The Second Person

Early, significantly early in your quest for skill and competence in the writing craft, you were struck by a comment made by a middle school teacher to the effect that use of the second person--the you point of view--was almost instinctive in verbal American English usage but was unwieldy and frowned upon in written for. Of all the middle school teachers you did not like, you did like this particular teacher. Your reaction and response to her statement was not accordingly a gesture of defiance or protest or a combination of the two but rather an experiment to see if there was merit in her observation. The teacher's remarks were prologue to the terms and conditions of a writing assignment due the next day, an assignment of a five-hundred-word essay written in either first or third person. Your submission was in the second person. To demonstrate to this one of your middle school teachers that you did like, you also turned in a five-hundred word essay written in first person, a demonstration on your part that you could follow orders, could even do so in a non-contentious manner. Well or course she loved the second person essay, was only mildly approving of the first person venture, and made a point of talking about taking risks. As a result, the second person point of view stayed with you, much like the two Chesterfield cigarettes you carried about in an empty Sucrets tin, taboo items kept close at hand for the right moment, as tools in a tool kit.

From time to time, you used the second person in what were otherwise third person narratives, pulp novels for the old Nick Carter series, or some of the other commercial ventures in which third person and multiple point of view approaches led the narrative way. It was not until you'd moved to Santa Barbara and drew a book by John Sanford for review that you became so happily caught up with second person as having potential for sustained narrative. When you were ceremoniously invited to the stone carriage house on upper Buena Vista Road for strong muddy coffee and slabs of Sara Lee yellow cake served by JS, you were allowed to see his own pleasure in the second person. Indeed, the very book you'd reviewed was autobiographical, a fact that allowed you to see how second person might, if allowed to run unchecked, speak to the notion of the writer being too involved with self to take anything else into consideration. "It [second person] is not a distancing technique," he said. "Using it allows you to step into the world about you and capture meaningful parts of it to share with the reader. Listen," he said, "do you keep a journal?"

"Sure," you said.

"Then try this. Try one entry in second person. Then we'll talk some more."

You did.

Over the next round of coffee, considerably less murky because it had been brewed by Maggie Roberts, his screen writer wife, you confessed to admiring the second person but being led by it to write your journal entries in third person.

"Not bad, kiddo," JS said. "That serves the same purpose--writing about you as though someone else were doing the writing. I could see that working." Some of his previous and subsequent works were lapidary amalgams of second and third person, making you feel closer to them as you read them, in a comparative way, the way you felt when seeing your first play performed circular staged after a history of watching conventionally staged plays.

One of the more remarkable, sustained works of fiction rendered in second person is Jay Macinerney's Bright Lights, Big City, which opens thusly:

"You are not the type of guy who would be at a place like this at this
time in the morning. But here you are and you cannot say that the terrain
is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a
nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either
Heartbreak or Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip
into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then
again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack
of clarity is a result of too much of that already. The night has already
turned on the imperceptible pivot where two a.m. changes to six a.m. You
know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to
concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous
damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there,
you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet
trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush."

Italo Calvino's remarkable If on a Winter's Night a Traveler uses the second person to introduce a convention-shattering sense of relationship between the author and reader, indeed between the reader and the reader's self:

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a
winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.
Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the tv is always on in
the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!”
Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise. “I’m reading. I don’t
want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket;
speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if
you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.
Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up
or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy
chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the
hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the
bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position.
With the book upside down, naturally.

"Of course the ideal position for reading is something you can never
find. In the old days, they used to read standing up, at a lectern. People
were accustomed to standing on their feet, without moving. They rested
like that when they were tired of horseback riding. Nobody ever thought of
reading on horseback; and yet now, the idea of sitting in the saddle, the
book propped against the horse’s mane, or maybe tied to the horse’s ear
with a special harness, seems attractive…"

Nor should we forget the mind-boggling icon from our own past (note how easy it was to slip into the we point of view):

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on
the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is as far as he knows the
only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is
another way if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.
And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t. Anyhow, here he is at the
bottom and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie the Pooh.
When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to say, “But
I thought he was a boy?”
“So did I,” said Christopher Robin.
“Then you can’t call him Winnie?”
“I don’t.”
“But you said—“
“He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what ther means?”
“Ah, yes; now I do,” I said quickly, and I hope you do, too, because it
is all the explanation you’re going to get.

You already know about Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins and so you don't have to quote from that, tempting as it might be.

J.S. Bach wrote a treatise (in third person, by the way) discussing the emotional impact transmitted to a particular musical composition as a result of the key in which it was written. Inspired by that, you have thought long and seriously, briefly and humorously about the person in which a story or novel or essay or biography or even a recipe is written. Although you have never met the man James Wood, it is as though you had, having read through his recent How Fiction Works. Said book would better be titled How Fiction Works for Me. It is as though Norman Mailer had approached fiction instead of himself (see Advertisements for Myself). You are particularly tuned to Woods as you write this because among other things, Woods believes the I or first person narrator is the most reliable of all which has prompted you to believe that Ishmael would have been just as trustworthy and believable in the third person. You of course never knew Melville, but you feel safe in assuming he was sold entirely on the first person because of the first sentence. When you get a gift such as that, you take it and run.

More Dots to Connect--or to Collide

When you were much younger, there was no dearth of ideas, only the manner of their presentation and your response to them. Ideas, notions, concepts, were presented to you as though by liveried waiters, with dramatic eclat, with trumpeting flourish. Your response to them was of an agreeable single-mindedness. It was not as though you were incapable of doing numerous things at once, rather you knew, you felt there was enough time to allow the singleness of focus. One thing at a time. One thing into which you threw yourself in much the same way Sally throws herself into the consequences of a scent.

The short story of a student, Kelli Noftle, reminds you with great vividness of what it was like to be thirteen, the rampant rage of hormones trumping subtext events such as politics and the reading of political philosophers, the studies supplemental to approaching religion confirmation ceremony, the concentration-camp atmosphere of junior high school, and all around you, the vivid, exciting split away from swing and traditional jazz of a emerging harmonic progression called be-bop (which, had he lived longer, it is fun to speculate that Johann Sebastian Bach would have discovered).

It is comforting in its way to have this single-mindedness of purpose. The individuals you admire seem to carry it with them as they age, producing the work you admire and use as your individual pole star while engaging the subtexts of career, romantic relationships, parenting, friendships, and the necessities of aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual growth. Often you admire and envy this ability as much or more than you admire a given project.

Along comes the later game, bringing with it no lessening of ideas, perhaps even more and better ones to compete with the subtext. But now, there is a kind of cosmic sound track to go along with this procession, this Trader Joe's of the mind. It is the voice of that manipulative cynic, Andrew Marvell:

"But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot drawing near
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity..."

In a real sense, Marvell had in mind exactly what Kelli's thirteen-year-old boy had in mind, because within the same poem, Marvell goes on to suggest:

"The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace..."

When I was about the age of Kelli's horny thirteen-year-old, I became convinced that knowing this poem by memory would help enhance my virginal transition toward the plateau of those who had indeed embraced in the fullest and finest sense of that trope. (It never helped! Yet I still remember the goddamned poem.)

From all this arises an avalanche of questions: Can an artist of any sort be known from an inspection of the clatter and collision of ideas and notions whirling about within? Should we be content to keep our focus on the individual work and its implications? Should we try to find out as much about the artist as possible to expand our potential interpretation of the individual work? Would we better appreciate an individual Meditation from Marcus Aurelius if we knew his life at closer hand? Would we appreciate The Tin Drum more or less from our recent knowledge that Gunter Grass was not only a Nazi sympathizer, he was a ember of the Waffen SS?

One of my treasured cyber-acquaintances is with a photographer who lives a good thirteen hours away. (Twelve if you fly Air New Zealand, Digby Wolfe says). Known to me only as Pod, I am drawn regularly to the photographs he posts on his blog, photos showing--sometimes simultaneously--a splendid sense of humor, an immense curiosity, a well-developed photographer's eye, a sense of composition, a moving ability at narrative prose, a sense of whimsy, great curiosity, and more qualities that fall within this creative terrain. Only last week, in a comment he left on these vagrant pages, he mentioned having read the novel by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murikami that I a even now in the process of reading. Is it possible to get an accurate take on a writer from another culture who writes in another language, Pod pondered. "i loved it, but i don't think i understood it as well as i would if i was japanese. i love their horror films too, but again, there is always something i feel i don't quite 'get," he wrote.

In a more-than-tangential way, pod illustrates my point about the degree we can be influenced by mere exposure to the work. Having pondered his question, I rather suspect I will see more or look longer at the next picture he posts.

My treasured mentor was a delightfully supportive and imaginative person. Would I have enjoyed her own work as much as I do if I had not known she was refused admission to medical schools because of having experienced one or two petite mal seizures? Possibly not because I was so caught in her work. But my answer now is Of course it mattered because I so wanted to be like her that I took in as much about her life as I could.

Right now, 8:41 p.m., August 10, 2007, Santa Barbara, CA, my answer is the weasel answer: What remains of us is our performance, which is to say the amount of our self we put into our work. It keeps Marcus Aurelius alive for me, although I suspect that if I think it through, I could apply pod's comments about Haruki Murikami to my take on Marcus Aurelius.

For the nonce, go figure.

Making a Scene

A few readers of these vagrant entries wondered aloud to me at a recent Friday morning coffee klatsch at Peet's. Their wonderment had to do with my commendations of the blogs of photographers, notably Liz Kuball, Ben Huff, the remarkable Aussie who calls himself pod; and the European combo who call themselves Mrs. Deane.

Thus were we launched into a heated and productive dialectic on craft, in which more questions are invariably raised and left unanswered than those answered. The result is that we are haunted by the persistent nagging of the unanswered questions.

All the photographers mentioned above have posted on their blog sites intriguing photos of buildings, many of these photos having no people, some having people on the periphery, as though an afterthought. Net result: These photos encourage me to seek the personality in the buildings. True enough, in some darkened recess of my personality, I relate all buildings to people, and thus pod's moving shot of the roof of what appears to be a factory or warehouse evokes the dust jacket art for any number of Dicken's novels; Ben Huff's quonset huts in the Alaskan snow evoke visions of the types who work inside them; Liz Kuball's buildings in the Salsipuedes--what a lovely name: get out if you can!--industrial tract evoke the gritty quality of work, work being done, work left undone, the intrinsic neatness of industrial workings, the intrinsic jumble that attends my own work. Mrs. Deane, currently on a technical investigation of color and color separation, produces shots in which color literally and figuratively colors the emotional impact.

Johann S. Bach once wrote a treatise in which he set down the emotion evoked in every key, advising, for instance that a mass be rendered in one key, a celebration in another, a lamentation in yet another, and so on down the emotional spectrum.

I maintain that every work has at least one resident emotion. It is the task of the shooter, the composer,the writer, the actor, to convey those emotions as cleanly as possible.

Yes, yes; I know. We have all seen those tests in which people are photographed in the emotional equivalent of mug shots, and we, the viewers, are asked to identify the emotion we think the individual is registering. Looking at the "results" we see how what we supposed a smirk was really a suspicious glance, and don't mention that full-on smile; that character was in actuality registering feelings of superiority.

Nevertheless.

What we learn is to come as close as we can to getting our own feelings in the range finder--the emotional range finder.

We writers need settings that by their inherent nature, and the words we use to fine-tune them, induce an atmosphere. That atmosphere becomes the crucible for the basic dramatic unit, the scene. Buildings have personality. Seascapes and landscapes have a resident genie. Motel rooms. Offices. These are the settings for our stories. We have to give them as much thought as Mrs. Deane gives gradiations of color, as pod emphasizes mood by use of shadowy darkness, as Ben Huff removes a coating of snow with a splash of bright sunlight, as Liz Kuball emphasizes the presence of personality of an unoccupied building by her inclusion of a shadow from a nearby telephone pole, the photographic equivalent of an eye liner emphasizing the roundness of a model's eyes.

Especially when I have been writing reviews of late, it seems a natural order to favor the words "gritty," "spiky," "notional," and "driven" in connection with characters. This in large measure is because I am all those plus, I might add, impatient, curious, and irreverent. No accident then that I think these are excellent traits for characters, both the characters of which I write and those of whom I most enjoy reading.

Put them into a setting with personality--an abandoned building, a stunningly fawning architecture such as the Fess Parker Doubletree Inn in Santa Barbara, a Zen-like loft in Tri-Beca--then turn them loose to have at one another. That is the beginning of a scene.

Apply the pressures of chance, misadventure, and the chaos theory. Heat until they combust. Heat until the unthinkable comes to pass.

John Coltrane. Wayne Shorter. Bill Evans. Carmen McRae. J. S. Bach. Daniel Woodrell. Nicole Krauss. Zoe Strauss. William Butler Yeats. Frank Ghery. Mark Twain. Alice Munro.

The unthinkable, come to pass.

And now, the most difficult but necessary condition: Go thou and do likewise.

Cuand' arrive, scrive. When you get there, write.


My book review for the week beginning 04/12;