Destination, Pre-, Post, and Other

Most times when you set out to go somewhere, you have an end destination in mind, a specific place and a good possibility of knowing who and what event you will find.  One o’clock class.  Leave at noon, pick up coffee, arrive in time to find a shady park so that Sally will not feel discomfort, go over class notes and agenda, have a pretty clear idea of who will be in class.  No great drama there.

On a more personalized level, late afternoon Friday or Saturday and you have arrived at the place of zero interest in preparing the sort of supper you’d like to have and so you begin building toward an open-ended attack with an email sent to a number of congenial others with a question:  Anyone have any dinner plans or lack there of?

If you are in an even more specific mood, you might approach your omnibus email with a more direct, Anyone with a taste for the calamari in ink at Olio e Limone?

Sometimes you’ll get an immediate, What synchronicity, I was only now thinking of their calamari.  Sometimes not.  Sometimes, tummy eager for calamari, you are dining alone, over the kitchen sink with a substitute for calamari, piled high on whatever slabs of bread remain, perhaps almond butter, sliced bananas, coconut shreds, and some thickness of a soft, buttery cheese.  The outcome and company will have undergone changes, but the result—dinner—will have been experienced with the very best company you can be.

There are infinite variations on these themes as they relate to ventures “out” into the world, including the fact of your daily walk route having become established not so much through habit as preference, including your preferred shortcuts across some properties and long ways about others.  Some surprises, but not many. An agreeable cat on the lower reaches of Olive Street beyond Victoria.  A homeless man who bunks down in a store front on Anapamu just below its convergence with State Street, showing you some latest title acquired from the thrift shop, asking if you know anything about the author.  All in all, a predictable pleasure with a few unanticipated variations.

You return from such routine ventures more or less comfortable but not overly excited or stimulated.  Such ventures are a sort of steroidal ordinariness, several benchmarks above boring.

When you set forth to read or to compose, there is with certainty little certainty.  You have the sense of setting forth; you might even have recall of the catalyst energy that set you forth on your journey.  There is little doubt this journey is more one of discovery than anything else, the very least you’ll learn about such a journey is how you feel about a specific thing or activity.

To a considerable extent, reading is a similar journey.  You may well find yourself bored silly by a favored writer and transported beyond time zones and habitat by a new or formerly discarded author.

In life as well as in reading and writing, you favor the unknown over the known.  You’re fond of your peers and mentors and students, but you feel drawn to the character who has lost something she valued or has made some egregious mistake, costing him the same kinds of good regard you often feel you have, radiating from those you know.

On balance, you prefer the not-immediately knowable to the safe and comfortable.  Few of your friends are, so far as you know, a rogue or a crook.  To be sure, some are professors or writers, but then again, so are you.  At one time, you knew well where you wanted to go and how you wished to get where you wished to be. You even had in mind projects you hoped to write, convinced that doing so would get you closer to your hoped-for destination.

Now, your destinations are open-ended, tending to such abstractions as challenged, engaged, devoted, evolved to a greater degree, closer yet to understanding the things you find yourself writing in order to gain a grasp of what you plan to make of this understanding.

In all probability, you’ll want to write fiction and nonfiction portraying the understanding you feel necessary to achieve.

You will of course not understand how you reached the understanding nor if it is in fact understanding rather than an entire new abstraction you had not suspected to have existed when you set out on your journey of discovery.

Or was it only your evening walk?  

Contingency, the Writer's Friend in Need

Some philosopher—you believe it was Fritz Perls—observed, No matter what stake you may have in the matter, the universe is unfolding as it ought.

You don’t think he meant by this that individual preferences and behavior have no effect, rather that personal opinions, volition, and actions, even those that change the course of events, are a part of the package.  The drop of water and the ocean are thus encompassed in a calculus of motion, movement, and consequence.

Your observations last night about choice hummed about you much of the day, like a determined housefly or a hungry kitten, leading you to consider the next step after choice, which is a decision to act in a particular way or not act at all.

Nichole has chimed in from snowy Wyoming with the observation that choice produces consequence.  As a consequence of having decided to turn right instead of left when leaving the house…

Considering downstream effects of consequence is a sure way to measure the mounting intensity of story, any story, whether it is a lifetime event with a beginning, middle, and some form of resolution, or a dramatic one, Chekhovian in its close-lipped inevitability.

This brings us to contingency, that unplanned for possibility of elbowing its way to the front of the line.  Contingency may occur; hell, it might even be a likely candidate for occurring, but it is neither an anticipated event nor one planned for.  Contingency may be planned against, as a matter of fact, an in-that-case adjustment at the last minute.  Fred arrives for dinner, unplanned, but we’re having enough of whatever it is we’re having so that his arrival will not cause any logistics except where to seat him, but of course Fred has brought along a girlfriend who is a vegan.

Some of the delightful things about contingency have to do with uncertainty and chance, which has long been regarded as an excellent way to add complications in a story and a no-no as a means for resolving a story.  Let’s look back at Fred, arriving unannounced for dinner, with his vegan girlfriend.  After a quick consultation, Jack (the host) is sent to a market to get an eggplant, it having been decided in a contingency plan that vegans like eggplant.

Trouble is, Jack goes to a small, neighborhood market, where there are no eggplants, forcing him to go farther afield, at which point he finds a market that has eggplant, but it also has a few hold-up types who panic and take Jack as a hostage.

Hours later, Jack has escaped and has returned home, only to find an irritated wife because he was away for so long and has now returned without the eggplant.

Contingency, the unexpected element arriving after a choice has been made.  Contingency, you might say, is so much like Reality because it causes things to happen that are not always plausible.  Your challenge is to make contingency plausible and in the process interesting.

In its way, story is all about contingency because contingency is all about uncertainty.  How can you plan for the uncertain without in effect making it a certainty?

Besides, certainty shuts down the story, right now.  The writer’s goal is to keep contingency uppermost in the reader’s mind because it is the living characteristic of suspense, that wonderful set of conditions where the reader wants to know what will happen next, and only a foolish or naïve writer would do that.

Choices

Choice plays a major, defining role in life and story, beginning for you on some basic level with the words you chose and, if you happen to be composing, the punctuation marks by which they are given logical and dramatic emphasis.

What better way to get an adventure or story under way than with the need for someone to make a choice or at some point after a choice has been made by one person and challenged by another.

“Why did you bring me here?”

“What ever made you think I would enjoy this?”

“And you thought I wanted this outcome?”

The variations are endless.  So are the choices.

Why does a bee choose to land on a particular plant or flower?  Why have you landed so heavily on stories of mystery and suspense? Could there be a story if a lead character did not have a choice to make or has made one shortly before the story began?

Choice is the fulcrum in story and in life.  Even if you contrived to spend the major part of a day doing nothing that required a choice from you, wouldn’t that begin as the result of a choice?  When you think about the elements of tomorrow morning’s breakfast, as one example of how the process works, there is that moment of in or out?  If in, the choices are usually oatmeal with fruit and nuts and coffee or toast, peanut or almond butter, melon, and coffee.  If out, Esau’s makes creditable pancakes, but do you want pancakes or perhaps the salmon benedict at Café Luna?

Choice is what you chose, what you reject, what you write about, how you do the writing.  As well, it is about who chooses your work and who chooses not to choose it for publication.  Choice is the constant confrontation with dialectic.

You are everything you have chosen and all those things you have opted not to engage. Thus is your index of happiness and, yes, regret, tempered by the outcome of your choices.

“I should have known better.”

“It seemed a wise choice at the time.”

Choice is democratic in the sense that it allows us to put in a vote for what we consider beneficial; it is affirming because it puts the ego, the self, the I into the equation of the vast stampede of event we call reality. Allowing someone other than you a choice—“your call”—is an acknowledgment of that individual’s individualism, his or her right to express an opinion or vote in this existential rodeo.

There are any number of reasons for choosing friends, lovers, occupations, dry cleaners, and brands of toothpaste, each one an affirmation of something in your past or a negation of an unpleasant experience.

At times the notion of making one more choice seems a burden but after a few incidents of being told that your choice is limited to one thing or nothing, you rebel for the same sorts of reasons informing your choices of friends, lovers, occupations, dry cleaners, and brands of toothpaste.

Who are you?

You are the aggregate of all your choices, the judge and jury of the choices you will make in the future, the reflection of how satisfied you were with your past choices, your confidence that you will make apt, appropriate ones now and tomorrow.  You are the way you are seen based on your choices of clothing, the color schemes, the fit and style, the way you vote, what you order at a restaurant, when to go, when to stay.

You like to think after one or two of your favorite beverages that some things chose you rather than you choosing them, but this is because such beverages offer you the choice of being expansive and philosophical.   If a thing in truth chose you, didn’t you, after some consideration, elect to be chosen?

Sure.

Why the hell not?

Moccasins

 A sound bit of advice resides in the adage advising us to withhold judgment on a person until we have walked a mile in that person’s moccasins.

If there were to be some award given for making such judgments with no attempt at greater understanding, you’d have a shelf of trophies, your justification being your experience in various landscapes where behavior has run from the mere egotistical to the greedy, the needy, and the desperate.  You find it helpful to have the attitude of acceptance about this tendency of yours, otherwise you’d have to find ways of coming to terms with it and learning to live with it.

Worse yet, you’d have to put brakes on your impatience and quickness to judge, which is another way of saying you’d have to repress long held tendencies, producing the equivalent anomaly of a passive-aggressive Buddhist

On balance, the notion of the metaphorical walk in another person’s shoes—living his or her circumstances—is not only not a bad idea, it is a profitable one.  You use it nearly every time you  compose fiction or nonfiction.

What better way to create a character than the exhilarating journey of travel within that individual’s psyche, knowing what he or she wants, how the character anticipates achieving the goal? Wondering all the while how the character feels about his or her core being.

For works of nonfiction, even reviews or personal essays, there is the need to think about who the narrator is.  The narrator is you, of course, but which you, the moderate, the bombast, the political you? Which effect are you after in producing the material?  How do you intend the material to be seen?

An essay or review—even one of those small, compact jobs of a hundred words or so,  should in some way leave a fingerprint of the narrator, thus even those words are in moccasins, however tight and pinching at the instep.

There are, to be sure, a number of individuals you see in the warp and weft of your life who bring you no joy or even chemistry, thus they become excellent armatures about which to wrap certain character traits that might become interesting and useful.

Going to work on such individuals as characters, you have to reach a point of liking them enough to feel some admiration for the bad behavior you are about to involve them in.  When you see these persons in real life, your attitude toward them has undergone subtle change.  Having liked him or her as characters, you approach them as though you like them, and the whole process of getting no joy or chemistry from them begins once again.

Jake and Mr. Big

Many words cause speed bumps in the metaphoric road you travel most days.  Such words are appropriate in their name; speed bump is supposed to slow you down.  You’ve in fact been trying to slow yourself down in order to give close readings to the important things so far as you are concerned.

Close readings is a lovely term, leading you not only to reread favored books or books you struggled to get through because they were assigned in some class, or because someone you know and respect indicated you being less present in the universe without having read a particular book.

Speed bumps slow you down, making you aware of yet another vital word, revisit.  At dinner last night, you sat across a new friend, from Portland, fresh, in fact, off the plane from Portland.  As you spoke, you knew you’d have to go back to Portland, at least once more, if only to sit for a few minutes in two rooms.

The thought of revisiting Portland and the reasons for doing so were perfect reasons for writing a book.  You could have been more direct:  reasons for writing a book.  The attribution of perfect does not intend the book be perfect so much as it acknowledges your reasons for writing books and for thinking of this one in particular.

You have in mind a number of books you’d like to write, foremost among them two novels set in Santa Barbara, revolving about a character who extends back to your undergraduate days, where he made his first appearance.

There are also a number of works of nonfiction on your bucket list, not the least of which will carry your name in its title, Lowenkopf on Fiction Writing.  Not to forget the underway venture with your late great pal, Digby Wolfe, that came up as you both knocked back steaming mounds of linguini con vongole, wherein he grabbed your wrist and said, “We have to do that.”  The title there was The Dramatic Genome:  The DNA of Story.

Okay, you also wish to write what will be in essence a group of essays about twelve transformative American writers, six women, six men, given the self-important title, Studies in Classic American Literature.    Yours will be called volume two, volume one having already been written by one of your heroes, D. H. Lawrence.

Bucket list implies things you hope to write before you die.  You are of an age now where such thoughts are less abstractions.  Even though you were diagnosed with a stage III cancer, you did not think you might die when you nodded to the anesthesiologist before you were sent reeling into an eleven-hour sleep while your insides were bared to the light and worked over.  Only after you were well enough on the road to recovery and back teaching did you, of all places in a men’s room stall at the University of Southern California, think to yourself that you could fucking have died.

You write this with no known cloud of finality hanging over your head.  You write it will expectations of having time, energy, and means with which to write the books you have in mind, then see them through to publication.

Among those now, is the book you understood you wished to write, simply by having a conversation with someone newly arrived for a visit from Portland.

The place you think to visit again is 1157 SE 55th Street, in the Mt. Tabor section of Portland, a place you have visited eight or ten times since your mid-forties.  1157 SE 55th is a kind of home to you, wherein a door was opened and you were brought fact to face with things you did not believe in then and do not believe in now, yet what you found was a palette of colors and focus and techniques from a culture even older than the one you were born to.  This was in large measure because of a man who was like a second father to you when you had a perfectly good father already.

Both men were born in the same year, thousands of miles and extraordinary cultures apart.  Both tried to teach you things.  The extent to which each was successful seems the logical focus on what this new book will be about.  Your biological father was not so much an educated man as a man who understood what he wanted and how to share the fruits of his desires.  Your second father was a student of philosophy.  Both men radiated a sense of presence and self-awareness you recognized and caused you great pleasure to experience.

Much of your time spent with your father involved sitting with at baseball and basketball games, things that you experienced more for his presence than the game.  Your second father surprised you by asking you to edit a book that was more or less about the individual who was his second father.

You still think of your biological father as Jake, of your second father as Mr. Big.  Jake was several inches taller than Mr. Big, whose bigness was in the presence he radiated.

Mr. Big came to 1157 SE 55th in 1955, having been previously in Southern California and New York.   He was born in Fardipur, India.  His platform was as a monk of the Ramakrishna Order.  When you first met him, he was the senior monk of the order in America.  You’d just attended funeral services for a much beloved monk of the same monastic order, Swami Prabhavananda.

Your own connection, if you will, to religion, is to involuntarily say Jesus Christ if you have a narrow escape in a traffic situation or hit your hand with a hammer while trying to drive a nail or, as you did only the other night on your evening walk, say it rather loudly to someone in an RV who appeared to be on a collision course with your walking self.  You received the standard rite of passage most males from your culture experience at age thirteen, but you did not pursue any study nor follow any sincere path of community thereafter.  You do observe the mourner’s kaddish for your parents and sister, but this is almost entirely from love of them.

The awareness of this being a book for you is a surprise.  You had not expected this, which is, you have learned, a splendid way for things to begin.  Since you met Mr. Big, on July 4, 1976, the things you wrote seemed to take on a focus where, truly enough, you write intending publication, but more to the point, you wrote to discover what you knew and felt about the subjects of which you wrote.

What will you learn from Jake and Mr. Big:  A horse-playing father and a non-dualistic swami?  

Discontent, Winters, Springs, Summers, and Autums of

 Sometimes, all it takes is a word to get you off and running toward some kind of big, fat discovery.  Words with built-in emotion or conflict are the best, they hit you with the built-in argument that reminds you of the atmosphere of the culture from which you emerged.  In that culture, argument was conversation.  A simple question about dinner preferences could cause bruised feelings lasting a week or longer.

That kind of argument was like an appetizer, a rhetorical amuse bouche. Equivalents of second courses and entrees came along, sometimes accompanied with gestures such as waving of arms or elaborate shrugs.  If the atmosphere grew heated, glasses, lamps, ashtrays and bowls filled with olives were moved about as if in a steroidal chess game.

There are many such words related to story, many others related to politics, yet other words related to things people do together or don’t do together, sex being one such topic.

When single words don’t have an immediate effect, poems drive you to pick up a nearby pen or pencil to scribble a few notes, from which come the equivalent of arguments.  Some poems put you in mind of prisoners rattling the bars of their cells, shaking the world with their pent-up urgency and frustration, and so there you go again, back to the press of time and some vast lode of unfulfilled desire.

If you’ve gone from skimming through lists of words as though you were a dissatisfied kid, hateful of all his toys, onto a poem or two in a collection or a literary journal, still without a positive catalyst, you try a short story—there always seems to be a New Yorker loitering about on the kitchen table—thinking a dissatisfied character will do the trick, get you animation as though you were in a family discussion or, better still, cause you to want to write someone or something of your own into the crucible of discontent.

If you are at all alert to the writing tasks you’ve set out for yourself, you’ll find ways to cause you to experience discontent, even if that discontent comes from the equivalent of a family argument among aspects of your self.

When sufficient time passes and you have yet to reach your position of default discontent, you might just take yourself to a longer work, a novel or some long narrative of nonfiction, looking for ways to argue, to rail against the narrator or characters.

Niceness and contentment exist as those tabletop elements of your culture exist, things to be swept aside in gestures of impatience, perhaps even rudeness.  Niceness and contentment are as you were bade to be when you were younger, polite, considerate, on the lookout for some adult to whom you should defer or surrender your seat.  Those qualities take you away from the energy of story and emerging creativity, into the malls and discount stores of derivation, self-indulgence, and cliché, where you may dig yourself deeper into difficulty by your discovery of clichés, so replaced by the new crop that they actually seem fresh.

You no better, thus once again you are able to come through with flying cholers.

The Growing Evolution of Narrative

By happy coincidence, a review copy of Dennis Lehane’s latest novel, Live by Night, arrived scant hours after you’d delivered a longish lecture on narrative.

You’ve been a fan of his work for some years, after one of your clients on a book tour met him, liked him, then recommended his work to you.  At this point, years down the reading line, only one of his works, Shutter Island, was a mild disappointment for you.

Any new work of his is an occasion, particularly since he seems to be gaining in strength and reach.  How could anything be more satisfying than Moonlight Mile?  Answer:  Live by Night, his latest, seems to gather texture and narrative momentum, moving the reader closer to the reader’s interior both in feeling and stream of consciousness as each relates to the story at hand.

Only in recent years has the thought occurred to you to chart the slow-but-inexorable evolution of narrative as it attempts to move story along while simultaneously rendering the information through the characters rather than having story points and insights sent forth by the author like messenger pigeons with personal notes.

As your interest increased, you spotted some anomalies:  Jane Austen seemed to be well ahead of the wave of interior thought and a closer, more intimate sense of connection with character.  George Eliot got in her licks as, ultimately, did Virginia Woolf.

With such things as interior monologue and narrative text as denominators, you can almost place the time in which a particular work was written, witness the young Henry James growing more impatient with what must have seemed the rural pedestrianism of Thomas Hardy’s narration.

Well and good:  Author back off.  You are the filter of the story, its director and producer, rolled into one.  You are even casting director, with complete freedom to take chances on unknown characters, almost at you whim.  You say almost here because in the revision/editing process, the author may have to make some changes, by degree inserting more momentum or purpose or goodness or meanness or agenda into the character who appears to be causing the story to bog down.

Lehane is so rewarding because of the ongoing ways his characters sense things about themselves and their relations to the cosmos.  Yet Lehane remains in the background, not intruding, artful in his ways of allowing persons in his story to see consequences and feel effects without stopping the flow of movement to slip in an explanatory footnote.

This feels so right, bringing together a theory that Lehane learned a good deal from writing for David Simon on that remarkable novel for television, The Wire with your own growing conviction that the writer and actor have much in common, techniques each could stand to gain from sharing with the other.

There is a delightful sense to story when you approach it this way as well as when you read the works of favorite writers, allowing the story to speak to you the way you let music speak to you.

You can in effect have your cake and eat it; you can have your story and feel it and understand how the diverse parts join together to produce something alive and pulsing.

In back of all this, you’re happily aware that yesterday was the lay-down day—the day bookstores are free to shelve and display a new title—for the new Louise Erdrich.