Marginal

You no longer read for the pleasure you once sought.  Crowds and experiences within you have elbowed the early reading goals of pure escape and adventure to the side.  These crowds are jammed with people and experiences and associations, bustling to reach some unframed destination.

What you read at earlier ages was in effect a series of passports to get you beyond the routine of those days.  You knew from the news and from the rumble of events about you that the world was in chaos.  Names filtered through your boyhood games.  Mahatma Gandhi.  Hitler. Mussolini.  Hirohito.  You could scarcely relate to the former; the latter three were embarked on events that seemed worlds away from your youth, worlds where you had no control, scarce ability to do anything but watch and recoil, then retreat into reading, where heroes had the means of confronting their opponents, even coming to some terms with them. 

With few exceptions, these heroic men and women who attracted your interest were driven by some code of responsibility, where engagement was the only possible path.  Even in such romance as Beau Geste, where engagement meant removal from the immediate battle as a gambit, there were nevertheless responsibilities at a distance.  You looked to reading for your responsibilities, your duties, your places for engagement, your answers.

There were, of course, no answers, and as you read further, you recognized you were seeking your own definition and thus your own places for engagement.

You lived, during those times, in Los Angeles and New York and Fall River and Providence, then Miami Beach, being elbowed by experiences, the immediate encounters being the ordinary of middle class, the effects of World War II rumbling about you, in effect determining these places where you lived, and you were haunted at times by the potential for boredom and the frustrations associated with being as young as you were.

You had to read beyond the sense of yourself in your culture because your culture has provided you an education, excellent in some ways, deficient in others, where you were nearly marginalized, at least hypnotized to the point where you thought you ought to have the values and obligations and expectations representative of a segment you were not a part of.  You were getting the wrong signals. Through reading, you became aware of this disparity.  You, not society nor culture, were the instrument of self-marginalization.

Marginal as you are, nevertheless you recognize yourself in some groups and as an individual, looking for his compass.  Writing offers this compass; so does reading.  Your sense of feeling right or comfortable in a situation now depends not on the satellite beeps you receive from your culture or your society, rather from the you as individual.

You read and write for connections, hints of chemistry and physics of matter and individuality as you spin and orbit, much as the planet on which you abide, spins and orbits in a universe, alert for signals you can trust, eager to get messages from the trustworthy source you know to be out there, which of course is you.

If you persist, you may see and hear details and connections that will provide you with more tools for your toolkit.  For the moment, the connection holding you closest to and in greatest admiration of your species is the awareness of how many individuals feel the marginalization and are attempting through their own craft to get signals from the elements and matter about them.

Grudgingly and Grumble

Your notes, your memory banks, and even these vagrant blog essays are brim-full of events where you have learned on an intellectual level some painful awareness of a level you’d call accurate and universal. 

Problem is, in many such cases, you have not taken into consideration the other side of the equals sign, the emotional side of learning.  This awareness is vital in life and in fiction to the point where either way, in life or in fiction, a character who has learned a thing only one way is vulnerable to story. 

The behavior of such an individual, in real life or story, is recognizable and on the way to the reversals, destabilizing events, and realizations a person accrues in real life and is hit in the face with in dramatic narrative.

The most recent cause to be aware of this syndrome is your awareness on an intellectual level that discussions of religious or political conviction that devolve into screed and ad hominem argument are not conversation, are not argument in the Socratic dialogue sense or any other rational progression.  Further, the longer you remain in the exchange, in direct proportion, the less the likelihood either you or your opponent will learn anything or be able to move on to more civil discourse in other areas.  Further still, the longer it will take you to work off your cholers.

On two separate occasions today, you encountered such behavior.  You are only now able to sort them and move in, but in each case—and this is your point—you do so grudgingly, with a grumble.  Grudgingly and grumble are not words of positive enthusiasm.

Occasion one was about publishing, a former client, and behavior not well suited in your opinion to help the client advance in any positive way toward a desired publishing career.  In fact, the client proceeded against advice to self-publishing and to have paid a review source a considerable sum for a review that was at best tepid.

Occasion two was pure political head butting, with you a witness against your better judgment, with the no tangible result except, here you go again, a grudging and grumbling retreat.  You are not one for spectator sports, yet you were more or less leveraged into attending a contest in a sport for which you have no taste, with no stake in any kind of positive outcome, and with the dreaded residue of grudging and grumbling.

You are also aware how those two descriptors, grumbling and grudging, when manifest in a character, tend to move that character away from the front line of a story, which is at least a small victory in the dramatic sense.  In the real life sense, grudging and grumbling move individuals from the front line of their own story, their life story, which may, should the individual chose, be creative as opposed to being reactive.

There are a great many things in life and story to which one may be reactive, but you do not see this as being creative in ways that bring you any pleasure, either of the senses or of learning.

Your great hope for the events alluded here, for they were with some deliberation not detailed, is that when you come to review these paragraphs, you will no longer recall the events or individuals in either one.  Or, if you do remember them, the details will have settled, you will no longer be grudging or grumbling; the matter will have become muscle memory.

F.U.B.A.R.

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

            To a Mouse, by Robert Burns

There is story, in many ways set before you, not so much as a formula but rather as a mantra, a quiet plea not to feel safe to the point of invulnerability.  You are right to plan.  Couldn’t hurt.  Nor can it be a protective amulet; not a complete one.  Make plans.  Most characters we admire and root for have plans.  Dorothy has plans to get back to Kansas.  Frank and Cora have plans to get Nick out of the picture so they can be together.  Yossarian has plans not to fly any more combat missions.  Fast Eddie has plans to become the best pool hustler in America.

Start a story with a scheme.  Take Kurtz; he was going to Africa to do something in mitigation of the awfulness of the colonialists, right?  He started out as one of the good guys, right?

Now let’s look at agley.  Let us bring that forward from Burns’s agricultural Scotland to twenty-first century America, seeing it as awry.  In spite of a remarkable set of preparations, things go awry, become fucked up, F.U.B.A.R, as the saying goes, fucked up beyond all recognition.  What happens when you turn story over to the experts?  You know—humans. 

Things go wrong in reality but in story they go agley as in F.U.B.A.R. or it wouldn’t be something to draw you away from reality long enough to become involved.  George wouldn’t have Lenny to look after, and Lenny wouldn’t have problems forgetting how strong he is or how easy it is for him to become distracted by something he thinks is attractive.

The plan is going to turn things around—if it works.  The plan is going to be transformative, and because it seems to be the solution to otherwise impossible or difficult problems, we become invested in it because, like the Horatio Alger characters, say Ragged Dick, we know that hard work and plans produce positive results.  If we work hard enough and believe hard enough and plan with enough care, “it” has to work.  Plan your work then work your plan.  Failure to plan is planning to fail.  The early bird gets the worm.  The persistent writer gets published and the sales figures are so good she gets published again and again, and now she can pay off the mortgage and get her kids glasses.  Now people will stop asking her when she’s going to get a real job.

You’d be copping to cynicism if you didn’t think that formula were true, wouldn’t you?  And yet you have reached an age and had enough sufficient experiences in related fields to assure you that there is more truth to the essential truth of The Bhagavad-Gita than the Horatio Alger novels.  To the work you are entitled but not the fruits thereof. 

To some Westerners, this trope from The Gita sounds cold and structured.  Surely there is more validity in Ragged Dick.  Hard work brings you to the goal.  Guaranteed.  Do this and you will succeed.

The Gita says the same thing, if you look at it for a moment.  Doing the thing you care about is the essential element.  Doing the thing is succeeding at it.  Ragged Dick has us looking for the wrong preposition, succeeding in it.

Every day you write something.  You write it with the best intentions, which is to say you write it because you are glad to be doing it.  You write it because you know that the next day or the day after, when you look at it, you will have cause to wonder how you could have F.U.B.A.R.’d with such complete abandon.  You also know you have opportunities of fixing it, of painting the parts no one will see, of taking yourself and potential readers farther inside than you’d imagined possible.  Every next day you look at what you have done and know it has missed what you thought to capture, but has caught some element of hope and insight that you can have another go at tomorrow.

Soon, you are deliberate in the way you build in agley, using it as a part of your process instead of having it turning on you.  After more work, you become more expert at building in an agley that had been unthinkable to you when you were in your more formative years.  It is not so much that you’ve passed your formative years as it is that you now understand this is how it is:  The unthinkable come to pass, the best laid scheme gone aft agley, is a fruit to which you are entitled because it is not a reward, it is a tool.  By using it, understanding it, enjoying it, you have learned that even the happiest of stories leave you with grief and pain, but the pleasure of the work trumps those griefs and pains and yes, they, too, become tools.

Weasel Words

 When you catch yourself sliding into the passive voice for consecutive sentences or seem to sink into a pattern where there is passivity running through your recent paragraphs, you cringe.  This is the equivalent of being hungover or carsick.  Pen in hand, you make marks in the margin.

This slide into passivity blares out a warning:  You’re not enthusiastic enough, or perhaps you’re pussyfooting around, fearful of upsetting some furniture or some sense of neatness contrary to your vision of being acceptable.

You remind yourself of times when you’ve had to tell clients or students they were being too polite, too nice.  You remind yourself of images of yourself stored away:  pick up after yourself, tidy up your room.  Sometimes when you are out, parked in a larger parking lot, you see interiors of cars that remind you of the interior of your car or, conversely, interiors of cars that are fussy in their interior neatness.  Walking on, you rejoice to find cars that make yours by comparison appear neat and tidy.

Neat and tidy are good—no argument there, but when you are composing or revising your composing, you need to forget about neat and tidy, working instead toward that almost-impossible-to-describe state of effective.  In this state, unnecessary words are vacuumed up, trash disposed of, order restored.  Effective is “in,” a sense of having firm roots within the dramatic landscape.  “In” is beyond defensiveness or intervention from the author or footnotes or stage directions.  “In” is the place where the narrative wraps itself around the characters, sweeps them along to make their way through the reefs and shoals or drama. 

“In” extends to nonfiction by buoying the topic along the flow of narrative, extending the same sense as the voices of reliable sources, voices such as Gregory Peck or Walter Cronkheit or Chet Huntley for male narrations, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, or Elizabeth Warren for women.

Narrative without authority sounds like pleading or begging or complaining, and when tie narrative voice becomes too comfortable in its plea or begging or complaint, when it takes on the smirk of the arrogance that comes from a belief in absolute certainty, it moves over into the political or the cruder spectrum of philosophy.

You need to listen to yourself for traces of indecisiveness in the narrative because such indecisiveness has an effect on the verbs and attributes moving from that place in your mind where the story originates.  There are often heated arguments going on within you as you compose, but from time to time, as you review your work, you can see there are also times when some switches appear to have been turned off, leaving you with a flow in which somewhat and possibly or perhaps seem to think this is a picnic day, equivocation on the house.

Weasel words are the bane of effective prose, sending it off on flights of politeness when politeness does not get the job done.  Effective prose should be sent to the principal’s office, if only to make the principal squirm.  Effective prose stays with the reader and writer, making the experience of communication a transaction run on authority and strength of conviction.

Most adverbs are weasel words, in particular when they are used as attributions for dialogue.  Very is a weasel word; so are Possibly, somewhat, suddenly, and, if used as opening words for sentences “a” and “it.”

Sometimes the act of waking yourself up, either through coffee, revision, a stand-up and a few stretches, or some inspiring music will spill over into your prose to the point where you will not go drowsy when you read it.  Then you may be on to something.

When Your Characters Say Frog, You Jump

A favored device of yours, in particular when you cannot get meaningful sentences down, is to come here, electric with the frustration of wanting to converse and not finding a spot in your inner narrative voice to insert the wedge of your own voice in the dialogue.

You pick some aspect you consider critical to story in general and storytelling in specific.  Voice. Pacing.  Plot. Dialogue. They are all important, but sometimes the enormity of the relationship linking them becomes overwhelming.

You realize again the humbling task being a person is, the near impossible task being a person who writes is, and the greatest daunt of all, being a person who most of the time constructs a flow as layered and convincing as a real life layered, convincing, feeling person is.  Person and writer become congruent for a sentence or paragraph or two, producing, when you encounter this congruency, a state of absolute hope for what has been done and absolute despair that you will arrive at such moments.

Often when this frustrating grip of Ideal Editor is upon you, you look at your favorite aspects of story, starting your way into work with a focus on Voice, moving on to Character, Story, then perhaps Dialogue.  Seeing them in their overall context of Story, they often remind you of a pamphlet, The Aspects of Brahman, given you by a Hindu nun.  In Hinduism, (and Sanskrit), Brahman is the formless, universal Supreme Self.  Any attempt to define it in effect limits it, thus such well-known deities as Rama, Krishna, Siva, and Kali are personalized aspects of Brahman, the Supreme Self, and Brahma is the universal creative consciousness of Brahman,

This pamphlet explained things about Hindu theology for you; it also helped you equate Story as an equivalent of The Supreme Narrative, which has no relationship to religion, but exists as a kind of dramatic paradigm that has powers to enthuse and attract most of the human condition on some level.

The interconnectedness of major aspects or elements is endlessly fascinating for you.  Pondering it gets your mind where it belongs in the early stages of composition, off rational progressions and the desire to explain, on to the not-so-apparent relations between the building blocks, this to the point where you have written a book specifically on that subject and are now roaming about in another, where you hope to demonstrate that wherever our origin, story has some tangible place within us that we are struggling to understand.

In such contexts, much of your writing—although meant to entertain—is about discovery.  What your characters discover in effect—but not necessarily—becomes your discovery.  There is the possibility that your characters can and do understand things more clearly than you.
This last is not so fanciful as it may sound.  On more than one occasion, you’ve struggled with the ending of a story, trying to construct additions or supplements to it, only to see them collapse on closer inspection, which is in its lovely way the equivalent of the characters telling you, that’s it; it’s over.  Goodbye.

Problems have emerged in real life when you have not listened to individuals, but they are nothing in comparison to characters having done their best to tell you things.  But you’ve refused to listen.

Now, when characters say Frog, you jump.

More Chemistry

The feel of chemistry at work on some part of your being reminds you once again of being alive.  Not that you weren’t alive before or that you needed the prod of a reminder; you were in fact responding and interacting to other chemistries in which other forces, attractions, itches, yearnings, and sounds were a metaphoric swarm of cicada, humming and chirping the chamber music of a Summer night,

There is always a chemical reaction going on somewhere, inside of you and out, in places where you are and in places you see only in film and photography or other forms of art. It is a rare hour, much less a day, when you do not feel the pull, sometimes gnawing, other times poking.

The other day, there was an enormous chemistry between you and a braunschwiger and pickle sandwich, a chemical inheritance from your late pal, Digby Wolfe.  Today there was chemistry with a bunch of clematis and puffy pink hydrangeas left you by Lupe, the cleaning lady, and the discovered chemistry of a Face Book friend and former student, who’d changed her picture, reminding you how far beyond the reaction between elements and matter chemistry extends.

Because of your experiences working for a range of publishing ventures, in which a part of your job was reading and evaluating your responses to manuscripts and proposals, you have an awareness of chemistry to some degree beyond the ordinary reaction to a story or narrative.  You can often tell within a matter of a few paragraphs if there is chemistry worth pursuing.  Of course the same “guidelines” emerge in your dealings with people, and of course there have been times with manuscripts and people where your first sense of a lack of chemistry has misled you.

The implications of chemistry remind you that you are much like a satellite in orbit, sending signals out to be picked up and that you as well have receptors in places you’re aware of but other places where there is less specificity to the point where you venture “a gut feeling” or express “a visceral response” depending on the circumstances.

Analogy and metaphor proliferate as in the dropped calls many of your cellphone friends experience or the times during peak transmission hours when computers, gasping for bandwidth, take longer to download signals or sites.

What determines the sense of chemistry you feel toward a person or a book or a story?  Why do some dogs and cats seem to treat you as members of the same pack while others still are wary of you or aggressive toward you?

What are the attractions between the elements that are you and the elements in, say, noir fiction?  Why is there so much nourishment in a particular smile and the appearance of so little in another more perfect or dentally enhanced smile?

You know a bit about the signals flowers and plants send out, attracting bees and other insects to visit, thus engaging in a kind of ongoing orgy wherein pollens and seeds and spores are exchanged in a flurry of chemistry.  This causes you to reflect on the warp and weft of your own day and your part in this vaster-than-Wikileaks exchange of information and fertilization.

Individuals with whom you feel no chemistry might nevertheless deliver to you a phrase, a word, and attitude.  You’ve been at particular pains to work on this aspect of your behavior, hopeful of demonstrating to the world and to yourself and such individuals as you contact that youth is well served, youth is lovely and bright, and yes, outstanding in its beauty, but so are the rest of us.

Sometimes, rereading something you’ve been working on, you are impressed by the black hole of indifference that has swallowed up the chemistry and spat out the dross.  You look for ways to move the furniture, to remove the friction between words and ideas, bringing verbs as though nosegays for high school sweethearts, ideas as bouquets, figures of speech as arrangements, turning the bunch of violets, which as such things go, were sweetness personified into a dimension of color and shape and scent and meaning.

There are words and phrases you consider the equivalent of weeds.  Attempting to avoid these have startling effects on your style, your voice, the way you see things.  There are other words, often onomatopoetic, you must be on your guard to use sparingly lest they take the focus away from your overall intent and call attention to themselves as the expensive flowers in the arrangement.

The right word.  The right sentence.  The right paragraph and page and narrative.  All these elements owe explanation to the word “right,” which may well be your chemistry and some other person’s annoyance.

Go forth about your day and your days, broadcasting your chemistry, but do not neglect to absorb the ongoing orgy.

POV, Melons, Osso Bucco, Tangerines

Somewhere back in the past, let us stipulate one of the early creative writing classes you had after high school, you came to grips with the concept of point-of-view.  Because of a remarkable experience in junior high school, one of the few positive experiences in that venue, you’ve always had a particular fondness for the second-person POV, settling slowly into it for your journals and, later, your blog essays, after no small amount of nudging from your friend, John Sanford, who published volumes of autobiographical materials in the second person.

Because you were off to an early start, you went about “learning” point of view the way you “learned” about metric feet. You wrote hopeless, bad poetry by the ream, working your way up to a thesis on the metrics of the Shakespearean sonnets, efforts you do not in any way regret, in particular because they did not make you a decent poet.  Far from it.  But you can hear and do listen for the cadence in narrative.  You listen in fact for a good many things, most of them quite a bit more idiosyncratic than spondees or anapests or such extremes as Longfellow’s dread “Hiawatha:”

By the shores of Gitche Gumee, by the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest, rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them; bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water, beat the shining Big-Sea-Water,

all of which is an example of trochaic hexameter and an English major at their extreme margins.

You think to have done better at point of view; outside these vagrant blog lines, your favorite POV is multiple because of your longtime fascination with the drama of ambiguity as well as your belief that you’ve not done well at all in presenting yourself as a reliable enough narrator, which is something of a plus because self-appointed reliability is a one-way ticket to pomposity, and we know what happens to pomposity in most narratives.

Your use of the second person in your blog mini-essays represent attempts to pin down narrative threads, truths, and open-heart surgery on your visions of yourself and the world about you so that you may make appropriate distinctions when you present characters you wish to portray as being different than you, in some cases brighter, in yet other cases more intelligent, in other cases still less pompous.

You sometimes approach your self the way you approached a cantaloupe not many days ago, thumping it, sniffing it, pinching it, only to have had it politely removed from your hands by the produce manager, who recognized a writer when he saw one.  “You wanna melon’s good for today, tomorrow, you try this one.  That one you got, it’s need maybe two, three more days.”
There is something of near mystical knowledge in such transactions.  The cantaloupe was in fact as sweet, juicy, and delicious as the produce man supposed, and you found yourself wondering, as you plunged a spoon into its chilled perfection, if you could be so certain about the effectiveness and ripeness and overall readiness of your narrative voice.

For the longest time, you had a friend, Jack, who was a butcher at the market you normally patronized.  He showed you ways to determine the readiness and potential for flavor or a steak or a leg of lamb or, for that matter, a lamb shank.  He would seem to heft a package, poke at the plastic outer wrap, then his eyes would glaze over for a moment, as he seemed to be in communication with the meat.  “Not a second more than forty-five minutes at 325,” he’d say.  Or perhaps, “This one, you pan fry, you understand.  You get you a cast iron skillet.  One tablespoon the best olive oil.  Five minutes onna side.”

If you could understand the qualities of your characters the way the produce manager understands not only cantaloupes but such recondite things as rappini, broccolini, and kale, or the way Jack spoke to meat and it answered him back, you would feel you were upholding your end of some cosmic bargain in your observations about point of view or motivation, or how a character would respond.

Last night, as you are leaving the Café Luna after a late evening pear torte and latte, Chris, the manager of the pantry, his long Rasta braids swirling, approached you, his hands closed about something in that surprise about to come forth gesture.  “I’m sending you off with a special tangerine. Not too sweet, just enough to take complement the latte and torte.”

To know such a thing about a tangerine may seem matter-of-fact, but to you it suggests there are persons out there in the world who can and do talk to the elements and to whom the elements respond in some meaningful conversation.

You peeled the tangerine as you headed onto 101 northward toward the downtown off-ramp where you depart the freeway.  As you popped the segments into your mouth, your taste buds were suffused with the fine sense of spray that hits your windshield first in an automated car wash.  A slight acid tang, reaching out to the memory of the latte and torte, assures you of the possibilities for assessing the inner qualities of things, assuring you that perhaps it can become within your grasp to see the intent and personality in a line of narrative.