Illusion

There is no magic, only apparent magic, which is to say illusion.

There is no work except for chores and activities that are not play, an equation that forces you to conclude that you must find illusions to make the work seem more like play and the play at your craft seem more like work.

There have been times when you have done both, work and play; times when you only worked, and times when you only played.  When the play began to seem like work, you knew it was time to move on to something else and, indeed, tried such stratagems as work, study, practice, even imitation.  In an irony, work only brought you into conditions where you thought, spoke, and acted on the very play you had ridden into a dead end; you were now teaching about writing and you were editing writing of others.  Although both of these were still work, you became curious enough about each to decide you would like to become proficient enough in each to make them as well become play for you.  The clock began ticking.  You could only teach up to the point where you had begun to discover that writing was no longer play.  Worse yet, you could only edit up to the point of being effective up to the point where--you guessed it--writing was no longer play.  If you did not improve all three, you would soon catch up to yourself, reaching the point where not only writing was work but teaching and editing as well.

Back to the one thing that was not work.  Reading.  Once again you read, working only when you needed money to support your habits.  Read, thought, was able to begin practicing again.

Through this process you become increasingly less mainstream and in another irony less likely and simultaneously more likely to move from having to work to being able to play as you wish, becoming, if you will, more removed from your statistical relationship via age and other demographic to the society in which you live.  The very qualities you practice make you less a fit, more out of step, more likely to attract attention as a person on the margin.  There are times, playful times to be sure, when you see yourself as one of the wretches in a Dostoyevski novel, slightly mad about the edges, going forth, looking, reading not merely books but landscapes, either those to inhabit or those to avoid.

You have evolved slowly to a happy, optimistic individual who experiences bouts of cynical despair then sets about finding some transformative writing project that will readjust the landscape for a time.

Hindus often use the term maya to reference illusion.  The more devout the Hindu the more he or she works (or plays) on the theory that only God is real, all else is illusory.  Thus you hear from them, It's all maya.  All illusion, except...

There is just enough wisdom in Hinduism to stop short of defining the reality that is God because, they continue, once you do you have limited God by giving it form and purpose and quality and who are you to do these things?  If you wish to lead the religious life, pick some particular form or aspect of God and attempt to see it.  But be aware that there are all these other aspects which you have not recognized.  Best approach is to treat everything as though it were God.

You, as you look for play, take some heart from your Hindu friends and from that crazy Hindu poet, Ramprasad, but as well from that equally crazy Yeats and Hopkins, and not to forget e.e. Cummings or, for that matter, Albert Goldbarth, and treat everything as though it were the playful illusion of writing.

Reliable Narrator or Writer Pursuing a Story?

Time now to turn the light of inquiry squarely on yourself, reminding you as you do so of the many film noir scenes you've watched at various stages of your life in which one or more detectives was attempting to lead a suspect along the perilous border running between the landscape of guilt and the loftier one of exculpation.  The inquisitor may or may not have had a hunch or gut feeling about the relative guilt or innocence of the accused.  He may also have had the cynicism that allowed the belief that all of us are guilty of something.  Or, as some of my lawyer friends have said as the level in the bottle declined, My clients all lie to me in some degree or another.  The inquisitor may simply be doing a job that runs on the duality of guilt and innocent--suspects are one or the other.  Questioning them will bring you and them to one conclusion or the other.  No middle ground.  

Thus the question:  How reliable a narrator are you?  This followed with:  Can your account of an event be trusted?  Add to this the follow-up: Have you a motive or agenda that will color your narration?

The answer to the latter is an emphatic yes.  My motive is to amuse, to inform, to cause suspenseful apprehension, to surprise.  Much as I admire Stephen King, I do not seek to emulate his intent of frightening the reader, although I do not think frightening the reader to be an unworthy aim.

I write in the spirit of observation, energized by the growing involvement in that observation, finding in it meaning and satisfaction from the truths, untruths, layers of meaning and intent that become apparent as I go.  Of course I present questions to these invented characters and situations, thinking they too should squirm in situations as I have squirmed, sometimes in later recognition of how wrong or foolish I was, other times in amazement at what I have learned from a simple transaction.

Guilt and innocence are neither my pole stars nor my cynical quotas, nor do right and wrong call out to me for representation or dramatization; all these are merely settings within a larger landscape of experience and behavior.  Guilt, innocence, right, and wrong are merely costumes the characters wear while performing their parts in the larger drama of trying to get things done and of their attitudes and composure when confronting the true guiding forces of story--consequence.  Take away their routine, their status, and their dignity, then see how they respond, then start writing because then the story has begun.

What's in a River?

  I first came to Mark Twain through the usual entryways of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, intent only on the kinds of adventure attractive to boys of my age, and with no immediate thought of following Twain through the doors of the literary life, although the memory does persist of my asking a fifth grade teacher if one might actually make a living in such a manner.  Mrs. DeAngelo replied with her characteristic understatement wrapped in a boxing glove, "Twain seemed to have done well enough for himself, but you have nothing in common with him and you have that funny California accent."

That encounter seemed to have planted at least one seed.  I resolved to get myself somehow back to California, where I would not appear to have an accent, and I resolved to follow Twain, which in some ways at least I did.There were a few other ventures into Twain fiction, notably Tom Sawyer Detective, and Puddin'head Wilson, but I was not pushed entirely through the door of my life's calling until shortly after my thirteenth birthday, when I was gifted with a book still in my possession, a large, inexpensive compendium of Twain's work, including Tom and Huck and Connecticut Yankee as well as several of the sketches, the text of some speeches, and large portions of one of the most magesterial and remarkable works I had ever read (and to this day dip into with soaring admiration and enjoyment).

By this time, I had read enough Twain and comments about him to be sure I had found a sturdy companion as well as text book in this volume, enthusing from time to time on the spot on drama and cultural accuracy of:

  "TOM!"

  No answer.

  "TOM!"

  No answer.

  "What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!"

  No answer.

  The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not service -- she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

  "Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll -- "

  She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.

  "I never did see the beat of that boy!"


This was revelation, pure and simple, launching me into the landscape into which I desired launching, each time I picked up a book.  If I could learn the reasons why this opening was so precise, so transformative and transportational, I might, indeed, get the hang, as Twain did, of making a living from story telling.

The revelation grew with my own emerging education as I learned the more subtle nuances resident in Huck Finn.

  "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

  "Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece -- all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round -- more than a body could tell what to do with..."

This was Tom Sawyer with a voice, which meant the narrator's voice, which meant you could pick your narrator because of his or her voice, and you were no longer stuck onto the age but could fly forth from it, as it were, splattering itself all over the white shirt of credulity worn by the reader.  You could make the reader feel that someone finally understood you, got you, knew the forces that shaped who you were and why you did what you did.

In an epiphany of understanding, as you grasped the importance of this magesterial work, the enormity of what lay ahead of you was shown to you in a vision that has never completely left you.  

"The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world -- four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope -- a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so.

  "It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the Ohio to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the 'Passes,' above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohio the Mississippi's depth is eighty-seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth.

  The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable -- not in the upper, but in the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez (three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth) -- about fifty feet. But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet; at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two and one half.

  An article in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, based upon reports of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico -- which brings to mind Captain Marryat's rude name for the Mississippi -- 'the Great Sewer.' This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high.

  "The mud deposit gradually extends the land -- but only gradually; it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history. The belief of the scientific people is, that the mouth used to be at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred miles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river. This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any trouble at all -- one hundred and twenty thousand years. Yet it is much the youthfullest batch of country that lies around there anywhere..."

You will or won't recognize this as the opening paragraphs to Life on the Mississippi.  These paragraphis are presented with a voice as avuncular and respectful as, say, the voice of the late Walter Cronkheit, embodying the actual personality of the river, giving to the page a sense of the River's life, its reach, its enormous appetites, its personality, its graceful stature, its seemingly inherent sense of being the most elegant monster, a Leviathan with courtly style and manners.

It has been a long time since you first beheld those words and those that came after it, realizing in slow degree that the book is only about the Mississippi River in subtext; this is a plangent, remarkable memoir of Samuel Langhorn Clemens, emerging in many ways as Huck Finn, appearing for all the world to see a good deal other than what was intended--the heart, soul, and creative swagger of the man who wrote it and who found his voice and swagger right there on the river.

These early paragraphs remind you of an emblazoned moment from your fourth year, when your father took you to a posh jewelry store on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, whereupon he advanced you to a concave window, directed your attention to a wrist watch on display, then told you to reach in to claim it.  You were only too happy to comply and accordingly only too frustrated when your hand struck the obstacle of glass instead of the object of your pursuit.  Over your mother's complaints that this was a terrible thing your father was doing, your father bade you to always consider things that appeared to be in your grasp, things too easily taken without effort.

For years you did not conflate your father's words with Mark Twain's words about how statistics, particularly dry statistics, could be used to convince individuals of realities that were not in fact realities but rather fantasies or deliberate distortions.  Even now you are amused at how long it has taken you to question some of Twain's statistics and figures, particularly because you knew that he had once been a pilot on steamboats plying that Mississippi River so elegantly brought to life in Life on the Mississippi.  You are amused by the past times you have been taken in by Twain, and reckon you have once again been taken by this outpouring of statistics and comparisons.

Make no mistake about it, Twain knew that river as few others did,its turns, tides, and shoals, its reefs, its depths and banks.  Steering steamships up and down its miles of meander and whim, he developed an intimacy with it of staggering compass, causing him to walk with the lover's swagger and dress with the captain's cap, cutaway coat, and tie.  Few men were as equipped to speak of it as he, allowing for the reach of analogy that Mark Twain knew of the Mississippi as Honore St. John Crevecoeur or Alexis de Toqueville knew of the emergant America.  Few men were so mischievous as Twain, and thus, recalling across the distant years your father's words, you look at the concave windows separating you from jewelry shop and text, bidding you to look at things that appear within your grasp and look at them closely, lest you be taken in and brought to the frustration of the illusion.

Some Scary Thoughts about Dialogue

Much has been said about the role of dialogue in its relationship to advancing story while simultaneously offering forth clues about the agendas and personality of the characters involved in the story. 

Not enough has been said about the role of dialogue in the critical and ongoing definition of the writing self, that focused agglomerate of conflicting forces to the point where it is almost worth calling it TBS--The Balkanized Self.

Dialogue in this case becomes conversation between the critical, thinking aspect of self and the visceral, emotional receptors.  As a guiding principal, consider how, as we move outward from childhood, through the rocky shoals of puberty and into overt sexual agendas to complicate our foraging, hunting and gathering selves, the causes of what we consider nightmares morph from dragons and ogres, and monsters into more casually encountered mammals, possibly even persons not unlike our very self.


The menace enters through the side wings of the ordinary.  Perhaps a rat or spider here and there, but most nightmares could well be out-takes from "I Love Lucy" reruns or even, heaven forfend, "Happy Days."  The factor that pushes these dreams into the genre of nightmare as opposed to quotidian dream is the emotional equivalent of the sound track, the resident emotion.  

This is one reason Stephen King is so good, which is to say scary; he particularizes the fearful lurking in the ordinary.  He does it with a rather extensive-but-ordinary vocabulary, via cadence of his lines, and sometimes through the merest questions:  "What's that?" or "Did you see that?" or "I can't believe what I just saw."  

The emotion is brought in sideways, through subtext and inference, through evocation, which comes from the senses, the scary way scary things smell, the taste in one's mouth when one is frightened (and thus the question, Does having a dry taste in one's mouth contribute to the emotional undertow of a nightmare?), the way things sound.  (How, for instance, does a buzzing fly sound when it is in your room, scoping out its next landing site, as opposed to when it is trapped in a spider's web and about to become the prix fixe dinner of said spider?)

An ordinary dream encounter is just that--ordinary.  In a true nightmare, there is the enhanced presence of one or more emotions, playing on the sense of danger, fear, frustration, impending menace.

Pay some attention to a scene in a dramatic movie, asking yourself when you ever heard the sound tract using a bassoon as a suggestion of menace.  Or perhaps a moment intended to be humorous, punctuated by tense, sawing violins.  It is the emotion subtext that informs the scene of the scariness.

The dialogue between reason and emotion informs us of how we can play the ordinary, the quotidian for its scary, Stephen King effects.  We need both to keep the scene on even keel, from foundering in the self-induced sea of the melodramatic, with the focus where it belongs, on the apparently normal, set to play against a background brimming with fear of falling or of failure or discovery.

When we have come to recognize this delicate balance between the reasonable and the unthinkable, we may metaphorically ask it to dance, try it out on the page, bring the memorable nightmare to a life that can be felt across continents and, of course, ages. 

Cicadas, Waiting for Lefty, and Misguided Cnicism

Whether we are waiting for Lefty in Clifford Odets's eponymous play, or Godot, in Samuel Beckett's or perhaps merely waiting for a taxi or a sale or an inspiration, there is the sense writ large that the thing being awaited will not come, that our expectations have no tangible potential in a world gone increasingly more toward ruinous decay.  We wait for outcomes, appearances, phenomena; we wait for promises to be made or broken, we wait for signs informing us the cosmos knows about us and is on our side and, furthermore, it wants us to win.

It is as natural to wait for things as it is to do busy work while giving the Cosmos, the Universe in blow-up, to make the decision that will effect us.  In spite of ample signs to the contrary, we wait for destiny to catch up with us and to bestow some form of recognition upon us, thinking surely this time our swinging bat will have connected with the pinata.

The unspoken roommate of this expectation is background.  We wait while something is going on in our midst or about us.  An expectation without a setting has little chance of causing anyone to care.  We expect inspiration in spite of a numbing succession of days in which thought was not our best friend, where words were like unwanted hairs tweezed from the forgotten parts of our body, reminding of their presence only because of the sting attendant on their being yanked out.

Such days are more friendly that we realize at first.  The true gift arrives like a guilty-looking FedEx delivery person, late to the point of irritation.  We fall upon the gift, wanting it opened right now, the better to celebrate.  The gift comes from the forgotten order of the forgotten inspiration, hoped for however briefly in the past, while waiting for someone or some thing to arrive with a fanfare.

In all this waiting for the mundane to get on with it, already, we lose sight of the arrivals coming in out of the dark or the wet or the sun or the noise of the crowd.  It is there for the recognition that it is all about us, answers everywhere to the questions we asked some while back and allowed ourselves to become too bored to heed when the answers from the cosmos appear.  The cosmos speaks to us like cicadas on a summer night, buzzing with the very things we so often fail to notice.

Once more, unto the breech

At an earlier time in my life, my universe was largely confined to Orange Street in Los Angeles, which had its eastern terminus at Fairfax Avenue, extending west to its dead end at San Vicente Blvd.  My own limitations, imposed by parents, forbade me to cross Fairfax or, to the west, Crescent Heights Blvd.  

Because it was sparsely traveled, I could cross Orange St., which gave me access to the then enormous empty lots fronting on Wilshire Blvd., my venue of choice, because of its vastness and because of the potentials offered by a group of large billboards fronting on Wilshire that could be used to represent whatever edifice or vehicle my imagination dictated. 

Let us say age seven or eight, a time when miracles seemed to abound of their own volition, having nothing to do with my own imagination or urgency to learn.  One of the truly great miracles at the time was an orange popsicle, a frozen chunk of colored sugar water, with two protruding wooden grip sticks.  This represented an infinitude of progress over the Milk Nickle, a chocolate-coated rectangle of vanilla ice cream from which protruded only one wooden grip stick.  True, the occasional wooden stick was stamped with a joyous FREE, which entitled the user to a free Milk Nickle, and which also became an object of barter and capitalist envy. 

Bruce Wolfson was known to have as many as five free sticks at any given time, which meant that he, among other things, could get a Milk Nickle whenever he felt like it.  Joel Gambord, younger and smaller than Bruce Wolfson, openly speculated that Bruce Wolfson had amassed his fortune in ways he'd learned from reading about Andrew Carnegie, which is to say by stealth and force.  This view meant little to those of us who were wont to redeem their free sticks soon after finding them, although it did cause us to regard Bruce Wolfson with suspicion. It was a well-known fact that Bruce Wolfson had offered Leon Sherman two unused Fleer's Double Bubble gum for his Free stick,  If we actually had unused free sticks, it is doubtful we would have confided the fact to Bruce.
  
The orange popsicle had no free sticks; nevertheless it seemed to me something desirable beyond description, meaning I would frequently take my own orange popsicle into the comforting shade and protectiveness of the large billboards, there to contemplate the traffic on Wilshire in a kind of youthful stupor while seeing how long I could get the popsicle to last.  

It was at such a contemplative vigil that I discovered perhaps the greatest treasure of my young life, greater even than the faux pearl-handled pocket knife, a gift for my sixth birthday, a magnifying glass that could, if I chose, burn a hole in nearly anything I chose, or an equally faux pearl-handled pair of Gene Autry cap guns.  The treasure was a single roller skate, prematurely abandoned because the leather strap binding it to the foot had worn out.


The roller skate, as any boy of my age knew, was my immediate passport to the adult world, the world of mobility and status.  

All I needed now was a length of two-by-four, eighteen inches or two feet length would do it.  A handful of nails, a wooden fruit box (readily available for the asking at Weiner's Market on Fairfax), and a length of dowel the thickness of a broom handle.

Let me put it to you this way:  By using a skate key or pliers, the roller skate could be dismantled, leaving you with two sets of wheels.  Nail each set at opposing ends of the two-by-four, secure and nail the wooden fruit box (small end down) to the front of the two-by-four, nail the dowel or broom stick (sans, of course, the broom head), and you had the forerunner of the contemporary skate board.  Such vehicles on Orange St. were called skate boxes.  

There was enough carrying space within the fruit box to allow for carrying personal treasures and to encourage mothers to send willing sons on errands to the market, the dry cleaners, and on a few memorable occasions, to Miller's Drug Store at the corner of Sixth and Fairfax.

The miracle of the popsicle paled in comparison to the miracle of the skate box.  Not quite the miracle of a bicycle, it was nevertheless a vehicle for mobility, exploration, and the vast, previously untested fantasies of graduation into the serious world of prepuberty, entered with the velocity of wheels generously oiled with 3-in-1 oil and fueled with limitless imagination.

Why? Because

When we ask as a teacher or reviewer "Whose story is it?" there is often an air of smug authority in our voice, indicating our knowledge of what the question really means as well as the satisfaction of having arrived at so lofty a plateau.

Truth to tell, we believe we are at the head of the line by asking the question in the first place.  Buoyed by this confidence, we go on to ask yet another question, as if to verify our position in the first place.  "Why that particular point of view?"

Often the answers to these two questions have to do directly with something the writer will have read some while ago, something in fact he or she may not have direct memory of until we, in our questioning mode, persist with even more questions to which the story teller, in a storytelling mode, answers.  Thus the power of the question in the first place.  Why did you give the protagonist red hair?  Why does the baby sitter speak with a French accent?  Why can't your attorney character not have a teak desk and not smoke cigars?

Questions from critics cut off more communication between the writer and characters, especially when sometimes the answers are best answered with the single word, "Because."

It is true that some time and effort become necessary; characters do not step forward confident and fully equipped. They must be pampered through a number of conflicts to the point where they are understood, formed, able to take whatever life has to give them within the confines of the story.  But once they have emerged and begun to feel their way into their assigned parts, give them the respect actors pay their favored directors; let them say of you that they were cast against an enormously large group of candidates, encouraged by the mere fact of being selected, and now ready to take on their part with confidence.  When someone in the audience asks why they were chosen, you can close your eyes and hear the appreciation as they respond, "Because the part was absolutely right for me."