Cats and Dissatisfaction: Primal Forces in Story

Dissatisfaction is a major dramatic force.  Dissatisfaction produces struggles, ripples of protest,  reminiscent of a metaphoric cat.  The cat was if not satisfied, then by no means unsatisfied, cat-like in its behavior.  Dissatisfaction is a cat, resisting being placed in a carrying case for a trip to the veterinarian for shots and or treatment that will in the long run provide a more comfortable present and future for the cat.

Even if not satisfied, the cat is busy doing cat-like things until a greater force wishes to take said cat to the vet, at which time the cat becomes an instrument of drama, displaying such dramatic qualities as acute reflexes, suspicion, and a near preternatural ability to misinterpret movements or gestures made in its direction.

You are at the moment caught up in the struggle between the actual cat and the one of the metaphor you've introduced here.  You have had cats in your life, many of whom have left you with a fond regard for the species, based on your perception of specific friendships formed with specific cats, misadventures with other cats, and crossed-purpose relations with still other cats, a more or less analogous metric of comparison to your relationship with humans.

Your present cat is a better-than-imagined success in that you wished an animal presence to fill a void left by a dog.  You've had dogs in the past who were not pleased with the results of their visits to veterinarians, and you in fact had two cats who, although not overjoyed at the prospects of visits to a vet, wallowed themselves to be taken without the need for a cat carrier.  

Your present-day cat made the trip from the animal shelter to your  abode in a case you selected with thoughts devoted to the cat's comfort.  The ladies at the animal shelter who put your about-to-be cat spoke praises of the cat carrier you'd purchased, one of them telling you how her own cat would probably want to hang out in such a cat carrier as this.

In a broad, general sense, you are acute to the responses, surmises, and reactions of other persons, part of a package you hope translates as empathy.  The lady who praised your cat carrier was responsible for you, despite evidence to the contrary, hoping your cat might indeed like to hang out or at least enter on some basis of equipoise into the cat carrier.  

The fact of two ladies needing to secure your cat into the cat carrier could have served as a warning, but in general, your cat was (and still is very much so) an affectionate cat, seeking human contact.  This led you to make assumptions not borne out by fact.

There were earlier attempts to get your cat into a carrier, consultations with friends who are themselves in relationships with cats, and a serious study of a You Tube film featuring a veterinarian who demonstrated how to secure a rather cranky-looking cat into a cat carrier much less commodious and aesthetic than the carrier you got for your cat.

In a shift of the real with the theoretical, your actual cat becomes the abstraction, the need for getting him to a veterinarian is the actuality, thus the art of drama switches roles with the banality of reality.

From your experience with cats, you conclude that a cat who is not fated to visit a veterinarian is, if not a satisfied cat, by no means a dissatisfied cat, thus no real story.  Getting your not-dissatisfied (yet) cat to the veterinarian changes the playing field of reality to the stage of drama; it is the equivalent of the opening scenes of Hamlet.  Agenda stalks the battlements.

The way to bring satisfaction into drama is to have someone confront the satisfied person with an accusation--"You're too damned satisfied with (fill in the blanks)"--or a challenge: "I'm tired of you sitting around with that fat cat look of satisfaction all the time."

If you were intending humor here, you could attempt to start a story with getting a cat or equivalent into a carrying case for a visit to a veterinarian, but you are not trying for humor, you are wishing to demonstrate how satisfaction and dissatisfaction can be manipulated to create dramatic circumstances which will produce the destabilizing, lack-of-stasis atmosphere associated with a story in progress.

Characters who are dissatisfied want something.  They wish to be left alone, to be allowed to participate in something with a greater hand in the outcome.  They wish to be paid more, to be given credit, to work less, to have help, to get out of a Sisyphus-like situation; they may want love.  They may resent certain characters who appear to be satisfied with such things as the status quo, with prospects for the future, with prospects for their stated and unstated needs having some potential for being realized.

Characters who are satisfied arguably wish to continue being satisfied, but relate to drama only to the extent that they become targets of the dissatisfaction of another character or group of characters.  We can identify with the characters who are satisfied if we are given sufficient reason to suspect the motives of the dissatisfied characters.  We can also side with the characters who resent the apparent smugness and lack of inertia resident in the satisfied characters.

In a real sense, acquiring a cat to fill a void left by a dog makes perfect sense--until the cat has been in a fight, either with a neighborhood cat or a chain-link fence, and the newly acquired cat would be on the receiving end of some attention to the tiny puncture wound on his back.  At this point, the sense or vector line of the story resides in attempting to get the cat to the vet or risking the cat's recovery with a splash of an antiseptic salve that worked wonders on the now absent dog.

Thus story has complications, contingencies, potentials for improvisation that come from the single most basic condition of drama:  two or more individuals enter a scene (or landscape) each convinced of the absolute rightness and moral authority of their respective positions.

The cat, back from the vet, still thinks to want affection from you, still is willing to accept supper, which it eats with a satisfied gusto--before taking off into the late afternoon.

Perhaps you've missed the potential for humor after all.  True enough, there is no story in persuading a dog to go to a vet.  The dog in question for whom you experienced the void which led you to consider a cat was in fact frequently used in filmed advertisements for the veterinarian to whom you wished to take the cat.  The dog in question appeared to enjoy the attentions lavished when given shampoos at the grooming facility of the veterinarian.

There is intrinsic and extrinsic story in making plans to take a cat to a veterinarian.  You have some scratches to show for your efforts and a cat who has been missing for some hours.  The cat will probably think things over in time for its breakfast, but consider this:  the cat has a collar to which is attached a medallion with its name, your name, address, phone number, and the phone number of the vet.  The cat also has a medallion affixed to its collar advising that the cat has an implanted microchip which, if scanned, would give your name, phone number, address, the name and phone number of the vet, and the name and contact information of a cat rescue facility.

Imagine a story in which, after some time, you receive a phone call in response to one of the medallions the cat wears.  "We have your cat, whom we're holding for you to come and fetch.  You do have a cat transporter, don't you?"

Cliches For Dummies

At one time in its lift, a cliche was a beacon of originality, a life preserver thrown to a drowning essay or story, an indication of how language could team up with ideas to produce a vision of how someone felt, how a thing looked or tasted, of how a person may have come to resemble the appearance of his dog.

A cliche gave us something to reach for at one time, but now, finding one in our language, written or oral, is like having a fleck of spinach on one's front most teeth without our being aware of it.

To be fair to the cliche, it was once awl-sharp in its presentation, so much so that it helped us see a thing in perspective.  Comparing a thing, for example, to a dead horse was only the first step in the formation of a wonderful vision.  Someone, somewhere, had arrived at the unimpeachable notion that a dead horse could not be kicked, which may seem a bit overstated, but when used in connection with some implacable resistance, some unrelenting stubbornness or failure to think a matter through, the trope became as much a part of the language as, say, States Rights are to a GOP politician.

Some man or woman in dim reaches of history, was fond of and therefore observant of turnips, perhaps even to the point of dissecting several, studying the vegetable for texture, tensile strength, fiber content.  That nameless individual came to realize that turnips may have a moisture content but no circulatory system involving blood.  

There was, in fact, no blood to be found in the turnips under observation, leading the individual to conclude some now-forgotten behavior or response was as fraught with difficulty as getting blood from a turnip.  (If you were dealing with the matter, you'd be more likely to consult beets.  Even though beets, like turnips, do not bleed, they at least have the virtue of a dark red moisture.  But the point is borne home when, to your knowledge, no one has used the analogy, like getting blood out of a beet.)

The simple, organic truth is that cliches were once apt definitions of a situation or circumstance in reality.  The cliche has, like yesterday's toast, become stale, overused to the point where it is offered as a shorthand to describe a situation that might provide more insight were it to be addressed with a fresh take.

When you address editorial chores on your work or the work of a client or student, you try to devote a complete, focused pass to rooting any trace of the cliche, however apt the cliche might be.  Using a cliche is the equivalent of wearing a rented tux to a formal gathering.  Rented tuxes are notoriously first-time associations of young men with a ritual of finery and display to which many are not familiar.  

This is by no means a bad thing; traditions and rituals do have to begin somewhere, but the average first-time use of a tuxedo is associated with graduation from high school and the senior prom.  Two or more cliches are scraping their heels on the floor in impatience, the one being a cultural association that this is a time to cross the barrier of initiation into the ranks of those who are sexually experienced.  Although sexual mores have evolved, this entry into sexual experience may still be associated with such rituals as forming romantic connections that may lead to marriage.  In some cases, these cultural stepping stones may lead to unwanted pregnancy, which leads to other choices that transcend mere sexual urges.  In any case, we are presented with the masculine cliche of a high school senior in a rented tux as a symbol for a young person on the cusp of a major plateau in life.

Acute, illustrative proto-cliches provide a remarkable vision of behavior.  You believe Will Rogers (1879-1935) was responsible for the observation of an individual, "He was as nervous as a long tailed cat in a roomful of rockers."  A splendid observation, memorable, illustrative, but, alas, now a cliche unless it is used as a barrier to mark where the bar should be set for another, acute observation of a similar nature.

Part of your concern for excising cliches from your work is your desire to keep your own narrative voice, such as it is, free from distracting elements, one of which is the use of trite and convenient material.  For a long time, your reaction, on discovering some monstrous cliche squatting in the foundations of a narrative of yours, was to contrive a fresh metaphor, but what you learned in the process was that a contrived metaphor, which is to say a metaphor catered for this particular banquet, has the look and sound and feel of contrived dishes at numerous banquets, where it joins the already cliched rubber chicken or banquet fame.  You cannot contrive freshness. 

Freshness comes from being so engaged in the material that the visions of it are closer to the intent the story conveys to you as you write it.  You look for cliches that have--here comes a cliche--piggybacked onto your text, hopeful of finding them and replacing them with direct, declarative sentences, which are often the more illustrative way of conveying information, in particular emotional information.  You are embarrassed, therefore, when, after your own efforts, a neutral or supportive editorial hand finds cliches you've missed.

Finding cliches in your work suggests to you a laziness in your dealing with the material at hand.  One positive approach is to attempt a new draft without reference to the old.  The mind is like--watch for this cliche--a magnet, attracting--another cliche on the way--the iron filings of association.  Do you risk the associative, no-thinking approach to get at your deeper feelings?  No question about it.  Yes.

Thus this observation:  We--you included--live in a world where cliche abounds.  When we're in a hurry, we often find the temptation to reply in a cliche.  There are choices to be made.  Depending on your relationship to the person who asks you, How are you? there are choices to be made.  Do you think that person really wants to know or is merely throwing up a conventional and casual greeting?  Do you say, Not bad,  What about you?  Do you say, Oh, same-old, same-old?  Do you say I have an intermittent ache in tooth number twenty-two which I am attempting to insulate with Tylenol?

And this question:  Do you live in a world of cliches, from which you are attempting to rid yourself in order to make even your talking to yourself as fresh as possible so that you can come closer to getting at the more accurate sense of your feelings and responses?

Is there some moral imperative, having admitted you wish to lead the literary and writing life, to develop a sense whereby you can discriminate between your views, the views of others, and the splendid opportunities the writing life gives you to engage in dialogue rather than solipsism?

If you said yes, smile.

Eye Contact

Things change.  Ask Heraclitus ( 535 – c. 475 BCE), the pre-Socratic philosopher who, even then, thinking about something as quotidian as baths, observed how one could not bathe in the same river twice.  Ask him and his followers about the mutable nature of things.  The Google of those early days was a wide-spread group of books or scrolls, often with Latin titles that began with the words, De Re, then went on to some descriptive noun such as materials, metal, water, even a generalized matter.

Nothing appears to have slowed the mutable nature of things; they still change, recession or not, global warming or not.  Boundaries change, standards change, measurements change, minds change.  Seemed like a grand idea at the time, but now, there's change.  

In many ways you'd yet to articulate, you've changed.  In ways still not clear to you, you're in the process of changing.  Such as?  Ah.  don't ask.

You were wishing to change in terms of reaching age six in order to be permitted to carry a pocket knife, which you considered the most remarkable tool a boy could carry.  Reaching six and being given a pocket knife for your birthday, change took on a different aspect for you.  Perhaps for the first time, you had mixed emotions about the age process; soon enough, you've be out of sixth grade and grammar school, into what was then called junior high school, grade level seven-b, which for your world meant John Burroughs Junior High School, Sixth Street and McCadden Streets, mid-city, Los Angeles, where you would be known as a Scrub, the lowest plateau of social order, subject to hazing, taunting, and the mindless terrors only a grammar school student could suppose.

While you were thus occupied with the age process, you remained confident you would not change in your affection for licorice cigarettes, Fleer's bubble gum, and Dixon Ticonderoga pencils, grade 2B.  You have not had a licorice cigarette for fifty years, although your late great friend, Barnaby Conrad, once gave you a package of Black-Jack chewing gum.  You've not used bubble gum for at least twenty years, and although you have one or two Dixon Ticonderoga pencils about, you cannot recall the last time you used them.

Things changed in that you did not have to suffer becoming a Scrub at John Burroughs Junior High School.  Instead, you moved from Central Beach Elementary School, Miami Beach, Florida, across the street to Ida M. Fisher Junior High School, where the hazing was different only because Miami Beach was not Los Angeles, and where instead of being in grade B-seven, you were in grade seven-B, section 1, thus you were 7B1 and you were used to doing something you'd never think to do in Los Angeles, you wore short pants.  

Some, but not all of your destiny was interrupted or, if you will, changed, because you did indeed graduate from John Burroughs Junior High School and, as you expected, attended Fairfax High School.  Changes came about because you'd been bumped up along the way, causing you to be the youngest and shortest in your classes at John Burroughs, until a growing spurt took you in hand, enhancing your length.

By the time you graduated from Fairfax, you were far enough removed from the classmates you'd started with to the point where you'd make eye contact in the hallways, but were more in connection with your new peer group.  Without giving those matters much in the way of thought, your interests focused on changing yourself into something you had no concrete vision of, a writer.  You were also interested in such concepts as approaching manhood, where you had a notable role model, your father, and as your college career progressed, other role models to serve as guides.  But still no sense at all of how you'd manage to make the journey, should you have been given a vision of yourself today, to what you are and what you are quite happy with today, although curious about realizing some if not all the changes in store for you.

There are some changes in store for you that you try to forestall with such things as exercise, diet, curiosity, study, work, and relationships.  One thing you may be able to forestall for some several years is death, but in some ways, that has become for you a kind of analog to the peers you left behind you when, at age nine, you were gone from Los Angeles to live in the East, New England, and the South.  

You make eye contact with death and it with you.  You are no strangers; it has taken your grandparents, your parents, your sister, your wife, two of your closest, dearest human friends, and a line of cherished animal friends beginning with the cat, Sam, who left you in about 1970, extending to your most recent departure, who took her leave as recently as April 15.

Just yesterday, you made eye contact again, a mere passing in the hallway, an acknowledgment that someone from your world was gone, a person whose politics were so far removed from yours that you'd come to agree that you'd acknowledge your differences, and talk around them.  

You had no idea you'd be making such eye contact with death, which is and yet is not a complete abstraction.  It is also an aspect of reality, and so you are each aware of the other and you acknowledge its metaphoric ability to bring change to your life at any moment, that in the best dramatic weights and balance, it has the power, you have the illusion.

You have moved on to another peer group beyond the change you made on your return to Los Angeles.  Now you make eye contact in the hall with your work, the area in which you began doing things in high school to get you launched to where you are.  It recognizes you and you it.  You recognize and make eye contact, or try to, with such abilities and strengths as you have, wishing to keep that contact and recognition strong and friendly.

In numerous ways, each vision you attempt to strike eye contact with is a new project in the making, a new book, a new story.  Right now, there are a few you pass in the hallway, wanting to leave the equivalents of mash notes in their lockers.  As you had crushes on girls in the hallways of John Burroughs Junior High and Fairfax High, and then UCLA, you have crushes on a number of books and stories and novels.  Seeing them reminds you of the personalities of the young women on whom you had crushes and of your half-formed romanticism, working its way within you and in effect helping you describe the you you are today.

You walk down corridors of schools in your mind and in reality, greeting student, dream, and faculty alike, greeting ideas and attempting to make eye contact, holding on for that exciting nod of recognition where you understand some form of relationship has been established.

Of course you have effected a relationship with death.  At the moment it is not a fearful or resentful or even defensive one, merely a respectful one.  All your nowness, all the things you have become are too eager for those other relationships where conversations turn into ideas, ideas turn into visions, and you are able to step into those visions for the sweet rides of connection.

Pages

Some time ago, you heard yourself telling a class how "One keepable page a day works out to a novel a year."  The information stuck with you, through days of many pages or no pages at all, days where keepable was an abstraction, a goal, the quest of a Joseph Campbell heroic journey.

Some more recent time ago, you heard Dennis Lynds asking Duane Unkefer, who was about to have yet another drink, if he'd done his pages for the day, to which Unk replied, "I've been off my game for a while."  Dennis' response, "Got to get you back on the horse."  And once again, you heard Unk's demurral.  

You remember that incident as well as the first.  Took you a while, but much in the manner of a recovering booze abuser, you began marking the time since you began getting at least one page a day. No celebrations, only the awareness of a personality lingering about the work area, where ever the work area happened to be.

Sometimes the page was handwritten, not an uncommon experience under any circumstances.

Before his life was cut short by an unanticipated traffic accident, Dennis wrote under his own name, the pseudonyms of William Arden, John Crowe, Mark Saddler, Carl Dekker, and perhaps yet others you're unaware of.  You place his total at over fifty booklength works.

Unk has, to you knowledge done three.  This is not meant to dis Unk, whom you consider a friend, nor is it meant to romanticize Dennis, who was also a friend while he lived.  The two men are different types of writers, each approaching story from a different purpose.  Both took pains with their manuscripts.

Disclosure:  you met Unk after having reviewed his major novel, Gray Eagles, a review that caused him to seek you out.

Disclosure:  Dennis was so prolific that you ghosted a few of the novels he wrote without a by-line for a series character with many authors.

This puts paid to anything but the focus on pages, the personal effects on a writer having produced pages, the reenactment of the heroic journey, the lifting of the writer from one plateau to the next highest.

The ultimate problem with the meme of a keepable page a day being equal to a novel a year is the difficulty in knowing which page to keep, how many non-keepable pages must be written in order to find one that is keepable, and the added metric of there being the great possibility of editorial notes to cope with even after a book is accepted.

You are currently in the process of editing a book for another editor, a highly fraught set of circumstances in which money and confidences have been exchanged and a publisher is waiting.  You've discovered in addition to the author having "and" as a habit word, also having a habit meme consisting of sentences with three linked independent clauses.  This usage accounts for nearly forty percent of the text in question.

This is one of the things editors are for, thus no judgment is intended.  The process revolves around pages.  What you produce becomes a gateway for your eventual satisfaction.  What you don't produce becomes an engine of dissatisfaction that takes on its own agenda, perhaps to your continued uneasiness.  Even if you work at producing pages but do not in fact produce them, there is a minimal plateau of satisfaction you've reached.

Small wonder how your adjunct interests and activities hover about the production of pages, undershot by the desire to cause some of those to be keepable.

Another thing you find yourself telling students, your arms separated by at least the length of your body, even more if you're feeling expansive.  You have to know this much, you say, now bringing your hands to a gap of about a foot, in order to write this much.

The disposable pages are thus as much a part of the process as the keepable ones.

The Tell-Tale Hurt

Early in the opening paragraph of Edgar Allen Poe's short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator asks us readers, "but why will you say that I am mad?"

Although packaged and presented as a horror story, "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a skillful presentation of a narrator unintentionally portraying irony.  The story is about a murder the narrator has committed.  Unlike the kidnapping and murder of Poe's other, even more famous short story, "A Cask of Amontillado," the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" has chosen a victim with no tangible connection; this was a killing for a much more impersonal motive. 

Fictional and actual profilers, psychologists who construct a profile of a murderer, could well argue Poe's unnamed narrator to be an extreme narcissist, one who chose a victim at random, then orchestrated the death in order to prove how impossible it would be to detect the killer.

The narrator does not protest innocence, rather instead, the narrator protests sanity.  "But why will you say that I am mad?"  The narrator is shrewd about not leaving a clue about gender.  There are reasons to argue the narrator of either gender.  Gender studies scholars (are you being ironic there or a step up from irony, which is sarcasm?) of today might wish to open the argumentative door of the narrator being transgender, if for no other reason than opening the door for equal opportunity, perhaps invoking the spirit of how race relations in this country have improved to the point where miscegenation is recognized and on its way toward accelerated acceptance.  Thus the recent acceptance of dramas in which African Americans, Latinos, and Asians are portrayed as antagonists, as criminal, as intrinsically evil.

Your grudging acknowledgment of Poe's prescience and considerable dramatic influences (in particular on the shortform narrative) is not enough to bring you into his corner as a fan, yet you still acknowledge his effect on how the more effective characters are influenced by the heavy hand of irony, of quirkiness, of that brooding and internally armored front-rank character so prevalent in today's more resonant fiction.

When dealing with the works of your students,your clients, and those sent to you by literary agents, your first impulse is to examine lead characters for niceness, which in this case means a sense of balance and equipoise bordering on consideration.

There are numerous tenure-track jobs in reality for individuals with consideration, persons who empathize and demonstrate either by direct knowledge or from instinct the basic tenets of The Social Contract.

In the work of beginning writers, characters are either too nice or too much representative not of individual traits but of some form of malice personified, evil incarnate, you might say, or at the lesser end of the scale, solipsistic, acolytes of Narcissus.

You like gritty, bothered, pestered, absorbed, obsessed characters, goal oriented to the point where they are easy to give off warning signs of zoning out on reality, focusing instead on some aspect of their goal, which is often curiosity.

Thus you are able to tell students, clients, and yourself for your own composing sessions, Who are they?  What do they want?  Why do they want it, whatever it may be, right now?  What are they willing to do to accomplish their desires?  In a world where the term "racial profiling" is as fraught with the potential for bigotry, you propose this new term, "character profiling," which should allow the profiler (and you) to see far enough into the future to understand how the character is apt to behave if and when the goal is reached, the heart's desire is achieved.

From this vantage point, you can begin to visualize closure beyond the one-size-fits-all endings of contemporary short stories and novels, then into a suggestible state of mind and heart where the energy of the story at hand has presented itself at least in vague presence.

Who knows how many times you've gone over Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado," looking for a template, only to discover it in terms more visible to you at the conclusion of James Thurber's remarkable and thematically similar short story, "The Cat-Bird Seat."  

There are more than generational differences between the writers and between the writers and you as reader here, nor is it possible to hold up Thurber as a paradigm of niceness and normality to Poe's quirky, troubled life.  The major difference is Thurber's frequent arrival at what can only be described as acute, memorable humor, while Poe rarely arrives there, but often arrives at a horror Thurber could not hope to approximate.

Humor is the exposure of sad, wrenching truths in the human condition.  Horror is the representation of the sad, wrenching anger and frustration individuals inflict on themselves, on others, and on animals.

Poe was not funny.  Thurber was.

Thurber was never horrific.  Poe was.

Both had excellent control over the way the characters behaved within their narratives and the effect such behavior was likely to have on their readers.

Neither was nice.  From things you have read about both, each tended to be unpleasant and reactive when taken in wine.

Each had access to that un-nice vision when composing.  But Poe was not funny.  Thurber was.

Congratulations.  You may  have just worked out why you prefer Thurber to Poe, and why you think it important for a writer to leave niceness outside the the work area when sitting to compose.

Details: Mustard vs. Mayonnaise

The more you think about details in a narrative, the more you begin to see them as ghostly figures in Goya etchings, haunting the story in ways you've only just begin to suspect.

Perhaps this is a generational thing since among other storytellers, you grew up among the likes of Philip K. Dick, Bram Stoker, H.P. Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman, Richard Matheson, and Fritz Lieber, haunting used bookstores and mail order dealers for back issues of Weird Tales.  But an equal possibility is your arriving at an ability to put details in a physiological place.

If you start your formulation with the shifting in brain waves as one passes from the waking state into the fraught, personalized world of the sleeping state, you are ready to finish the analogy in progress with the borderline cusp between Reality and the world of equally fraught, personalized management of story.

Story is managed reality, managed dreamscape, arranged to produce feelings in readers that draw forth from them their own cusp worlds between sleep and wakefulness, between actual reality and the reality of story, presented as though real.

Sometimes--often--in the dream world, an object or its lack takes on a drugged, truth-serum force, evoking emotions of one's own.  Sometimes appearing in one's dreams without, say, shoes, or particular items of clothing will provide the equivalent of a sound track, radiating an emotion of bewilderment or embarrassment or loss.  Sometimes an item or detail in a dream will evoke intense pleasure or desire.

Details in stories convey a sense of reality, but since a significant task for story is to radiate reality, the details must be chosen because of their emotional impact on the writer or the characters, perhaps even both.  A single adjectival or adverbial attribution to a detail can set it in vibration, where it will evoke the sense of being real that is the narrative equivalent of hyper reality.  An old shoe.  A new shoe.  Even a brown shoe, or Uncle Fred's shoe sets the detail in motion.

Some stories seem to shimmer with an urgency that, on reexamination, seems numinous, near mystical without any explanation.  To this day, you recall a dream you had when you were a scant five or six, and had in recent days been given your first experience with a then frozen treat called a Popsicle, an ice pop that was nothing more than frozen, fruit-flavored water, another distinguishing feature the two wooden handles for the user to grip while working away at the confection.  

The experience was a sensual delight for you to the point where you could not wait to get the next Popsicle in reality, you were so eager, you dreamed of having one.  In your dream, you experienced the feel of your tongue against the cold, of the melting ice within your mouth, sugary, fruity red.

Most important of all, the thrill of dreaming and experiencing with vividness something you wanted.

Details evoke that same sense when you read them; you are more likely to believe, which is to say resonate with the demands and puzzle and imbalance set forth by the story.  The proper choice of details is every bit as important as the characters, their personalities, their quirks, their needs, their methods of dealing with the obstacles in their way.

John believes he loves Mary and wishes a romantic relationship with her.  Ho hum, that is until it is clear to you that, worthy though John may be, Mary's interests are elsewhere.  No more ho hum; you've been where the fictional John is.  Now you look for, you crave some detail about Mary that will cause you to have the same regard for this fictional Mary as you may have had for a real Mary.  Now the story is on, and you are in your way as much a part of it as the fictional John you are rooting for in his ardent wish to have Mary recognize him for the fine fellow he is.

Because they are small, idiosyncratic things, details must be managed with care.  They must not be allowed to seem formulaic.  If the detail is cheese, it must be of a color and smell that evokes taste or softness or its appearance as melted.  Plain, dumb, old cheese with no attributes won't do it.

A student in your writing workshop this past Saturday spoke in passing of bologna sandwiches her father made for her and how now, she prefers bologna sandwiches, if at all, with mayonnaise.  Then, it was mustard.  A day later, you had no bologna in your refrigerator, but you did have sliced turkey, which you would normally dress with mayonnaise, but today, Dijon mustard.  Also, as of this moment, you now have a packet of bologna from the Italian deli in your refrigerator.

Even were this essay slide into a discussion of the comparative virtues of mayonnaise over mustard or the reverse, the subject would still be about details, wouldn't it?

From Time to Time

In what may still prove out to be yet another error of judgement on your part, you were never a fan of the writing of Marcel Proust.  Were you unable to sleep late some night in some hotel or lodging not your own and the only other book than A Remembrance of Things Past, also known as In Search of Lost Times, was Atlas Shrugged, you might be persuaded to have another go at Proust.  But not now.

You do like the thematic approach you understand him to have taken with time.  In the process of adding years to your curriculum vitae, time has acquired a shape, a personality, an insistent presence.  A recent rummage through a suspect shelf in the kitchen cabinet produced not only the record you were seeking, you also discovered a photo of a quite young you, perhaps six or seven, but not likely any more.

Time has turned you on its lathe, drawing you out to a taller you with better posture, quite a bit less hair, a deeper voice, a much more acute range of vision, and greater sophistication wrapped about the armature of any story you tell today.

Time has also added to your body the same effects visible on a well-traveled street.  You have pot holes, scars, a greater allergic awareness of things Acacia now than in the past, an incredible tolerance for coffee, and an almanac-like present-day awareness of fools and foolishness now you had no inkling of then, the better to not suffer them lightly, much less at all.

Relative to the you of that picture in which, face contorted to keep your eyeglasses perched high on your nose, you cling to your mother's Pekingese, Ming-Toi, a cranky lap dog and no pal for a six-year-old boy, you had a greater wish-for list than experiences, you are at about the same ratio now.  This is not to minimize or criticize your range of experiences, rather to admit to a broad spectrum of things undone that you hope to get done.

For the six-year-old you and the current day you, time was and still is the fulcrum.  When you first came to the last line of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, you were about twenty.  Nevertheless, you found yourself borne with some regularity back into the past, searching to discover ways you'd come to be the person you were then, in some ways as cranky as your mother's Pekingese.

Now, among other reasons, you find yourself borne back into the past to dwell with fondness or grief over things and persons in your life now lost to you, roads taken and not, decisions that have stood the test of time (which, near as you can decipher the concept, means outcomes you still endorse and enjoy).

From time to time, you perform Dr. Frankenstein-like experiments with time, freezing artificial moments of it on paper or on screen preparatory to sending it to appear on paper along with an ensemble of individuals you have created, plucked out of the waters of your imagination like a fly fisherman capturing sleek, darting trout from hidden pools, using dry flies that approximate real life insects real life trout might well consider for a snack.

You find comfort in the awareness of how time influences writing, music, photography, art, and biology, each of these concepts having time as its denominator as you in fact have it.  In each of these concepts, you included, timing is everything.  How long will it take?  What are the intervals, if any?  What things did you leave in the past that might be recovered and used to some benefit?  What past things are better left, perhaps lost in metaphoric cushions of the large, cosmic sofas on which you have sat or reclined in all innocence, unaware of things slipping from your pockets?

This is not the time for if only, nor was the time when you stood in front of 6145 1/2 Orange Street, a scant half block away from the Miracle Mile in mid-city Los Angeles, where and when Miracle Mile portended great miracles of imagination and discovery and where, indeed, the present day you of 409 East Sola Street, Santa Barbara, still senses portents of miracles to come with time and an obsessive need to imagine.  Considering a few accidents you experienced between then and now, you do feel the presence of the miraculous, skittering about like a burrowing animal that has found its way into the foundations and is now digging for its own possibilities.