pointed. A midget photographer in a room filled with professional basketball players would likely get lovely shots of knee caps. Similarly a tall photographer in a room of midgets would get some stunning and revelatory shots of male pattern baldness.

I am also mindful of Fathers and Sons, a memoir, and a rather loving one at that, of what it is like to have survived through the Waugh family, arguably one of the more dysfunctional, even more so than, say the Bushes.

Everyone in a family has a point of view, causing family gatherings and holidays to be remarkably cheerful or remarkably acrimonious, and sometimes these two polar opposites exist simultaneously. My late sister was a lifelong joy to me, an observation that could suggest she substituted for the things provided from parents, but no; they, too were great joys to me. My sister and I simply did not see eye to eye on my mother. Although we both adored (not too strong a verb here) my father, we saw Annie differently, my issues with Annie stemming, I think, from routine teen-boy/mother issues and ultimately rounding out quite nicely. My sister often joked that when I was out of the house, my mother was transformed into another person, another mother with another set of agendas. I countered by teasing my sister with having been traumatized by the witches in The Wizard of Oz and Snow White.

I see that this walk with Sally has at the very least given me some notes for November and a way of looking at story that could make it more yet of a crucible in which things are heated to the point of combustion, where they promptly run over the sides and cause merry hell to break loose.