Wile E. Coyote

On Monday evening of this week, you were heading toward a dinner rendezvous with four long-time friends when you passed a small neighborhood restaurant you’d been unaware of before.  Intrigued by its friendly, warming outdoor fireplace that cast warmth over the outdoor tables, you paused for a look inside, thinking this could become a place you’d want to try.

Your attention was drawn to a large television screen seeming to float over the main wall that faced the street.  Although impressed by what you’d estimated as the four-foot by six-foot screen, you were about to write off the restaurant as another sports bar until you saw a familiar image, shrugging, then dusting himself of debris he’d acquired during a fall.

The image was of an old friend, one you’d originally regarded as a cultural peer, his momentum growing in your esteem until he became a favored cultural peer, then an icon.  Over the years, you’d think about him from time to time, never with anything less than fondness and the accumulation of the residue of identification.

During some long forgotten conversation in some long forgotten venue, you’d received the information that his exploits were available on YouTube, a fact you were at pains to confirm.

Now, when the world is, as Wordsworth put it, too much with you, late and soon, you do not subject yourself to Ishmael’s cure of going to sea (look what happened to him when he did), instead, you take yourself to YouTube to watch Wile E. Coyote.

Standing before the restaurant, you watched transfixed as the scruffy coyote, undeterred in his ongoing battle to turn The Roadrunner into take-out food, engaged with dispatch another of the remarkable devices available to his toolkit, courtesy of The Acme Co.

What a splendid, unanticipated reunion.  Meeting Wile E. Coyote on Anapamu Street, short of the corner of Chapala, you recalled times in classes and in conversations where you’d proclaimed him the patron saint of characters.  At one point, somewhat along in your consumption of a local pinot noir, you’d observed how, were you of a particular religious bent, you’d want a scapular with the coyote’s likeness on it, insurance that were you to perish without last rites, you’d nevertheless be transported to the realm of story, wherein your eternity would be assured.

Wile E. Coyote has everything a character of either gender, of any age, could want.  He is of course Don Quixote, but he is also Gatsby; he is Becky Sharp (did she poison her husband?) he is Jane Eyre; his single-mindedness of purpose is an inspiration to those of us who confabulate story and those of us who read it, in particular those of us who read it for the techniques and strategies of extending our own narrative skills.

One moment you see Wile E. Coyote, in hot, thunderous pursuit of the Roadrunner (beep beep), the next moment; he has overrun the boundary of a particular mesa or butte.  Now, he struggles to regain his footing, but he is too late.  He must suffer the consequence, which is to say the humiliation of the long, downward plummet to the earth below.

How often have you, in one manner or another, whether romance, writing short stories, refusing the opportunity to reprint Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Fiction, or refusing the editorship at Pinnacle Books, subsequently taken the plummet yourself.  Wile E. Coyote is your Henry V, the night before the battle of Agincourt.  Cry, God for Wile E., Acme Products, and the gorge.

Look, if you will, at Inspector Jaivert.  Regard Captain Ahab.  Pause to reflect for a moment or two on Bill Sykes or, for that matter, another icon from the pages of Melville, Bartleby.  Ah, you wish Shakespeare, do you? Well then, consider Coriolanus or Mac Whatzisname ah yes, Macbeth.  Not to forget George from Of Mice and Men, nor Eustacia Wye from The Return of the Native.   Indeed, look at any of the notable Hardy protagonists, Tess, Michael Henchard, Jude, as examples.  You’ve already mentioned Fitzgerald’s Gatsby; what about his Monroe Stahr, what about Dr. Dick Diver.

Look closely and you will see in each of these memorable ones the likeness, the image of a scruffy coyote, running, hunkered low, about to spring.  If you listen with care, you will hear the cartoon soundtrack evoking the spiraling, downward descent.

Plop.

After a long, leisurely dinner, you strode toward your car, a block or so away.  As you passed the restaurant, you turned toward that large screen.
There he was, in yet another adventure.

Things had not got better for Wile E. Coyote.

Truth

You are at some pains to tell yourself the truth whenever and however possible.  You focus on such specifics as how you feel in or about a particular situation, a person in that situation, perhaps even your role in the situation.  Did you, for instance, do a good job at a particular task?  Could your performance been better?  More nuanced?  Less?  More decisive?

Even though you are well aware of the nuances the word truth has, you nevertheless try to steer a course toward it, with some sense of obligation to keep the destination in mind.

If truth is, in ultimate terms, the abstraction you suspect it is, nevertheless you attempt to treat it as though it were some tangible, recognizable thing such as a friend you’d readily recognize in a crowd, someone you could remark to, later, “I saw you at the market,” or in the coffee shop, or somewhere.

You’d want to see the friend even if the friend did not want to be seen, was not, for the sake of fancy, willing to be seen there, thus does “truth” become complicated according to individual agenda.  Thus also, “I saw you but you did not wish to be seen.  I will accordingly be a good friend and not have seen you.”

It is nevertheless better to have a friend who does not wish to have been seen in a particular place or, say, with a particular person than not to have a friend, meaning as well your own take that even though you would be stretching or distorting the truth so far as the friend were concerned, it would be better to have the flesh-and-blood friend than the abstract truth or the distorted truth or the manipulated truth.

You could argue that a number of such moral dilemmas with this particular friend could easily put the kibosh on your friendship, but of course you can also argue the same feelings with regard to wishing to keep the truth in your life.

Without at least the abstract definition of truth in your life, you are every bit at sea as the ancient mariners who strayed beyond the convenient view of the coast.  There is no telling where you might arrive on a given journey.

You do not spend too much time thinking about the permutations and abstractions of truth, and yet, every time you do, you come away with a growing sense of how to get from one place to the next in the metaphoric navigation of life.  There are some rolled-up charts available, religions, philosophies, attitudes, and while they have some apparent relevance, their unique boundaries make you aware again and again that these are little more than mnemonics to help you adjust the instrument only you can adjust, which is your own compass.

There are satisfactions to be had from being able to rely on your inner compass, the most powerful of all, in your view the reward of being able to trust yourself when you pose to yourself that great existential question, “Now what?” and to be able to listen with some sense of trust when you hear the answer.

Breath

The character who is short of breath speaks in bursts, making it seem as though each sentence is peppered with punctuation marks.  Fond as you are of the short, punchy sentence, you are even more devoted to longer ones, languorous ones, whose independent clauses seem to appear as if from nowhere to hook on to the one immediately previous, imparting a sense of a train coupling in a rail yard or of the energetic riffing and spontaneity of an improvised jazz solo.

You begin paragraphs with a deep intake of breath, anticipating a long, adventurous ride, then step forth into the dramatic void, putting a tentative foot down on a plot point, curious to see what will come next, the conscious thoughts of breathing long gone as opportunities for misstep and mischief plop at you like insects colliding on a windshield.

As this play of writing event unrolls, you find yourself in a cadence where your sense of events becomes in effect you as eavesdropper on the inner monologue of your narrative surrogate, the person or individuals who are telling the story.

Breath and breathing had a good deal to do with this aspect of your narrative.  For some considerable time, you had no thought to get yourself out of the picture—you in fact thought it a necessary adjunct of the story.  You were following the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom you still much admire, in particular his ability to throw off observations that impressed you with their acuity.

Being enormously fond of him is not a problem so long as you remind yourself that he was born three years before your father.  Much as you admire Fitzgerald, you admire your father who, although by no means a literary sort, has left you the legacy of his voice and his cadence in your head.  Your father was born scant physical miles but myriad cultural ones from the university where Fitzgerald attended but notably did not graduate.  You admire Fitzgerald, but your inner breath is your father, in particular when he delivers a summary judgment or opinion on the human drama going on about him.

One of your favorite anecdotes to illustrate that last observation came from years when he associated with your mother’s youngest brother in a series of business ventures ranging from the sale of luggage to the repair and refurbishment of it, to auctioning failed or bankrupt businesses.  Your anecdote reflected that, through his long association with your father, your uncle had discovered that Jack was your father’s middle name, and that Jesus Christ was his first because your uncle was frequently heard to say, “Jesus Christ, Jack.”

Breath and breathing have everything to do with what is said and how it is said.  Virginia Gilmore, your drama mentor, impressed you with the story of her first stage appearance with a young male actor who had been terrible during the rehearsals of this, his first Broadway play to the point where many in the cast were complaining to the director, who simply shrugged, then told them to wait until the play was running.

Opening night, and the cast were ready for curtain, but no sign of the young actor, a curious fellow from Nebraska named Brando.  Someone went outside for a last minute cigarette, but never got it lit.  He came storming back inside, announcing, “That little son of a bitch, do you know what he’s doing?  He’s out there in the alley, chinning himself on the goddamned fire escape.”

Brando came in breathless.  He spoke his lines with his air coming in gasps, an approach that caused his lines and presence to electrify the cast and the audience.  The rest was history.

Breath.

How you say whatever it is you say.

Breath.  Your voice in short, explosive bursts or long sentences seeming to have no end, causing the listener to poise in the wonder of how much longer the speaker can go without pausing for air—wanting it to be for ever.

How do you want whomever it is you want to confess love for you to express that love?  Short gasps?  Long, drawn out syllables?

How do your characters express love for one another?  Having heard the supposed open sesame to the heart, how do the loved ones respond?  Listen, can you get to the point?  I have a call on the other line?  What about Charlotte Bronte’s remarkable, “Reader, I married him.”?

Take a deep breath and repeat after me…



 

Ritual

 A ritual is composed of one or more symbolic acts, performed to produce a specific, hoped-for result.  Whether the tradition behind a particular ritual is explicit or not, the ritual carries with it the burden of being performed correctly if the desired results are to have any chance of being successful.

From the get go, the ritual is like an iceberg, much of it appearing quite rational.  Like the iceberg, the ritual has a large portion of itself not readily seen, an element of the magical.

The ritual may be as simple and personal as a morning cup of coffee, sipped from a particular mug with a particular history about it that contributes to the magical.  If properly prepared and sipped from that particular cup, the day will be pleasing and effective for the celebrant, perhaps even advantageous.  At the least, the celebrant will not find the rest of the day difficult or lacking harmony.

Those who enact a ritual become more than mere spear-carriers in lavish operas; they are celebrants who bring measures of respect and sincerity to the acts they are about to perform.  No plateau of result can be gained from the mindless, rote activity of making coffee, then drinking it from the particular cup.  The celebrant must exert some energy to the transformative magic that comes from drinking coffee made with love in a cup that has emotional ties.

If the Hopi Snake Clan performs the Snake Dance with proper reverence and expectation, by the time the snakes are released at the four cardinal directions, where they will carry back the news that the dance was done properly, the rain clouds are gathering over the mesa, and as you drive away, fat drops are beginning to splat on your windshield.

If the homa fire at a Hindu puja is performed correctly, with devotion in the heart of the pujarini, then Agni, god of fire, will relay the message that everything was done well, the offerings symbolizing fire, earth, air, and water, were well received, and the banana and yogurt were looked upon with approval.

If the manuscript is given one last spell-check before it is sent out, surely someone at the receiving end will see immediately that it is from a professional, wanting to be read now, right now, instead of later, when all the administrative work has been tended to.

Some rituals are thousands of years old, some a few hundred, others yet made up on the spot, a replication of some past chemistry, some past result that was beautiful to behold and experience.

Individuals who share rituals, however trivial the outcome might seem to a remote viewer, have begun to forge a bond that is essential to the human condition. In some ways, entire relationships may be seen as an interlinking series of rituals, the bonding process becoming more of a chemical nature with every repetition.

Sometimes an event as simple as a shared salad at a restaurant can become a ritual, particularly when, at the same restaurant, the same salad is ordered again and the participants tear into it with their forks this time instead of the politeness of dividing the salad into two servings on separate plates.

Rituals need not be anything but secular, the implements may be as simple and straightforward as a handful of pebbles, a few seashells, perhaps some dried flowers.  Their significances may mean nothing, absolutely nothing to a larger audience but this fact does not in any way diminish the potential for an enormous sense of intimacy and connection.

Some organizations have secret rituals one must be initiated into.  Your cultural heritage has a ritualized study of the Kabbalah, a mystical study of the relationship between the creator, who is seen as mysterious and notional, and the finite nature of his creation, the universe.  Were you to approach the study of the Kabbalah in the conventional ways of rabbinic and Talmudic lore, you’d have to wait for initiation until you were forty on the theory that some of the implications are so staggering and powerful that your circuits would be fried were you to attempt to absorb them too soon.

One of the better rituals you’ve come upon is the one where, whether you feel like it or not, you spend some time every day writing, attempting through a sense of devotion to the project and a sincere desire to become more aware of the potential tools and approaches to telling stories.  There are several outcomes you hope for, including growing awareness, satisfaction at the way things emerge, and keepable pages, which is to say material that might fit with enough other keepable material to make something longer, interesting, chemical in the way it holds together and suggests potentials that are not readily visible.  The beauty of such ritualistic behavior is that there is absolutely no guarantee of anything except the growing sense that this is what you wish to be doing with much of your time.

Your best sense of the way the universe works—at least for you—is that there is no magic, perhaps the appearance of it, but in your universe, all magic is ultimately explainable.  To be sure, there are enough remarkable combinations and events and products and people to give the distinct impression that magic abounds.  Perhaps it in fact does, but not for you.  The fact is, you rather like having to work for your magic.  Even if some outcome appears magical, your satisfaction comes from knowing that somewhere along the way, you worked for it in the most wonderful ritual of all—comp

The Foolishness Genome

We may not be pleased with the outcome of a particular dramatic work but we would be even less pleased were the work not to have any outcome.  Thus in story, anything is better than nothing.  In fact, you could say that story is popular because it provides things reality does not always see fit to display.

You could take that line of logic a step farther by observing how, by definition, story must have an outcome.  No outcome, no story.  No outcome, you’re stuck with a tale, a vignette, a slice-of-life.

You—or anyone else—would be guilty of a fallacy in logic, aptly named the pathetic fallacy if you were to say that reality does not care if its events have outcomes or not.  The fallacy resides in the observation that reality is capable of caring about the events taking place all about us, whether they are observed events or not.  The tree falling in the forest may not matter because no one is there to hear it, but that is another fallacy.

After considering the fallacy of logic, you’ll use it anyway on the grounds that a writer who listens with too much care to convention is not much worth listening to; he or she is a mere copying machine rather than someone who provides a fresh vision that may in addition to its freshness be useful.

Reality may not care about outcomes, because it is not sufficiently invested in persons, only institutions such as disasters, droughts, universities, and perhaps elections. As a result, the likelihood is greater that there will be frequent gaps between outcomes in an individual’s life.  If you are going to use such individuals in your stories, you are well advised to write around the gaps or somehow convince the characters to take steps that will provide outcomes.

On the other hand, there is something attractive about a character who has grown tired or even better frustrated by the lack of available outcomes.  This is the sort of person who will want to take reality into her own hands, perhaps get it on some kind of regimen that will produce outcomes.

It appears to you that a major pattern was established back in eighteenth century literature, particularly in England, where stories were ending with marriage as an outcome.  In later years, outcomes developed because of marriage, the individuals having evolved in one way or another because of the potential crucible inherent in marriage.  There are, of course, crucibles in all situations where individuals are placed in close contact or where individuals in anticipation of close contacts discover that they are not close at all.

Individuals who are goal oriented seem to do best in reality and in story; they work toward a goal, achieve it or don’t, are happy with the goal or disappointed by its appearance.  This procession of events may work in reality, but something is lacking in the calculus if it is presented in story.  The stage is set for surprise, often, but not necessarily in the form of reversal.

Sometimes the outcome appears to have been forgotten, both in reality and story, but this, too, is a dramatic aspect, the digression or diversion as an enhancement from short form to longer form, from the short story to the novella or full-on novel, the one-act play on steroids, growing into a more developed narrative.

Your own reality time has been bent and twisted about by reversals, surprises, and digressions to the point where you are tempted to toss into the stew pot yet another ingredient, irony.  Your early plans were to make your way with short stories, perhaps working your way up to longform work, but the surprises began coming at you as though you were in story as opposed to reality, leading you to digressions, which piled upon themselves and you could not see yourself in story any longer, instead in reality, doing things that dealt with story in ways you had not foreseen.

Whether from despair and desperation or accident or luck or stubbornness or faith, all circumstances you’ve had as roommates, you have achieved a state of comfortable coexistence with outcomes you’d thought to have eluded you.  It would be as foolish of you now as it was foolish of you then in those days where you thought you could do it all with short stories to think that you no longer have to reach or learn or that, indeed, you have little left to reach for in the way of learning.  It accordingly behooves you to find
better ways to exercise your foolish genome.  Foolishness is a splendid outcome to achieve, but as the case remains with all the elements of the craft in which you hope to continue, that, too, must be practiced on a regular basis.

Tolerance

You are launched into the fourteenth month of residence at 409 E. Sola Street, a place that offers you numerous satisfactions against a balance sheet of insignificant complaints.  You wish the clothes closet were a tad larger, you’d prefer an off-street parking space for the Yaris and one of the electric outlets on the west wall does not carry a current, the only thing the landlord has washed his hands of, thus necessitating a clever on your part use of an extension cord.  In the simplest and best terms, you’re a happy tenant.  The building is going on a hundred twenty-five years of age, yet shows signs everywhere of being refurbished, with one glaring exception.  If you use the microwave and the Cuisinart electric grill at the same time, the circuit breaker in the outside fuse box goes on strike, sending the kitchen circuitry into non-operative status.  The fuse box is not too far away, leaving the worst of the experience being the need to reset the digital clock on the gas range and the Cuisinart electric toaster/grill.

When you think of some of the quirks, shutdown modes, and other idiosyncratic behavior among friends, acquaintances, students, and clients, you are again reminded of your good fortune in having found 409 E. Sola Street.

When you think of your own quirks, idiosyncratic behavior, and the glorious chemistry of acquired traits in ratio to inherited traits, 409 E. Sola Street seems yet more remarkable.

Loving anyone causes a different set of tolerance, assumptions, and vocabulary to emerge in your mutual dealings, a set of vast difference from those applied to casual acquaintances, clients, and students, with yet another set of standards waiting to be used on complete strangers.  Only this evening you encountered an individual you recognized as familiar but had no memory of the source of the familiarity, thus you were polite, cheerful, even engaging in conversation until you were asked what seemed to you the unusual question, “Are you finding it any easier to be tolerant?”

Your immediate reply trumped your being perplexed by the question.  You heartily went on about the relative difficulty of tolerance these days with so much political anger and divisiveness in the social atmosphere.  The observation was delivered with what you considered firm good humor, which is to say you were not feeling anger as you spoke, rather bewilderment.  Ten minutes later, you placed the individual as a former student whom you given one of the lower grades of your career, a C minus, causing you to reflect, as you should for reasons of intimacy related to your striving for understanding of the human condition as a participant in the human condition, as a writer, as a teacher, a lover, a friend.  This former student, through her question, clearly had visions of you with the quirk of intolerance.  She was gone, foreclosing your chasing after her to ask, “Tolerant of what?”  You have an index of tolerance in mind, relative to a number of things.  You are only of mild intolerance to eyeliner as compared to highly intolerant of strong perfume, in particular perfume that smells like salad dressing.

There are historical reasons why you are less likely to be tolerant of an individual speaking German or Arabic, any number of reasons why your tendency toward speakers of any of the Romance languages would be in the top percentile of acceptance.

Regardless of common wisdom to the contrary, you do indeed judge a book by its cover, vastly prefer Italian fountain pens to German ones (beyond the threshold of taste and into tolerance), and are more likely to find satisfaction from meals taken in Italian, Mexican, and Viet Nam restaurants than those offering French cuisine, although you could easily have had a hair cutter of Italian origin but vastly prefer Maryelle, a native of France, who has been cutting such hairs as you have lo these last twenty-five years.

There is often no rational thought much less behavior to the things determining tolerance and intolerance, nothing like romantic love to cause your index of tolerance to undergo sea changes as you work with some deliberation to see that individual as she is rather than as a representative of some type or configuration.  The same is true of friends whom you love, their preferences and proclivities and behavior dropping well under the radar of your growing sense of being an outsider yourself.

At the moment, a good deal of your communal social activities take place Friday mornings, amid an eclectic gathering for Friday coffee or Tuesday evenings for, shall we call them, pre-dinner drinks.  From time to time, at either or both gatherings, you look about you to marvel at the diversity, at which point you are thinking well beyond mere tolerance and into the unknown pathways of chemistry.

Jane

For some time, you’ve heard these splendid endorsements of Virginia Woolf and her contributions to the development of dramatic fiction.  The endorsements are, you believe, well deserved; she did turn a number of corners and truly helped a great number of writers achieve a tighter grasp of narrative strength, but if you were going to suggest one person a wannabe writer ought to read for technique and for psychological insight and for narrative focus, you would pick the writer Mrs. Woolf learned from without a lingering doubt.

That estimable source would be Jane Austen.

Pretty much all story before Jane Austen was related through the filter of a narrator, who added descriptions of what the various characters saw, felt, intended, and came to realize.

To be sure as well as clear, your reading experiences and studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels impressed you and had such effect on you that you plunged into the stream using those techniques, without even thinking about them much less dissecting them.  So there you were, an emerging writer of the mid twentieth century, not overly visited with the narrative techniques associated with point of view.  A character was broke, you said he needed money, had him thinking he’d do pretty much anything for money.

Shows you how closely you read Austen’s Persuasion.  Shows you how little attention you paid to Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, especially that scene where Elizabeth is at a dance and Darcy and his buddy, Bingly, are chatting away, and Elizabeth hears Bingley speaking admiringly of her older sister and Darcy expressing no interest whatsoever in her to the point of being rude about it.  Shows you how much you picked up by rereading, going on to Persuasion, which you like even more than Emma, the opening paragraphs of that remarkable narrative a splendid distraction, not withstanding.

Alas, Jane was dead at 41, shortly before Persuasion was published, but what she left is more than a legacy, it is a dramatic handing off of the narration to the characters—not the author stepping in to comment or offer stage directions.

So far as you’re aware, William Trevor is the only one who comes close to using that omniscient sense you get wherein you’ve access to the inner workings of a number of characters at the same time.  Everyone else, you included when you don’t watch with greater care, sounds nineteenth century, which is to say remote, almost as issuing from behind some scrim, Thomas Hardy-like in effect.  And yes, for all that, it would not be so terrible to sound like Thomas Hardy, but there is, more or less, a century between you, and the century shows, affects the tone of the narrative when you read it.

No wonder Mark Twain had such a “thing” about Walter Scott; Twain was bringing in a conversational, vernacular approach to storytelling that once again turned narrative on its head, shook out the crumbs.

Was Scott all that bad?  He was only so in relative terms.  The early scene in Waverly, where the hauntingly lovely and passionate Flora, the then equivalent of Miss Scotland, took young Captain Waverly out into the countryside, whereupon she sang him songs of the Scottish mythology, is a splendid example of the city boy, the Englishman, becoming enraptured by the Highland spirit.  It holds up today; it has a life because it still says something, dramatizes an important individual and cultural conflict.  But it is told through the filter of another presence.

It took Jane Austen to whittle that presence down, to show us how to get the story from the characters rather than a detached narrator or, indeed, the author.

This is an extreme example, one with a fulcrum of absolute absurdity, but having reached it, you cannot help but wonder how much more effective that twit, Ayn Rand, would have been had she paid more attention to the narrative as advanced by Jane Austen.

This near screed has come about because you were at it again this past Wednesday night, in particular after listening to someone taking on an eleven-generation novel set in early Los Angeles, having no idea what you were talking about when you spoke of El pueblo de la nuestra senora la reina de los angeles de Porciuncula.  Huh?  She said.