Uses of Butterfly Nets in Writing Stories

 Because you have a significant admiration for his fiction and have, at times, used--with proper attributions--some of his interpretations of literature when you were in a teaching role, you tend to think of Vladimir Nabokov from time to time in the pursuit of one of his serious side activities, tracking down and collecting butterflies.  

You've seen more than one picture of him thus engaged, quite possibly being photographed by his wife.  What a lovely connection to make in relationship to him--a major writer, wandering about likely landscapes in search of rare butterflies.  

In a quirky, wonderful way, this vision of Nabokov causes you to appreciate his writing at yet another level, the level of a serious, informed, opinionated man, stalking rare species in order to preserve them, study them, and write about them.

This association allows you the enjoyable metaphor of any writer--but you in particular--moving cautiously amid the dense foliage of sense and sensation, trying to net a rare concept or, even more to your liking, a splendid example of an ordinary concept, then to bring it home for study and writing.

The activity has become, for you, an ongoing attempt to pursue the exotic or its polar opposite, the overwhelming presence of the ordinary.  Each, in its way, is attractive, a different side of the coin of challenge.  

While you do enjoy the exotic and seem to be able to identify it when you are in its neighborhood or when it trespasses into yours, you recognize a gravitation to the ordinary.  You enjoy the way ordinary presents itself in the kind of determination exemplified by a volunteer plant, taking root in the crack within a roadway or sidewalk. You identify with and cheer for the plant.

Such outlier volunteers are often called weeds, regarded, if at all, with the kind of annoyance manifest in discovering a single hair growing on, say, a nose or ear lobe, or some place where the presence of a single hair is an impertinence.  Thus do you frequently find you describing yourself, intrusive, insolent, irreverent, but also, with Mr. Nabokov in mind, searching for the rare and common ironies fluttering and darting about in the forest of humanity.

Irony seems to flutter its wings at you, inviting pursuit, which you hope to capture, then analyze, your hopes expanding to the point where you can dramatize the irony, show individuals, through their behavior, doing and, when appropriate, not doing things that add to the available displays of irony.  

Is it your extensive experience with such things that leads you to recognize the difficulty in describing what you've netted?  And of course, you wouldn't be honest with yourself if you didn't question your overall abilities:  Are you in fact as able as you will ever be, you wonder, at being able to represent what you've captured?  

Your extensive experience carries with it enough confidence to balance out the amateurish Q and A of the Inner Editor, allowing you to in effect extract the butterfly from the net, then begin getting at the circumstances of its drama.  Every writer you know has similar problems.  

The writers whose lives ended before you came upon the scene, and those contemporary writers you know only from their written reports, have gone through the process as well, their work shimmering before you not only because of its exotic beauty but because of the degree of work they required to make the work seem so effortless.

Revising Your Manuscripts and Your Past

Until the computer found its way into your life as an instrument for composition, you were used to the need for wastepaper baskets, most of which were filled with crumpled manuscript pages.   At least one of these wastebaskets was papered over with a collage of rejection slips from dozens of magazines no longer in existence. 

Wastebaskets, wadded manuscript pages, and rejection slips became an early part of your routine.  If a particular story or essay were rejected ten times, you felt it was time to be subjected to the Inquisition of Revision. 

This was your silent way of acknowledgment.  However fond you were of words, sentences, paragraphs, and your interest in ways these  elements could be linked to form meaningful narrative or discourse, things did not always work out as you'd hoped.  Sometimes these things were sources of the kinds of itches that appear in portions of your back you are least well equipped to reach.

Your current involvement with computers at the current level of wireless connections to printers, and the ability to move files from one device to another does not mean things work out as you'd hoped, with no equivalents of crumpled pages or printed manuscripts, now covered with handwritten emendations.  Far from it.  

Instead of crumpled manuscript paper, you highlight a paragraph or a page, click the Select All option, then tap the deleter key with the little finger of your right hand, sending those offensive keystrokes back to the divine nothingness of the chaos from which you attempted to wrest them.

The more realistic meaning is your awareness that thoughtful narratives or discourses have not become easier over time. Word order, intent, sound, and attitude are only a few of the causes for the crumpled pages or that emphatic tap on the delete button.  There was something satisfying about the sound of meshing gears, of the friction of paper being yanked from a typewriter platen.  

You're pleased to have the memory of those misadventures and their consequence, the knowledge you would have to start gain, rethink, re-envision.   Revision is not only a way of your working life, it is in large measure the way of your entire life.

In one way or another, you're reacting to some past incident which, although you cannot replay or revise it, you are attempting to marshall your present day coping devices to accommodate.  The past action could have taken place as recently as yesterday, but it could have also had origins in a time or incident with an origin you can no longer pinpoint, although you've been in a way, revising or reacting to over a considerable haul. Random as Reality can be, Life seems to hear also the sound of that different drummer, Causality.

Although there are many narratives with looser structures than the conventional plot designs, the concept of Causality removes much of the apparent randomness of Reality by suggesting an equivalent of Newtonian physics brought to the page or stage:  Random acts don't make the cut.  Events that take place on the page or stage have been triggered by relevant past actions.  Even an apparent whim will have had its origins in some past action.

Revision of a manuscript gives you the leeway and thrill of appearing to leave your own fingerprint on Reality by doing in effect what the Army Corps of Engineers did to the Mississippi River.  You reroute, shunt, divert, dam courses of dramatic information, which is a gathering of agenda, motive, consequence, and attitude.  

You cannot in Reality make a direct revision for some  thoughtless behavior delivered in the past, but you can make it your purpose to do something you consider positive and worthwhile in present time as a way of acting on your revision.

Metaphor: the Sock Drawer of Life

With so many things in your life to keep track of if you are to get at the chores you wish to engage, you see considerable value in metaphor as the equivalent of a file folder.  Now that you think about it, you're willing to venture a metaphor you'd only this moment brought to mind.  Metaphor is the sock drawer of life.

With that as background, let the record show your awareness of how your memory of having an actual drawer in which your socks and underwear were kept goes back to about age eight or nine.  During those years, there was nothing metaphoric about your sock drawer; it was a place where your freshly laundered socks and underwear were kept at the ready after they had been laundered.  

The presence of your sock and underwear drawer was monitored by your mother who, you recall at one time, suggested your sock and underwear drawer was not a practical place to store your comic books and library books.  Years later, in fact, within this most recent century, you thought to portray a character as a young boy who, as an example of his authenticity, was discouraged by his mother from storing comic books in his sock drawer.  

You remember this fictional mother of your own invention telling this fictional boy, "Things go in appropriate places."  You also remember the boy thinking, Things may need to go in appropriate places now, but as a grown-up, he'd put things where he felt they belonged, because how were grown-ups ever to understand what real order was about unless they'd had experience as young persons, putting things where they wanted them to go.

From about age twenty, when the washing, folding, and arranging of socks and underwear had been well established as your entire responsibility, the sock drawer with increasing regularity became a metaphor, by which you mean that you'd begun to accept the Cosmic behavior that can be described either as missing socks or unmatched pairs of socks.

For a time, your solution was to limit the color of socks to gray, but even then, however infrequent your inventory, the number of socks present at any one time was an odd number.  No matter that you'd switched to gray Byford cotton socks.  You were somehow losing the occasional single sock or in some mysterious way, one gray sock found its way into the Bermuda Triangle of socks.

At this stage of your life, you've advanced to a stage of not wearing socks most days, using them only when you are dressing toward some greater formality.  By your reckoning, you've only worn socks twice this year.  You've also graduated from the combination sock and underwear drawer to separate drawers for each item.  You're more conscious of underwear coming and going, either losing elasticity in the waistband or the wearing through from use.  Nothing mysterious about disappearing underwear.

In the drawer below, the sock drawer, the old magical realism persists.  The last time you were consulting your stash of socks, you were attempting to coordinate the color of socks with the shirt you'd chosen to wear.  Sure enough, you could find one sock in that hue, but not a pair.  You told yourself with some severity that this was the ideal time for an inventory, where socks with the merest hint of wearing out at the heel or single socks of a particular color or pattern would be dispatched,

Metaphor helps you visualize the relationship you'd discovered between two things you'd thought were unlinked, provides an excellent emotional Post-it note, urges you to see the potential for anticipation and inference.  

One of the first times a metaphor stuck in your mind as a glorious braid of originality, immediate conveyance of a feeling (in this case apprehension), and a personalized rather than generic sense of accuracy came from the American humorist Will Rogers.  "As nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs."

For the longest time, that observation held the lonely spot at the tip of the pyramid of human awareness.  You knew with certainty how such a cat would feel.  When you put that in tandem with the observation that the more regional an observation was, the more universal the observation became, you were on your way to feeling you had some way of accessing the totality of the human condition, whether it was a sock-wearing culture or not.

You also understand through your admiration of certain fantasy novels and tales of magical realism how it can transpire that, were you to count the number of socks in your sock drawer now, you would arrive at an odd number.

One Sardine on a Wheat Thin

When we take up writing after being seduced by the notion that we can write with as much conviction and truthfulness as we found in the reading we enjoyed, we begin a fraught, complex relationship with event and purpose.  The relationship reminds you of your first cat, who was in fact your neighbor's cat, who visited you because you were home most days, writing impossible stories on a red Olivetti portable typewriter.

The cat came to you from boredom.  Surely it had good company when his owner was home, but days are long and languorous in the Hollywood Hills, and there you were, your mother's son, mindful that a visitor, even a cat visitor, should be offered refreshment.  

At the time, it was your nature to splurge on tins of pate, cornichons, deviled ham, sardines, anchovy, and other similar elements including wheels and balls of cheese, which could be transformed into suitable accompaniments for bottles of wine or cognac, should you suddenly find yourself with five or six guests debating politics, literature, or a suitable place to go for dinner.

Still in the role of being your mother's son, it did not occur to stock cat food for your afternoon guest because it was also your thought that the cat should not have to eat alone.  In this fashion, the occasional visit from the cat became a daily ritual.  If there happened to be an inch or two of wine left from a previous meal, you finished that, providing the cat with whipping cream, milk, or water to accompany his own serving.

So yes, your growing relationship with the event and purpose of characters in pursuit of some goal took on that quality of feeding a neighbor's cat.  There was a definite string of causality initiated by the cat's boredom, his awareness of you being home, and your mother's having programmed you to be a gracious host.  After about two weeks of the cat's visit, you began to hear your neighbor, addressing the cat.  "That happens to be quality cat food you're turning your nose up at."  You also heard, "Well, if you don't eat that, you aren't getting anything."

In the setting you think of as Reality, random events are more common than linked, consequential acts.  A look at a the front page of newspaper with a global outreach, say The New York Times, the Washington Post, or The Guardian may reflect fires in California next to a feature on Syrian refugees and China's aggressive campaigning for the 2016 Olympic Games.

Seen in the proper perspective, randomness becomes the landscape for Reality.  The moment we switch to story, mysteries, in particular police procedurals, someone is bound to say--and we are ready to accept--"One event is random, two similar events are not coincidental."

Story has become our relief from the randomness of Reality.  Stories in which the same event has transpired serially in a number of countries ratifies our willingness to accept conspiracy theories,  and a belief in a universe governed by determinism, where most events are the result of previous events.  

When the time comes for you to revise something you've written, whether it be invented incidents or what nonfiction has become for you, which is to say a combination of opinion, memory, and a linked association which may or may not come in first or early drafts but which eventually does come.  You had, for example, not given much thought to Sam, the cat of your first paragraph, whom you'd not thought about until you'd completed the first sentence of the first paragraph.

You also attend to more mechanical things, such as looking for habit words, repetitions you've made without thought.  A frequent habit word of yours is a, which you become at pains to remove wherever possible without causing a potential reader reaction, "Aha, he edited that sentence to get a few a out of there."  Yet another is the search for sentences that seem to want to go on in the belief that they have what it takes to stand as a paragraph.

This last is painful.  You enjoy long, rambling, meandering sentences to the point where you think you've become pretty good at constructing them.  But the payback you often get, in particular from editors, is that you are piling too much on the plate for the reader, who in effect wants one canapé at a time.

Your argument holds out for the position where most long sentences reflect a related string of events, piling on the clauses to accommodate for the passage of time and for the accumulation of purpose, but even you can see that quite often, one sardine on a wheat thin is quite enough; the while tin of sardines is quite unnecessary.

Horseman, Pass by

You began your adventures in reading to escape the banality of boredom and what would reveal itself to you as the banality of text books.  The closest you had to a living hero was Richard E. Byrd, whom you always heard referred to by his naval title of admiral.

Only reading gave you the sensual equivalent of the clash of swords, the war whoop of Indians, stealing horses from the Spanish, the thrum of a bow string as it sent an arrow forth against some wretched enemy on some distant battle field.  Admiral Byrd seemed to go pretty much where he wanted, when he wished to do so.  

The fact of his being a descendant of a slave owning Virginia family did not present itself to you until your college years, where reading took on greater nuances than the sounds of adventure stories.

Reading was getting you up to speed from the sensual to the nuanced toward the layered and braided strands of the life surrounding all the clashing and thrumming and self-directing admirals discovering things about the South Pole.  It was not lost on you that William Faulkner had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and that you were struggling to get some sense of his work, but you needed time well beyond the university to make sense of him and to feel yourself challenged by some of the comments he'd made in his acceptance speech.

Reading that speech was not the first time you'd felt as though you'd been thrown from a horse.  This is an important metaphor because you'd ridden horses to a considerable degree by then.  Although you were by no means a gifted or even comfortable rider, neither were you a poor rider, nor had you ever been thrown from a horse.  

By the time you'd read Faulkner's speech and were thrown by the implications of his vision of fiction--"the anguish of moral choice"--you'd read enough Westerns and had even tried to write a few.  In your imagination, you'd been thrown from any number of horses, roans, duns, Arabians, quarter horses, Appaloosas, you name it.

By the time you were thrown from your imaginary horse by Faulkner, you'd been thrown by a significant number of other writers, including writers you would not think of having that effect on you.  Katharine Mansfield.  Willa Cather.  Marianne Evans, AKA George Eliot.

Here you are now, in the midst of a booklength project on the hundred novels you regard as having had significant and lasting effects on your writing life, and you are aware of falling off of horses.  The implications are impressive and daunting.  To convey the sense of the effect on you these novels had, you must yourself relive the being unseated, the surprise that horse or novel could do this to you, and the added sense of surprise when you felt yourself being separated from your mount, that fragile, helpless moment of being airborne, followed by the sense of you meeting the ground with the weight of a falling body.

Over the years, you've learned a few things about horses that relate to you, in particular, as a potential rider.  Some of your high school and early college years were spent learning about thoroughbred horses, being ridden by trained jockeys, how these horses had fared in relationship to other horses in contests of speed and endurance.

Over the years, you've learned a few things about novels, in particular as they relate to you, how they are likely to hold up in various competitions with other types of novels, written by a variety of writers.  You've looked with passion and its lack at attempts of yours, and the attempts of others to write novels.

 In the strange, wonderful ways in which events and goals from the past have consequences that circle back in time, you understand that you were reading in earlier times with the hopes of some momentous event that would unseat you from your perch.

The adventure and escape you from the banality of boredom and textbooks remains with you as you select a book from a display at a bookstore or, in fact, as you thumb through the pages of something you've written, looking for the true place where it begins--the place that knocks you from your perch, then sends you flailing like Wile E. Coyote, when he realizes he's overrun the edge of the mesa.  Now, he has nowhere to go but that long spiral downward to impact.

Story as Negotiated Settlements

You did not begin teaching until you were in your forties.  Even when you began, you approached it with an air of suspicion, born of a long, painful time of reading through the slush piles of unsolicited manuscripts on your way to becoming an editor.  This suspicion made great sense at the time, because teaching had called to you rather than you calling to it.

Your teaching appointment came because you were an editor, which meant you no longer had to read through slush piles; you had assistants who did that.  Instead, you got to invite and solicit things, most of which you were at the extreme rat tail of the curve of choice likely to read all the way through.  When you explained this to the person who hired you to teach, he offered you a teaching assistant, who would in effect read through the slush from students.

The icing on the teaching cake was the fact of the teaching assistant having himself already published a book  At the time you were called to teaching, the entire concept of it was an outlier, one of the farthest things from your mind. The last time you'd given any thought at all to teaching was when you'd signed up for a course in education to allow you to pursue a student named Janet.  Neither the course nor Janet went the way you'd hoped. There was no future in either.

Having a job as an editor meant you were established enough in an occupation to move you beyond such previous jobs as a painter's assistant, a parking lot attendant, an assistant at a luggage repair shop, a telephone solicitor, a carnival pitchman, an auctioneer's assistant, and a night watchman.  

Being an editor was a respectable job for a writer.  There was no need to consider teaching.  Because there is in fact, reason to believe irony occupies a place in the genome of Reality, things one does not need to consider often come to one, either as an inducement from Reality or an indication that Reality has a sense of humor.

In much the same way being an editor became a negotiated settlement between you and Reality, teaching became another such negotiation.  After you've been teaching for at least five years, you heard yourself in class one evening, offering in a brief lecture about the structure of a short story the observation, "The payoff of a short story is a negotiated settlement with reality."

There'd been other things you'd said that impressed you, but this one has remained constant over the years since its first utterance.  With that statement, you recognized you were not only giving students worthwhile guidance, you were in a vivid sense accepting the fact of you being a teacher as well as an editor, and were on your way to the additional negotiation that you needed both to be the writer you wished to be.

Growing into Reality can be a ponderous, difficult thing, filled with unexpected turns, mazes, dead ends, and one-way streets.  This awareness is hard-won at best, given the way you were introduced to it by your parents and the propaganda presented by your culture as you appeared on the planet in time to feel many of the effects of The Great Depression and World War II.

Reality, as you see it, can be compared to the publishing industry in the sense of it being a constant stream of unsolicited events as they overwhelm the planned considered ones.  If Reality has a personality at all, it is a stolid one of near troglodytes.  Reality is Capitalism as the sorcerer's apprentice, an avalanche of event, overwhelming, incessant.  

In most ways, Reality is what the individual brings to it.  Hopeful, propaganda-biased individuals are more likely to arrive at the awareness of Reality as an analog to the house odds at a gambling casino, a few occasional payoffs, many near misses, and disappointing outcomes.

Many individuals approach story the way they save for vacations to Las Vegas, with hope for the big win or at least enough to have paid expenses. You admire their perennial hope as they board the bus to the nearest casino or stand in line for tickets to the latest feel-good movie.  You have nothing against them, but you do have the sense of them not sharing your tastes nor you theirs.  They are not likely to be readers of your stories nor you of theirs.

The only certainty you can see in Reality is that it will continue, without form or attribute.  Your dealings with it depend on your ability to have conversations with your expectations when you are offered options.

In this universe where Reality takes on the role of the Casino in terms of house odds, you see ambiguity and flexibility as key players in story.  You admire gamblers who are thrown out of casinos for counting cards or demonstrating an in-the-moment ability to compute event.  Their ability intrigues you without causing you envy.  Players who double down seem to radiate a way of confronting desperation, risk, and openness to consequence that attracts you, makes you want to stop and watch the outcome.

Stones, Rolling and Otherwise

Somewhere along your way from then to now, things began to lose their ability to define themselves as they once had.  Although things remained what they were, they also radiated other possibilities. Dots and dashes became the Morse code.  Semaphore and nautical flags had meanings depending on the order in which they were displayed.  Ice cubes melted.

You learned to construct secret codes of your own, based on picking a letter from the alphabet at random, then assigning to it the value of A, its successor becoming B, until you'd gone through the available options, leading you to the true A, which could have well had the value of a G or an H.

 You began to wonder then what other hidden meanings lay in wait for you to discover.  At the time, you still had few things you wished to hide, but by then you'd begun to read of individuals such as Leonardo Da Vinco and Gallileo, who found the need to write in code.  Buoyed by their need for secrecy, you began to nourish hopes for discoveries that must be reported with care and stealth.

A stone was no longer a mere stone, at rest in a spread of other stones.  You lifted such a stone, hefted it to see all its surfaces, then assessed its potential for movement on its own.  Why should the innate ability of a stone to move have consequences for the boy whom you were, the boy who could concoct a code, but had nothing to encrypt?

The stone had consequence because you'd arrived at a defining point.  You'd been exposed to the conventional wisdom of your culture long enough to cause the onset of dissatisfaction.  You could accept the answers of received understanding--water at sea level will boil at 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius; the sun orbits about the earth--or you could begin a slow, deliberate questioning of everything you saw until you in some way understood the logic of the wisdom.

Sure enough, the stone in your hand revealed to you a tiny particle of what might be moss or lichen.  Given the stone's shape, you could see it had once rolled, but had settled in somewhere, long enough to gather moss.  

You pitched the stone some distance from where you'd found it, wished it well in its new venue, then forgot about it until this writing of the incident.  How had it fared since then in this new setting so dependent on your whim when you cast it into its future?  The great probability you had in mind when casting it rather than dropping it where you'd found it was to see how far you could throw a stone.

This is no idle speculation of whether stones have the ability to fare well or ill.  Rather, this is a recognition that you and the stone, the one with scant traces of moss or lichen, are kindred entities, both of you cast by forces of which you have little or no control.

Your decision for yourself, based on a combination of whim and deliberation, is to gather as little moss as possible.  Even then, you hope to have made some considered choices about the nature and quality of any moss you might gather.  Your choices are sure to reflect the possible metaphorical connection between the culture from which you come, the cultures you've investigated, and the observations you've made while still seeing no need to encrypt them.  Rather the opposite, in fact,

This leaves you at the moment with, among other things, the consequences of throwing that one stone, yards from where you found it.  If, as you believe, one has a responsibility for the consequences of one's actions, you compose this with the awareness of some connection to that stone, thrown so long ago.  You are the sum of all consequences of your actions, not only the consequence of having thrown that stone but for the total of all such actions including those you no longer remember.

You are primarily grateful to your parents for having caused you to be here now, mindful you might not be here, were it not for the SIDS death of their first-born son.  Through much of your early years, you were aware of the grief you mother carried over this loss.  Your father was not one to speak of or demonstrate grief, but watching him after the death of his mother, you understood but could not decipher the code of his grief.  Each lived into the ninth decade, which conventional wisdom and observation tell you is a long ride.  You pay out your grief by seeing each in your dreams.  

Your sister did not have as long a ride.  On occasion, you see her in your dreams, but more often you see her in terms of you thinking to call her, as you often did, to report   consequences of you, being cast here and there, as you cast the stone.   There is great comfort braided in with the awareness that you can no longer call her; you had her to call and the habit persists.

From time to time, you wondered fancifully how you would have fared with an older brother, and indeed you've begun to address this consequence of your life in a novel, where you have given your protagonist the need to engage and repair a contentious relationship with an older brother.

At one point, you made considerable effort to locate the burial place of your older sibling, dead at age six months.  Some cemetery in the east side of Los Angeles.  At once point, in some attempt at solidarity with your mother, you even volunteered to go with her, but your offer was not accepted.  At one point, when she returned from a visit, she was saddened by the disrepair of the grounds.

He, wherever his remains have reposed all these years, is as distant from you as the stone you once cast, but his consequences and yours persist.