Spilled Change among the Cushions of Story

"Why did I turn here instead of continuing on my normal route?"

If your answer to the question was, "Because I was lost in thought," you were no doubt being accurate because you are often lost in something resembling thought or abstraction or, even better, the locus of muscle memory and concentration.  But in this case, and many others like it, you might not have been going far enough below the surface to get at a more governing response, some core sampling of you that, on investigation, presents a level of behavior you can not articulate, much less understand.

Whether you find clues and discoveries and surprises along the way or not, experiences suggest to you that you will always be essentially a naive narrator, given over to writing beyond yourself in effect to portray individuals of greater awareness and wisdom than which can be crammed into your available storage space.


You know this much for certain, you're long past the possibility of saying you turned here because you were fated or destined to do so.  This is true because of your philosophy in which Reality is too busy with its own agenda to pay much attention to yours.  Even if you were to do something severe such as log a segment of a forest or open one of the valves on a dam, thus flooding acres of land, Reality would be too busy responding in accordance with some notable law of behavior to offer a direct response to what you'd done.

A pigeon or seagull in transit overhead, scoring you with a splat of evacuated waste matter might be seen in some corners as karma or revenge, but the best you could do is apply the term "poetic justice."  But poetic justice is a dramatic device, conjured up by men and women who write poems, stories, and plays.  

Poetic justice is your dear old pal, Wile E. Coyote, patron saint of all characters, setting an elaborate trap for Roadrunner, using a device supplied by The Acme Co. which, now that you think of it, could well be a metaphor for Reality.  Roadrunner escapes the trap because this is Roadrunner's function. Wile E. Coyote will always trigger the trap to pay off on him.  This is so because Wile E. Coyote's function is to be, as Shakespeare told it, hoist by his own petard, blown asunder by his own canon.  The Acme Co. is the official supplier of devices, because this is the thing The Acme Co. does--supply devices.

Poetic justice made an early appearance in the cautionary tale told by The Pardoner in Chaucer's wonderful The Canterbury Tales, wherein three young men, well into a carouse, meet a funeral procession for an acquaintance of theirs, a friend who'd been taken down that very night by a mysterious figure named Death. Our three young drunks resolve to seek out this Death fellow and teach him a lesson.  

Not long after, they encounter eight bushel baskets of gold coins, which is in essence the first tangible step to finding death.  Before the evening is over, all three have plotted against one another, added poison to bottles of wine with which each intends to kill of the others, and, indeed, drunk from those very poisoned bottles, finding the thing they earlier set forth to find, Death, and poetic justice.

It is also a sort of poetic justice that you, who do not believe in things being destined or fated to happen, are not free of deterministic influences.  The paths on which individuals embark have destinations.  You believe this to the point of believing that even being continuously at sea is a form of destination.  Some destinations are reached, some barely missed or arrived at too late for the intended outcome.

We all define our story arc,and we do so even when we chose to accept the arc provided for us by a source outside our self.  We embark on it, add influence to it.  But.  With all its multifarious activity, Reality has some causal effects, which can interfere with our planned outcome.

You are looking for surprise discoveries, about yourself and the universe.  You could say of yourself that you are seeking spilled change among the cushions of Story.

The Chemical Reaction to Stories and People

No matter what has happened to individuals in real life or characters trying to work their way through stories, the persons who matter the most to you are ones who do not consider themselves victims.

Within the landscape of your vision, victims belong to the extraordinary set of individuals who serve as some kind of warning signal to you in Real Time and to characters within story.  These victims are harbingers of what can happen if you're not careful.  They serve as warnings to characters in story, serve in fact as an additional layer of pressure to send them over the edge, Sisyphus's rock, starting yet another downward trip from the peak.

You try hard to like most people, which is altogether a different course from trying to be the Politico or Friend to Everyone.  Your approach here is to look for a preponderance of attractive qualities in anyone you see, making a point to select qualities and techniques you envy to the point of admiration.  In this manner, you are able to be respectful, even appreciative.  

Friends are another matter.  Admiration, envy, confidence, trust all figure in the calculus of friendship, but more important is the less easy to define word of chemistry, perhaps because there are so many kinds of love and because chemistry is the advance guard of chemistry.  

Persons you consider close friends have often experienced some measure of disaster, disappointment, perhaps even severe disillusionment, but they do not for one moment look upon themselves as victims.

You know a few individuals who are well off to the point of being affluent, who have achieved their affluence as a sort of Teflon coating against their at one time having been victims, even now nursing resentments and suspicion.  You can get on with such persons, but you do so in recognition that there is little potential for chemistry.

The same essentials obtain for the relationship you experience with characters, certainly your own and emphatically with those of other writers .  You have respect and sympathy for some of the more notable characters of the previous two centuries, but no real chemistry.  The characters with whom you experience that tingle of chemistry surprise you in the range of their appearances and, indeed, their authors.  

Much as the voice and style and technique at evocation rather than description you find in Hemingway leaves you,even at this remove from having studied him with such intensity,  impressed and respectful, your response dpes not approaching chemical.

The same regard, arrived at in grudging steps and quite a bit of stubborn resistance on your part is there for Henry James.  This regard is an irony, arrived at because of two writers with whom you do feel a chemistry, Cynthia Ozick and Colm Toibin, in whose writings about James and their own homages to him show you things you were not able to see directly from him, not until as recently as fifteen years ago, right on the cusp of the present century.

Your reading of James provides you a sense of a number of individuals who have worked their way into positions where they either refuse to see obviois truths or have suffered humiliation, but they do not take the victim's way out.  And you recognize in James the ability to see a psychological nuance, but still there is no chemistry, while on any given page of an Ozick or Toibin, you can feel the chemistry sparking.

The matter comes down to the ability some authors have to put the emotions of their characters into the foreground and the ability some individuals have to allow for the easy access to their own feelings as a tangible means of expression.

With the passage of time and your studies of your own craft, you have come to value evocation where you once valued and sought to capture description.  Feelings can and have been described, sometimes with stunning effect.  Landscapes can and have been described, in prose and poetry, once again with the occasional memorable and stunning effect.

Nevertheless, there is little to compare with the feelings of connection you get when you are able to see persons in Real Time or characters in story doing things in response to the events Reality or Story have presented them.

A Short-cut Life or A Life Cut Short

You grew up in a city that was made for short cuts.

By the time you were in your twenties, you knew the fastest way to get westbound was on Olympic and to stay away from Santa Monica Boulevard at all costs.  If you were west and wanted east, you understood the vibe on Pico, all the way down toward about Union, where downtown LA was girding up for the night and would;t give an inch.

Wanted to get west, to UCLA or The Village?  Beverly Glen Canyon was a perfect back door.  So was east bound on Franklin to get to Silver Lake or Los Feliz, and don't you dare trust Sunset east of Doheney,  Lax?  Ah, The Street of the Scissors, La Tijera.

Thus armed with shortcut insights, you came here, to Santa Barbara, quick to learn how southbound traffic clogs 101 from about three in the afternoon.  You want to get to Carpinteria or Ventura, you go the back way, East Valley Road to 192, bringing you out on the 101 ahead of the pack.  Screw the traffic on State Street.  You want to get north, say to La Cumbre, back road again, take Mission north until it dead ends on 192, then hook a left, which will take you onto Cathedral Oaks, whereupon you're clear until Turnpike.

You think about other shortcuts, ones beyond mere driving from place to place, ways to get the meat out of a book without having to read it three or four times before you understand that you've captured a keepable sense of it, ways to lengthen the distance you're traveling between two points.  Now, thanks to the Garmin Vivofit on your wrist, taking the long way gives you Brownie points toward your ten-thousand-steps-a-day goal.

But you're looking for more than mere distance, a mere ten thousand steps, aren't you?  In fact, you're looking for essentials, the kinds you've been looking for in other ways, all your life.  You're looking for essentials and time, some amount of time, any amount of time to make some sense of them, however brief?

The younger you was in a different kind of hurry than the hurry you're in now.  That You was in the hurry of impatience.  One thing was true then:  You wanted to get stories and novels completed, you had to put in time at the red Olivetti portable or later, the IBM Selectric.  In consequence, you pulled all-nighters, two, three times a week, your eagerness running ahead of the pile of manuscript pages.

Couldn't always wait to edit or revise, used too many bottles of white-out on too many first drafts, eager to get on to the next thing, the next, the new, the promised.  If it didn't work, no matter; the next one would.  Trouble with that kind of thinking is, the next thing often did work, which still didn't make it as workable as it could be.

The younger you wished to taste everything on the menu, then scout new restaurants; wanted new joints and bars to hear the combos who couldn't get gigs in the better jazz venues; wanted to catch all the ballet troupes coming through town.  A new writer? You couldn't wait for the cheaper priced massmarket edition, you had to read her or him right now.

Couldn't always wait for friends, had to get to ghost towns and high desert now, top down on the Dodge convertible in order to get the sense of sunrise falling on your shoulders, hunched over the wheel.

In a memorable sense, youth was like being at that architectural gem, the Union Station in north central LA, the retro design and panache stirring up excitement within you each time you visited, sitting in that ornate waiting room, listening to the announcement of trains arriving and leaving, magical names of magical trains, coming to LA and departing for the places of heart's desires, each one a different, better desire.

All you could think to do next was to walk to Olverra Street, eat too many taquitos and drink too many salty, touristy margaritas, then sit, drunkenly watching tourists discover L.A. as though it were an answer to all their problems.

The dental hygienist threw you out of your dentist's office at about noon, making it a clear shot down the De la Vina/State intersection to the shortcut behind Ralph's Market and a short jog right to The Daily Grind for some coffee to dull down your shiny new cleaning job.  While you sat, drinking, dunking your cinnamon roll, three of four things came rushing over to you, like flies to a fresh bowl of potato salad at a picnic.

You took notes, which is something you do now.  You have piles of notes, notes for stories, notes for the novel in the works, notes for the book linking acting techniques with storytelling.  In the most simplistic of terms, you're looking for time to make some sense of all these notes.  You're no longer fearful of making mistakes.  You are, in fact, most fearful of still traveling too fast to allow yourself the time to make mistakes.

At one point, back then in time, you'd have said your goal was to create memorable, resonant, enduring stories.  But now, you see that was a short cut.  You want the long way around, in order to make vibrant, memorable, enduring mistakes.

A Tale of Two Sydney's: Who's on, Firsr?

Although the short story is an important form for you, you have not completed a new one for about two years, although you could say you put in significant time editing and revising the twelve appearing in your June publication of a collection of previously published works.

When you begin to fret about the time passed since your last completion, you have the comfort of knowing you have two short stories launched, that there is no similarity between them except the narrative tone, which is in effect the literary equivalent of a computerized breakdown of your voice.

Even though you've written and published a number of short stories, there is no guarantee you will find the endings of either of them, a fact simultaneously pleasing and frustrating.  Both stories have kept you up at night, sneaking into your dream state and that limbo of a place between being all the way into sleep and all the way out of sleep.  

These ventures into insomnia have come, to your surprise and delight, when you were pretty well committed to other, longer projects, some of them nonfiction, although let this be said:  The nonfiction is intended to have the qualities of narrative voice you treasure in yourself and other writers, become scornful when such voice is missing from your work or anyone's work.

Seeing a story under those circumstances is of a piece with having a dream in which one of your dogs has appeared, mostly Sally these days, but on occasion Molly, Edward, and Edward's remarkable mother, Blue, whose Blue-Tick Hound bawl mouth was the canine equivalent of a Hayden or Mozart string quartet.

Each time you feel the need to check in on the two in-progress stories, it is always with the covenant you've struck with yourself to add at least a paragraph of new material or remove a paragraph.  Among the first things you look--and listen--for in your reading is the quality of the narrative voice, which you believe has become more tangible to you in all your composition because of the short stories you've written and the short stories of other writers you feel drawn to.

Narrative tone--voice, if you will--is one of your go to tools for checking the authenticity and grab of a story or essay.  If there is the slightest hint you are explaining the vision of the story to yourself instead of dramatizing it for the characters or pushing the arguments to a combustion of conclusion, the offending material has to be rewritten, often deleted, rephrased, again and again, until it fits the tone you see for it.

And what is this tone?  This tone is a feeling you often get in Real Time, after you've made a statement to which someone replies, "You're kidding, right?"  Better yet, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

Some of this you got from Anton Chekhov, some from John Cheever, yet other from Katherine Mansfield, not to forget Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, Deborah Eisenberg, Louise Erdrich, and John O'Hara.  Of course there are others, including writers from your great favorite magazine from the pulp days, Black Mask.  And you must not forget Flannery O'Connor, in particular her short story "Good Country People," in which a bible salesman has resolved to steal the artificial leg of a Ph.D. in literature who has renamed herself Hulda, because she believes it to be such an ugly name.

You've come to enjoy the dash of uncertainty in narrative outcomes and do so in large measure because of your observation of uncertainty in all human narrative.  But as well, you do so because of the number of times you've experienced uncertainty of meaning in the works of writers you admire, a result that causes you to constantly reexamine story and life to see if you did in fact understand what you'd thought you understood.

With little prompting, you could produce another list of writers who have what you will also call a satiric voice, one that causes you to look with great care at their work to see if there is that delicate trace of exaggeration, slipped in like a dash of balsamic vinegar reduction, that tips the work over from merely being engaging to taking up the tools of satire.

The great satirist of your youthful time, Peter DeVries, brought you great gulps of joy each time you saw his pieces in The New Yorker,  or when he had a new novel coming forth.  For the longest time, you appreciated the political views of Molly Ivins, and now, there is Stephen Colbert.  By the time you'd come to recognize these splendid sorts, you'd cut your teeth on Mark Twain and Ring Lardner.

In the same way Twain gave vigor and momentum to being the innocent abroad, you set forth to understand the Reality about you, how it has been shaped by the same sorts Chaucer saw in The Canterbury Tales, and how with little or no hesitation, that same Reality can cause you to accept things you might otherwise question.

The Profit/Loss Statement of the Self: All in the Family

Much of your life is lived within a bubble.  On any given day, the individuals you are most likely to contact have something to do with writing and/or publishing, themselves engaged as you are engaged in writing, editing, publication, and education.  If these individuals have other interests, say politics, these can provide some wedge of entry of the outside world into your bubble.  Nevertheless, yours is a bubble of relative smallness.

There are occasional chores and what you've come to think of as maintenance activities, such as routine shopping for groceries, routine visits to doctors,(which includes dental maintenance) barbers, auto repair facilities, laundry related activity, and exercise related activity.

A look at the Balance Sheet gives you a range of friends and students from about twenty years of age upward into the nineties, all of whom you have some common interests relating to reading, writing, and understanding the Self and the human condition

To keep the bubble from being too constricting, you are alert to what you've come to think of as cultural wedges such as concerts, lectures, political activism, drama, film, and travel.  You bring into the bubble numerous publications, many of which inform you of other publications, with which you attempt to maintain contact.  

The last item on your laundry list, travel, reminds you how easy it is to start with a map of your home state, then extend your vision to the entire continent, only to see the extent of bubbles everywhere, within and outside.

By reminding yourself with some regularity that you are in a bubble, you attempt, and are sometimes successful in bringing into your range discussions and visions you might not have ordinarily had.  To date, this has brought you the awareness that your opinions, like your memories, are resources you do not always think to declare when compiling a Profit/Loss Statement of the Self.

It is your good fortune to live in a setting now where you have relative privacy from your neighbors.  Thus the occasional sounds when there is an event at the nearby Santa Barbara Bowl, the occasional traffic snarls when the two yearly parades, The Summer Solstice Parade, and the Fiesta Parade, turn the downtown area near you into chaos.

Thus you are free to hear the neighborly squabbles of your own multifariousness, the you within the bubble of your choice, invention, and intention.   Lacking a better approach even in dealing with the varied aspects of yourself, you content yourself with the reminder that you don't want to evangelize any of them, effect any changes among them, not even patience with the You who has become a parental if not authoritative figure.

The best you can hope for is patience with them.  Once, years back, when you had a neighbor with whom you shared a contiguous wall, you developed a dialogue about the volume at which you both should play music and the times where such playing was neighborly.  Even now, thinking about that arrangement, you find a measure of satisfaction when you realize here were two individuals attempting to be considerate of one another.

You do not want your inner neighbors to stop playing loud music or change their tastes.  You do not want the Inner Sceptic to stop thinking all your ideas are crazy.  You do not wish for your Inner Introvert to suddenly become gregarious to the point of wanting to go on picnics with you, nor do you wish your Inner Editor would come to grips with the things you're attempting to discover through your writing efforts.  They are a noisy, self-absorbed, inconsiderate bunch, but they are after all family, and as you know from your outer family, they are not going to change.

The Writer's Lament: A Mouse! A Mouse! My Kingdom for a Mouse!

"I wish I could get a screen shot of this or find some way to show it to you,"  Dr. Mayhew said, peering into the device that allowed her to peer into your eyes.  She is an optometrist, who had been on your case for some time to have the necessary, painless, and easy-to-perform surgery that would repair your growing condition of cataract in both eyes.

"It's as though you're resisting the opportunity to see better,"  she urged.

You reminded her that only weeks earlier, you'd passed the vision part of your drivers' license examination.

"Not the same thing,  Would you like me to make the appointment for you?"

That was then.  Less than a year later, you are in the same examination room, your chin comfortably at rest in a chin-shaped plastic guide, allowing Dr. Mayhew's associate, Dr. Schwartz, to look into the same measuring device.  The difference is that you have indeed had the surgery, can in fact see even better than Dr. Mayhew supposed you might, and are now investigating the potential for reading glasses.  

"What do you see?"  Dr. Schwartz, who is a practicing Buddhist, asks you.

"Nothing,"  you say, because in fact, the lens covers of the device have not been lifted.

"This could be a very good thing for you,"  Dr. Schwartz says, well aware of your own interest in Buddhistic ways of looking at things.  

In some ways, seeing nothing is a step toward the stripping away of illusion, what some philosophical approaches call maya.  You are laughing once again because it had not been long since you, in the act of shaving, saw a line of fleas, moving with a determined synchronized march across the platform adjacent the bathroom sink.

You'd also laughed at about one minute post op on the left eye, because the new lens afforded you a dramatic change in vision paradigm.

Your own encounter with cataract-correction surgery came at about the time a number of friends and students had dealt with the removal of the lens issued at birth and its replacement with a new one of significant capabilities.  Your friends and the opthamologist who performed the surgery spoke freely of potential post op phenomena, which included seeing bugs, spiders, lines, and flashes of light that were for the most part illusory.

Until the moment where you saw the fleas, you'd had no such encounters.  Nearly everyone you knew who'd had the procedure  had seen at least one non-existent spider.  To this day, your literary agent will bat at insects which you do not see.

Small wonder then your pleasure at the line of fleas in your bathroom; you'd seen an optical illusion and, earlier, you'd been given a view of nothing.  You were on your way to a world that would, with help from you, reveal itself and its mysteries as such things should be revealed, which is to say as a result of personal search,investigation, and the accumulation of subjective experiences which would in effect remove the cloudy, yellowish filter over your sight.

This business of personal search, investigation, and experimentation has extensive implications for you.  Embarked as you are now on a book comparing the personal searches, investigations, and experiments of writers and actors, you've become drawn to the possibilities about you.  When you watch plays or films, you're most likely to focus on the actor's projected sense of concentration.

Had you some of the developed traits of an actor, you'd have been able to imagine your own fleas without needing the optical illusion of fleas.  You'd be able to see fleas on demand, where there in fact were no fleas.  The best you can do now, so far as fleas are concerned, is recall your memory of the optical illusion of fleas.  This is a start, but it is not yet enough.

Then you come across a book by the actor/director Richard Boleslavsky, Acting:  The First Six Lessons, in which an aspiring actor is asked to visualize a mouse at a particular spot on the floor.  You are once again replying on your memory of mice to provide you an entry way into the suggested act of imagination.

You think nothing about imagining a character, a full-fledged individual, yet you cannot imagine a mouse.  This is at once a facetious matter, wrestling with a serious one.  Actors provide a control group against which writers may judge themselves and their own ability to imagine a situation to the point where, however contrived, the situation emerges with the patina of plausibility.

What is the point of imagining all these varied scenarios if you cannot bring them outside, where others might see them, then become caught in their imaginary worlds?

At this point in your life, you have any number of individuals living in time-share conditions within that great, shamble of a rooming house within you.  Dogs and cats frolic and fret, babies cry to be held, fed, and jiggled.  Mice scurry.  Relatives come to visit, and you are out in your car, rushing to the nearest market that remains open until midnight to get some item of whim--the last time, it was liverwurst and pickles--for the sudden yen they have confessed to you. 

The FedEx and UPS Deliveries of the Mind

There are times when you have ordered such things as computers, items of clothing, and, in the most recent such venture, an espresso making machine, complete with individual capsules filled with various types of coffee, then awaited delivery via FedEx or United Parcel.

The time of delivery is agreed upon because such things have to be signed for.  This means there is a window of a day where you might otherwise be doing something constructive away from home, something such as teaching a class, or perhaps writing at breakneck speed in a coffee shop, where you've gone to get away from the distracting quiet of your home.  

You might even be skulking in a number of book stores, daring the right title to present itself to you as a surprise of a treasure, something you might not have read about in any of the six or seven review sources to which you subscribe.

All irony and suppressed sarcasm to the side, you are at home during this window of time, no doubt drinking coffee, less doubt still consulting the yard for tell-tale traces of the FedEx or UPS delivery truck, the forthcoming shipment somehow gathering more importance than you'd ever intended.  

The espresso machine--an enormous disaster, by the way--was a complete whim.  You have several sizes of the stove-top Bialetti device that makes an admirable attempt at most of the espresso coffee you're likely to drink at home.  Nevertheless, you wait for the person who will deliver it, whereupon, you will sign for it in a flourish of cursive.

But here's the rub.  The window of delivery time has come.  And gone.  No trace of the delivery person.  You feel more let down than a computer you do not absolutely need (because you have a back-up) is worth, or a summer-weight jacket, or a stainless steel stock pot, both of which will add some interest to your life but no more than you are apt to discover without awaiting delivery.

There is only one way to assuage your disappointment, a cafe au lait at one of your favored venues, say the Daily Grind across De La Vina from Trader Joe's, which you know to be having a display of figs and of fig jam.

On your way out, either tacked to the gate or in your mailbox is a note from the delivery source, regretting you were not home, then giving you the option of driving to some facility in the nether reaches of the city or calling a number to reschedule the delivery.  There is a slight note of reproof in the suggestion that this time, you pick a time when you know you will be home.

Laid back and forgiving of human trespass as you have become during these golden years of yours, you are anything but laid back now, wanting to exact some elaborate revenge fantasy in which FedEx and UPS trucks litter the landscape, on their backs, wheels still spinning, their drivers sitting helpless at their sides, shaking their heads at the cunning and malevolence, dare you say the shock and awe of your revenge.

The feeling returns to you on those rare days when you sit to compose, awaiting word of delivery from your whim of composition, which you have ordered, then come to feel the need for its arrival.

After an hour or so of fidgeting and the occasional tapping of the delete key, you repair to the kitchen, spooning your favored Espresso Forte roast into your stove-top Bialetti machine, thinking coffee will settle the matter, give you the proper balance to begin.  Most often, all you need is a sentence or two, at most a paragraph before you are in and at one with the image of your concoction.  It is speaking to you.  On some occasions, you're even able to do what you try not to do, which is edit; you do this by cutting some of the early clutter and set-up.

There are the times when you have in effect been left the equivalent of the Sorry We Missed You note from FedEx or UPS or, for that matter, even the USPS relative to the arrival of a check that needs to be signed for.  You feel the impatience begin to rise, visualizing the stainless steel stock pot, filled with water come to a boil just before you deliver a handful of pasta for an evening meal.

You are eager for the delivery, whether it is an essay, a chapter from a nonfiction project, or a scene from a story.  At first, you grouse at the number of years you awaited delivery and none came.  Then you remember how important those years were to the overall process, by which time you understand the enormity of the gift when it arrives.

Some nights, you're up late, working.  Other nights, you're up late, waiting for delivery, alert to the outside noises of the street.