Complications

Complications are enhancements to make ordinary wristwatches more expensive, things that somehow make you feel you own a Porsche, things intended to inject excitement into timing a soft boiled egg, convince you that you really are the sort of person who cares about elapsed time in some contest, convince others that you have daily need of knowing such times.

Outside of watches, complications are man's closest companion and as a consequence, have effect on women as well.

Complications are the engines that turn the wheels of Reality; they rev up the action in story and send persons involved in relationships off into unintended orbits from which they struggle to recover.

Complications are things that were supposed not to have emerged in the Good Old Days, although those same Good Old Days were not so remarkable as a retrospective glance might make them seem. True enough, things cost less then--a nickel or a dime, because of their buying power then, were adventures waiting to happen; you could get a cup of coffee, an ice cream cone, a comic book, a soft drink--and you were undoubtedly younger, thus better able to duck, outrun, or merely stand still to endure confrontation. But things only seemed less complicated. Age and perspective cohabit in the cabal of complexity, providing perspective for it of not a full exploration. But the perspective remains the only relative thing in the calculus; complexity inhuman affairs, wherever and whenever it is found, seeks its level the way water does in an aqueduct or, more to the point, complexity, like a carp in a pond, grows to fill its enclosure. Wherever we are, at any given time, complexity has taken our measure as though a Hong Kong tailor had fitted us for a three-piece suit; it even allows for the waist to be let out should the need arise.

Our first awareness of complexity often arrives as a matter of a choice that has been presented us. You close your eyes to expedite the time travel back to a voice offering you either of two stunning prospects that you become lost in the interstices. Tentatively, you essay that exquisite choice, smug with the problem-solving approach that has come to your mind. A little of both, you venture, only to be made aware how quickly such simplistic answers depart your sphere of awareness. "No! Chose one or the other. Not both." The reason behind this, you learn, is the reason not of logic but of power. "Because I say so."

Soon, you will learn to use Because I say so, and without quite realizing it, you will have gained admittance to the Big Tent of Complexity wherein motives--yours and "theirs'--become paramount and your interpretations of them are now the determining factors in your future behavior.

Complications are as much you as they are of those about you; they are your interpretations, your reading of a script, your interpretation of what someone means or wants or means and wants when he/she tells you he/she loves you. Complications are your understanding of how it is you have nothing against chocolate but the flavor of vanilla is ever so much more subtle and representative of you, this awareness taken to a new level of complexity when you are heartbreakingly in love with one who prefers chocolate. This means there will be a thin coating of chocolate on everything in your life, your silver, your dishes, your tongue, your other body parts including your heart. You cannot get through life without one such complication, one such love, one such story; you cannot pour your heart into a story or a libretto or ballet in which you demonstrate the futility of war without encountering someone who tells you he or she enlisted as a direct consequence of having heard/seen/read that particular work.

You may think you can renounce all such complications by means of the monastic life but even there, choices are to be made, consequences of them haunt you as you are forced by conscience and heart to chose between the dualistic or non-dualistic approach. Even there you might be tempted to say, you'll have some of each, but the answer is always the complication of No! Because I or someone or something says so.

Were you to be successful in determining the source of the I who says so, thinking to work your wit and charm upon It,you would still find the complexity of It preferring chocolate to your vanilla, and you by now being heartbreakingly in love with It.

I Confront, You Confront, He, She, or It Confronts

Confrontation may well be the head-on meeting of two or more opposing forces but it is also the spine of story and in the ironic bargain the navigation system by which most of us maneuver the reefs and shoals of our daily reality.

A sophisticated balancing act begins when we set forth to tell a story, putting onto a collision course the same forces we claim to observe in fiction while at the same time pursuing any kind of civil citizenry. We manipulate characters into irresistible situations of stress, moral confusion, and the just-beyond-arm's-reach realization of heartfelt agenda at the same time monitoring, controlling, and restraining our own behavior in the names of consideration and social restraint.

To the extent that we inject our own sense of tension and temptation into the story at hand, we invite the reader inside the raging dialectic between teller and reality, between observer and actual participant, between character and temptation.

Conventional wisdom whispers into our ear the encouragement to focus on conflict as the engine of story, an encouragement we fall upon with the eagerness and recognition of fleas discovering a long-haired dog. But our results of following such a course are fraught with the misplaced energy of thin, one- or two-dimensional characters who barely hint at the conversation to be had between writer and character, between characters and readers.

If the reader is led to feel the tension the writer experiences between story and reality, then and only then has the story succeeded in becoming more of a portal to interior conflict than a mere traffic report of conflicting agendas.

Confrontation is the meeting within each and every character, however front rank or humble walk-on, of the character's core agenda and what the appropriate behavioral dictates of that particular character--what is felt internally and desired as opposed to what is said and done in consequence. Accordingly, confrontation is present in every stave of dialogue, a simmering, bubbling catalyst that may explode into a force that causes the character to say and/or do something that betrays the protective covering, the Kevlar vest of reality worn by the character. Most characters will not willingly betray secrets of agenda until the collision with the stress of urgent confrontation, knocking at the gate like the porter in Macbeth, demanding to be let in.