Improve through Improv

You are in the midst of the discovery that comes from revisiting a number of short stories you'd thought were finished.  The stories led you to believe they were finished in a way you at first did not understand, then came to appreciate.

Almost all the stories you'd thought were finished arrived separately, in unfinished stages, waiting upon you to apply the final touches.  No problem with that; you play and dance and think, trying your best to listen to the characters, even talking to them, telling them they're on their own now.  

Some of them believe you and tell you how they wish things to go, and you say,"aha, so that's how it is with you," and you set down their choices.  Now the stories say, "We're through, we're out of here."  You send these stories to various publications you've come to appreciate.

They send you notes saying they find your stories congenial and will offer them a home, and you are pleased for the entire process.

Other stories are not so cooperative.  This is so not because of any inherent problem with them, rather the matter focuses on you.  You work furiously at finishing them off, trying one crazy stunt after another.  You do everything you can think of with the possible exception of listening to the characters, a complicated matter that in fact has led to this essay.

The stories were, after all, quite finished.  You did not believe the stories themselves, much less the characters, not until you'd done the equivalent of trying to tack numerous last acts to these stories you'd come to think of as problem stories.  They did not think of themselves as problem stories; you were the narrative fly in the dramatic ointment.

After some time, you came to understand that the stories you worked so hard to finish were already done.  No wonder you couldn't get additional scenes to fit onto them.  They already had a caboose.

Which meant you had to spend considerable time, thought, and effort asking yourself and, in subsequent adventures, your characters if you could please come to some agreement about where the story ended.

You reached the point where you almost understood.  To put the matter in a yet better way, you reached the point where you understood as much as you wished to understand, which was the state where you had to reach some understanding with story, with characters, and with endings.  The risk, you felt, was going too far in articulating the way things should be, opening the door for a formulaic feeling where instead you wished to achieve another feeling, one of a well-articulated presence of believable certainty, which, according to you, is a blend of certainty, absolutism, chaos, and uncertainty.

These past days, you've been looking at the notes your publisher has sent on a group of your short stories from which he hopes to select twelve or fourteen, all of which in one way or another caused you some forms of exercise, conversation, frustration, and, ultimately, satisfaction.  All the stories have gone through your process, have been sent off, have been well received, discussed in some memo or other, sent through a final review, then published.

Here they are again, much like children coming home to live with the parents again because each one has notes from the latest publisher.

This is not a complaint because in looking at them again you're thinking there are some stray cat or dog hairs, a flake of dandruff, or in more direct terms, an unnecessary -ly adverb, an observation from you that would have had better effect coming from a character, a tad too much about the waist here, and traces of poor nourishment there.

Although you're quite pleased about this forthcoming publication and your publisher's obvious enthusiasm, you were for a time not sure how to proceed.  You spent a good deal of time puttering with the order of these stories and the building momentum you hoped to achieve.  Both processes were, you realized, stalling devices.  You were edgy about looking into the actual text, particularly since the Publisher said there'd be notes.

How could you think to get into the story, recapture the feeling in order to cope with the notes and your own impressions?

Then the answer.  Improv.  You have your characters improvising a scene.  Starting to feel good.  So you try another take.  Soon, the chemistry is back, and that's the dynamic to make everything work.

Henry V, Act 3, Scene 1:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more...

What Good Is a Story if It Doesn't in Some Way...

There are times when you become so engaged in a narrative that you not only suspend your disbelief, you as well fail to realize what you've read is not a story.

You do not come lightly to this failure to recognize story from non-story; your own early work reflects innocence of the dramatic genome and its applications.  Not only is that fact a given, even today, you are in frequent need of several drafts before you can begin looking at the narrative, calling it out, challenging it with such rhetoric as "Are you story yet?"  Perhaps even the more stringent, "You call this story?"

To date, you're over two thousand mini-essays on this site.  At least a quarter of those are in some specific way an investigation about one or more facets of story.  If awareness of your own hypotheses and investigations is any help at all, you are at least that much more apt not to pass a narrative you've written until it shows a passport or entry visa of story.

If your speculations have any weight, you've in some measure defined for yourself and your dramatic instincts such concepts as "slice-of-life," "vignette," and "flash fiction," the later having a range of subjective definitions, ranging from acceptance as a shorter short story to your own definition of an expanded joke or apothegm or, perhaps, maxim.

You've had to work your way into what a story is for you from the point of view of what it is not.  Because so many of the narratives you called story in the past were narratives with attitudinal (authorial) payoffs, you were able to see how easy it was for you to pick a situation that was a concept, extend it for a bit, then resolve it yourself, scarce in your awareness that it was none of your business but rather the explicit business of your characters.  

Thus you wrote concepts.  Unable to take that necessary defining step in which the characters could cause some resolution, you supplied it via theme.

Thus, your personal rule number one:  A concept is not a story.  

A writer (such as yourself) trying to write a story and not being successful with the particular story is only a concept.  True, it has a basic ingredient, conflict.  The writer is trying to do something, but is not making progress.  He is frustrated.  

You introduce another character, say a pal who is an editor.  "Hey, how you doing on that story you owe me?"  External pressure.  "Fine, fine,"  the writer says, feeling pressure.  "Coming along nicely."  Pressure exacerbated, but still no story.  How about, add another character--the writer's SO.  "Hey,"  she says, "Didn't I just hear you tell Fred, who buys all your stories, that you were well along?  And aren't you in fact desperate for a story?"  Enhanced pressure, but no story.  A writer on a deadline, unable to develop material, is not yet a story, only a concept.

Feeling uncomfortable for the fib told his editor and guilty for snapping at his SO, then sending her off to a movie with a girlfriend, he resolves to be a better person.  Even you, back in the earlier days, could see that there was still no story.

However.

The writer recalls an incident that might lend itself into that magnificent dramatic concatenation called a short story.  He sits before his computer, begins to type.  Still no story, but he is beginning to formulate who the characters are in this narrative, when, of a sudden, a female mosquito (only girl mosquitoes bite) enters the room, begins buzzing about the writer, sensing a four o'clock snack.

The writer grows irritated, waves the mosquito off.  For her part, the mosquito has begun to sense a nice afternoon cocktail.  She persists in her attempts to land on the writer.  Aware of the mosquito's intent, the writer pushes back from his desk, spots a copy of The New York Review of Books, picks it up, rolls it into a tight wand-shaped tube.  It is a weapon.  It is also the first direct step the writer in this scenario has taken to solve a problem.  

The concept has now been moved into story stage, which will be enhanced in any of a number of ways depending on the author of this story.  The writer could, for instance, take a swat at the mosquito, miss, and break a bone china coffee cup given him by his SO, swearing at the misfortune as he stops to pick up the broken shards, wondering if repair is possible.

Complication.  The SO has returned from the movie, which was so bad, she couldn't bear to sit it through.  Also, she began thinking maybe she could be more supportive of the writer, which she does by offering to make a pot of coffee, which now confronts the writer with the need to confess the misadventure with the china cup, consider the second  stretching of truth by concealing the misadventure with the cup.

Where once there was only concept, ironically buzzing about in search of a story, now, thanks to the introduction of the mosquito, story is in place, progressing as the writer attempts to deal with physical, emotional, and existential.

In order to impart more of your own fingerprint on this story or any story of your own composition, you wish to impart your personal rule number two:  You must keep reviewing, reconsidering, and improvising events and responses that provide some outcome or revelation that you'd not previously seen--a complete surprise to you.  All the better if the surprise borders on a revelation of an existential nature.  (You do write for discovery, don't you?) 

Rule Three--yes, there is a third rule here--is that the effectiveness of the story and its outcome are in direct proportion to some aspect thought to be unthinkable (to one or more of the main characters or you as the writer) has come to pass.  Another, less sententious way of stating this premise:  What good is a story if it doesn't fuck with some social or moral convention and your own sense of boundary?

Escape Velocity

  In the waning months of 1974, you moved from the city of your birth, Santa Monica, California, to relocate about ninety-five miles north, to another coastal town that in a number of ways continues to remind you of Santa Monica.

That same year, you began teaching at the University of Southern California, which is located near a neighborhood where you once lived for a brief time.  You made the commute for thirty-four years, during which USC and the neighborhood underwent the kinds of small and epic changes you've come to associate with the entire Los Angeles Basin.  Sometimes, when you'd arrived in Los Angeles, you could almost feel the changes that had begun to take place.  You'd visit the home where you lived with your maternal grandparents, noticing how it had aged, faded, begun to peel.  You saw the high school you'd feared you'd have to attend, and you saw USC, which you feared you'd have to attend.  You had no reason to think you'd teach anywhere, much less USC, thus the beginnings of many ironies when you in fact did teach there.

On most occasions when you traveled to Los Angeles, you drove through the city of your birth.  Today was no exception.  You were scant blocks from the place you lived in 1974, close to the site at Fifth and Santa Monica Boulevard where your father had a store, passed locales where, in earlier times, he and your maternal grandfather had several stores, and were within blocks of 611 Fourteenth Street, whence you were taken having been born at the then Santa Monica Hospital at Fifteenth and Wilshire.

You passed the coffee shop near Fifth and Lincoln where, at one time, you went with some regularity to have eggs Benedict.  Of course it has long since ceased being a restaurant and is not the setting for a family dentistry practice.  You in a larger sense passed ghosts of your former self, your parents, and their friends.

In that same sense, every time you are in El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, you see ghosts of yourself, friends, ambitions, experiments, and learning curves.  You see a place you were convinced you would never leave.  Even with its massive changes and architectural equivalents of face peelings, you have a sense of direction and history you've not experienced in any other larger city such as Mexico, D.F., London, or New York.

Driving north on Pacific Coast Highway to Topanga Canyon, then over that old familiar road, you saw ghosts of other Los Angeles Canyons, notably Laurel, Coldwater, and Beverly Glen.  You saw wide reaches from the heights, and small, intimate alleyways from the lower portions.  You were amazed, as you always are when driving in any portion of the sprawl that is LA how familiar everything seems, how the curves of the canyons are graded, how the houses are cantilevered on the hillsides.

At the topmost point of Topanga Canyon, a mile or two south of Mulholland Drive, at almost the exact spot where, several years earlier, you found your lost dog, Edward, waiting for you one Christmas morning, as though he'd known you'd come for him there, you realized that often in your dreams, you are driving through portions of LA in all its moods and surreal presence.

You have some kind of understanding with the Los Angeles Basin, which is an enormous landscape containing parts of heaven, hell, purgatory, gated communities and long, leisurely strips of tall palm trees, seeming to sway slightly in the wind, reminding you of lion's tales.  You drove down a shaded lane in which crepe myrtle had strewn their wondrous mauve foliage.  Then there were vestiges of jacaranda in bloom along bricked center dividers in streets that ambled like congenial drunks along late afternoon shadows and old stage coach stops.

In its way, Los Angeles is like a large, sheet cake, its design and shape a collaboration of exuberant, bright kids wanting to try something new.  Cut a slice and take it with you.  Cut another slice and take it home to someone you love, or hand it to a stranger whom you hope to love.

Driving through Los Angeles is like a double shot of espresso with that special espresso cream from being made so perfect.  You drive through places such as Woodland Hills and Calabassas to reach 101 northbound, watching people driving Porsches flipping off drivers in lesser cars, women in Lexus and Cadillacs waving rolled Yoga mats in greeting, and hip, blond teenagers shouting Namaste and making tents with their hands.  Commuters are texting, talking on cell phones, making gestures of benediction to the Deer Crossing signs.

You need a special escape velocity to get out of Los Angeles, and by the time you're over the county line into Ventura County, moving to such outposts as Thousand Oaks and Camarillo, you understand that you carry some of Los Angeles with you, fairy dust, karma dust, perhaps a touch of cardamom or coriander on your sleeve.

Stopping at the Marie Callender restaurant off Las Posas to get a large, generous cornbread round, seems a gesture of grounding yourself back in reality, but you know LA is still with you.  It doesn't go away.  

Later, you will realize how much energy being in LA has required of you.  When you sleep, you'll dream Los Angeles dreams, see Los Angeles stucco and glass and bold, fanciful graffiti that waves to you, beckons you back into the laser-like shimmer of a reality that follows you as long as there are motes of the fairy dust and karma dust and cardamom or coriander on your sleeve.

Fuck you.  Namaste.  Watch those chakras.  Fasten your seat belts and return your chairs to an upright position for landing in the rest of the world.

You'll be back.  It's there, waiting for you.

Impatient for Results

Things take time.

Impatience often becomes a dissenting voice, complaining about a particular thing taking too long.

You've lived long enough to have a sense of how long many things take, how surprises, both pleasing and unpleasant, arise, often in the form of something taking longer than it ought or a discovery that an event or goal in progress has happened before you'd expected.

In real and important senses, you've only in recent years come to terms with the impatience associated with finishing works in progress.  In your mind's eye, you sometimes visit graveyards of unfinished projects, recalling the way the idea came to you in the first place and the way the sensations of it seemed to take over your life, and how energizing and wonderful that was, until you'd hit the literary equivalent of the wall you'd sometimes hit in distance running.

That wall came for you at about mile twenty or twenty-one, at about the time when you'd burned off the glycogen reserves and felt a physical sense of devastation.  The solution to that came after some reading and study.  The solution was at once wonderful and simple:  a large helping of pasta with lobster sauce.  The lobster rather than the pasta was the major ingredient.  Eat a modest plate of pasta with lobster for dinner, then be able to run the full twenty-six miles the next day, not artificially enhanced as some professional athletes, but nutritionally equipped according to your own, three and a half hour performance time.

The solution in writing came when, one day, with no warning, you found yourself walking your dog along the beach, mind a delightful zone-out, when you were presented with the answer to a story you hadn't been able to finish and left, waiting, a few years back.  You rushed home, excited to get back to this old friend you felt you'd abandoned.

In this case, the pasta with lobster was patience and the habit of a regular rereading of incomplete works.  The lobster word here was regular, not merely at times when there seemed to be nothing coming.  You knew by then how important it was to not walk away from reading closely and writing every day, whether you felt like it--whatever that may have meant at the time--or not.

You've not had pasta with lobster for some time, the closest being a pasta dish that's become dear to you, pasta with calamari.  But that is not to fuel running adventures.  That is because you enjoy the combination.

Sometimes reading seems a chore.  Rather than spending the time trying to figure out why the task seems so onerous, you developed the habit of finding something to read--anything, until the chore aspects either vanished and you became caught in the work you were reading or the work you were reading seemed so foreign and remote that in self-defense, you developed a counter irritant, something of your own to write so that you'd later have something of interest to read.

As noted in your earlier paragraphs, things take time.  Not long ago, you visited a dermatologist because of a tiny red blotch near your cheek, noticed by your gatekeeper physician during your routine physical prior to having cataract replacement.  

The dermatologist nodded, squirted a blast of liquid nitrogen on the offending spot after diagnosing it as SK, subhorreal keratosis.  He gave you a time line.  Scab by the next day.  Three days for the scab to fall off.  A week or two for the traces of red from the new cells to return to normal flesh color.  Right on time.  Everything on schedule.

Some time frames may cause you more impatience or, in relative terms, less.  Now and then, you might do something to hurry the results, but the things you do may well be little more than diversionary tactics.

Attempting to achieve the Observing Ego condition could, if you attempted to rush that ability, occasion impatience, producing an irony of circularity in which you'd exchanged one impatience for another.

In story and in life, stasis becomes a Petri dish for impatience.

Escape from Boredom: Why Characters Leave Home

So far as you are able to tell, you came to reading with no expectations beyond cultural prompts from your immediate family, most notably your sister, who introduced a conspiratorial note.  "Learning to read will help you escape from places you don't like,"  she told you.  "You'll see."

She was right.  You did see.  

You're aware of your mother often reading novels.  "When you can read,"  she said, "you'll be able to read books like these."

She, too, was right.

Your father seemed, in your memory, more given to magazines and crossword puzzles.  He even had magazines whose contents were entirely crossword puzzles.  Once, after you'd learned to read, you were home from school with some childhood illness, your father brought you such a magazine.  "See how you like these,"  he said.

The cultural strata into which you were born was in effect a roller coaster ride to the learning of reading, the rises and dips enhanced by parents and a sibling who were themselves readers.  You learned to read as a natural course of events, as you'd learned to tie your shoes, brush your teeth, and, when the time came for you to need eyeglasses, to clean the lenses.

You took well to reading.  When you were ten, your sister took you to the main branch of the Providence, Rhode Island, Library, and shepherded you through the mechanisms of securing your own library card.  Two weeks later, you were asked to wait in a room at the library until your mother arrived, whereupon the librarian who'd detained you informed your mother that you'd attempted to check out James Joyce's novel, Ulysses.

You'd heard about the novel and were curious.  Thanks to your mother, you were able to bring it home.  You spent some time trying to make sense of it--any sense at all.  You've spent at least fifty years, at various times inching your way to a greater understanding of that novel.  

You'd already had the conversation with a teacher in another city in which, after reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and then Huckleberry Finn, you asked the teacher if it were possible for a person to make a living writing such things.  You came close to hating the city and school wherein you'd first read those books, but you still remember the teacher telling you how handsome a living you'd be able to make if you were ever able to write stories of the level at which those books were written, but you must never for a moment suppose reaching such a level would be easy.

This is all backstory-as-time-line to demonstrate how you began reading, as your sister suggested, to get away from ordinary, how ordinary confused and bored you, how boredom played havoc with your growing-up-years, and how boredom drove you to even more eclectic reading tastes.  You were hoping to find the literary equivalent of the Holy Grail, the one book that would inspire and guide you toward developing the abilities necessary to write such remarkable books as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

You had to learn, among other things, how terrible some of the writings of that author were and how important it was for you to realize how such a condition could exist without in any way diminishing your regard for him.  Even in recent years, when his autobiography was published, one hundred years after his death, at his request, you had to read through that thick, slap-dash undertaking, and still recognize the position of esteem in which you hold him above all others.

This is still, in a sense, backstory, approaches to how you have come to see how characters have grown through the years, even though in many cases characters over six hundred years old are still speaking to you as paradigms of what memorable characters should be.  You are, of course, speaking of a writer you think to compare with Mr. Twain.  You are seeing Mr, Chaucer as a canny, wise, observant creator of characters you can almost visualize down to facial tics and bodily gestures.

You are also leading to a discovery within yourself that you were in effect making even before you heard the concept and began wondering if you could acquire such a tool for your writing.

The tool is called the Observing Ego, which means in effect an aspect of self--go ahead, call it the writing self--that is Zen-like in nature, without affect, making no decisions, only observing; not judging.  You wish to add to the more conventional psychological use of the term the word empathy because you will be able to use this aspect of self to see characters without taking sides against them or judging their actions in any way except in the most dramatic terms.

The other characters make the calls.  You need ways to get into a cadre of characters with dark sides, selfish sides, limited visionaries, even tortured persons who take pleasure and energy from hurting others.

You're not surprised when giving a lecture or appearing on a panel when persons in the audience ask one of the three great cliche questions audiences such as those you speak before are wont to ask.  In addition to wanting to know what it takes to acquire the representation services of a literary agent, and which narrative point of view is the best, they want to know how to create memorable characters.

To show how long you've been at your trade, there was a long stretch of time when you'd set forth to answer that last question in terms of the word "memorable."  Your answers were accurate enough and, you dare say, adequate.  But now is another matter.  

You attack the word "memorable" as not being apt enough.  You want something more like dark or brooding or haunting or disturbed.  Memorable is too conventional, too ordinary.

The Observing Ego or the Writing Self would now tend to become bored with memorable characters, wanting to turn the heat up under them.

In so many ways, not with a direct relation to your age, maintaining the Observing Ego or, better yet, the Writing Self, is hard work because more energy is required to be beyond memorable.  Being present and observant and empathetic and brooding and dark is difficult work.  The performance levels are necessary in non-writing life as well as within the composition mode, and the necessary efforts to get nourishment from reading are excruciating.  But anything less produces ordinary and ordinary produces uninteresting, boring results.

The circularity presents itself to you in terms of ordinary and boring as benchmarks.  Life, reading, and writing story require a hand on the heat knob, turning up the flame.

Failing to Plot Is Plotting to Fail

The energy required to keep you afloat and operational is considerable, but considering the spectrum of things you wish to engage and be operational in, the balance seems fair enough.  Truth to tell, much of the energy required is energy directed at keeping you focused on the task at hand.

You are not using ADD as an excuse because you don't think you have so much a deficit of attention as a surplus of things you'd like to become engaged with to a greater extent per sitting.  In some senses, you remind yourself of Odysseus' sailors, being distracted by the song of the Sirens, those stunning, beautiful creatures with remarkable voices which they used to lure passing sailors to their doom.  

Your Sirens are concepts, ideas, the equivalents of play sets that draw you into their games.  They also represent intriguing words or concepts or facts you become aware of for the first time, then wonder what they mean, how they work, where they fit.

So you tell yourself in the most powerful oratory and logic you can muster that you are the opposite of ADD, you are in fact Multiple Attention Disorder, which keeps you away from activities better organized individuals would tend to before pursuing their own particular sirens.  

Hasn't worked out all that well so far.  All about you, note pads bear your near-illegible penmanship and its attempts to sketch in the stray observation or incident.  The hundred or so books you brought with you to this residence have expanded by a factor of at least five.  Only today, an individual you'd met briefly a few years back sought you out to give you an enormous box of literary journals and books on the theory that you, of all the persons he knew, would be best able to cope with and use them.

One robin does not make a spring, but it does produce a number of books which, you might add, are distractions at the same time they are serious and necessary adjuncts to your primary goal, which is getting words down in keepable form as a preparation to wrangling them into short stories, novels, essays and longer essay-type works you could think of as nonfiction books.

Which brings you to the next point:  For all the considerable energy required to keep you afloat and action, the energy required to neutralize the inertia of doing nothing is even more considerable.

You carry an interesting pair of polar opposites within you.  You may be slow to act but this is not from indolence, rather from the need to pause to consider which enthusiasm to follow.  Choices require investigations, more choices require assignment of priority.  What may seem like indolence is you in metaphor going through your pants and jacket pockets to investigate the index cards and backs of ATM receipts for lists of priorities.

You once worked for a publishing venture where the house mantra was "Failing to plan is planning to fail."  You'd not heard this until you'd signed on, but when you did hear it and saw the seriousness affixed to it, you knew a fuse had been lit, a time clock had been hit.  

From a managerial style sense, the mantra makes sense, but you'd already come to conclude that the planning involved in the types of ways you wished to invest most of your time was the approach of assembling all the information, then finding the proper order or plan for it.  You even began to call the approach rearranging the furniture.  Then you heard about the Chinese vision of feng-shui, and you began to sense the Cosmos was ratifying your approach, or perhaps you'd come to discover what the Cosmos already knew and that you in fact were the one doing the ratifying.

There is a calm comfort in the knowledge that you are more energy efficient by being in the midst of a storm of activity rather than having to draw on the energy to overcome the inertia of being a single-tasker.

The closest thing you can equate to the Cosmos having anything resembling a Code of Justice comes from your beliefs that 1) if you want something done at all, give the job to a busy man, and 2) you can't possibly get "it" all done.

Of course you do your level best to live by this code, nodding and tipping your metaphoric hat to the notion that you may well be arranging data to favor your vision while the very opposite vision might be the inevitable truth.

There are some points of intersection between these two visions of how get things done and the famed parable involving the tortoise and the hare, in which the hare has beautiful muscles and running technique, but is no match for the persistent gait and determination of the tortoise.

You might be wrong, but you will be too busy being wrong to find out.

Eye Contact

Some of your favorite essayists are writers who set their thoughts down on paper long before you arrived in any condition to be able to read them.  Even then, you were not devoted to their work because of your fondness for fiction and poetry and because you had not yet enough experience of your own to ante up when you read these worthies.

You were reading fiction and poetry,hopeful of being transported to a place of experience without having to think.  Writers such as Dickens, writing as Boz, William Hazlett, and Emerson set you down the remarkable path of the essay.  In more recent times, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, Wendell Berry, and--even though you thought he had a rotten persona as a teacher--Gay Talese, helped fit all the working parts in place to the point where a work such as John McPhee's recent New Yorker piece on, of all damned things, golf balls, had the effect on you as a Tom McGuane or Deborah Eisenberg short story.

Thus you come to another remarkable essayist and longtime blog friend, Gloria Garfunkle, who writes flash fictions, self-examination essays, or what you would call investigations.  Some years ago, GG extracted a promise from you not to call her by her actual name because at the time she was a practicing therapist and wished to keep her professional life and writing life separate.  

The fact of her also being a self-identified individual in whom a bi-polar imbalance existed made her professional and personal writings all the more momentous for you to the point where she became a part of the role model pantheon for the kinds of essay you care most about and most wish to write.

You could not have come up with a better character, a psychotherapist with bi-polar imbalance, in a sense a perfect metaphor for an engaging character.

Think then of the essay as more than a form; it is an interesting eponym because in the first place, to essay something is to test it and in the second place, the essay has become through convention a way of playing out one or more hypotheses, carrying one or more to some resolution.

Think then of this:  When you switched banks earlier this week as a result of your longtime, locally-owned, small town bank being taken up by a larger bank almost like a coyote having a neighborhood cat for supper, the manager who supervised your enrollment spoke of changing banks as a source of grief and mourning.  True enough.  Habit and tradition die a slow death.

When a car dies or reaches the stage of moribundity, you cannot help recount some of the trips you took together, the moments of tiff when you saw some repair bills, the moments of joy as you cruised together into some remarkable vista, some place neither of you had been before.

Now, we're leading up to something momentous.  Your relationships with moribund computers.  With the possible exception of your Ancora and Conklin and Shaeffer fountain pens, you've used computers as more than a tool, more like an intimate instrument.  You and your computers have had thousands of conversations, shared correspondence, investigated possibilities.  Your computer knows your intimate secrets.  True, you get some IMs on your cell phone that your computer knows nothing about, but if sharing were possible, you would.

You had a momentary pang when you switched from PC to Mac, and you did feel some sense of loss at the departure of previous computers. Without any conscious awareness on your part, your computers, in particular your laptops, became the equivalent of an intimate, a close, cherished friend to whom you could tell anything, with whom--and this is important--you could essay your way through ideas and concepts to some form of understanding.  In a sense, your past computers were partners, collaborators in the writing of essays, reviews, blog posts, books, lectures, speeches, love notes.  

To this day, you still think with nostalgia about the fire engine red Olivetti portable typewriter, given to you with love and devotion by an individual you'd hoped at one time to be your mother-in-law.  That Olivetti and you produced how many books together?  How many short stories?  That Olivetti, that splendid, fiery, Italian machine.

So here is the difficult part.  Here is the mountain goat leap from machines, implements, cell phones, pocket knives, fountain pens, to live, sensate beings, to absent family, absent friends, absent lovers, and above all, one being most recently gone from you.  Here is the part about someone with whom you had any number of the experiences and exchanges you had with such inanimate things as fountain pens, computers, and your Leica camera.

You were hunting this afternoon through a clump of papers on a coffee table near your reading chair.  A plastic envelope with a compact disc in it fell from between the leaves of a manuscript.  It bore the name of your veterinarian and your late dog.  In all probability, the disc has an x-ray or some other photographic image authorized by you for the purpose of diagnosing a distant symptom, long since diagnosed and dealt with.  The material on the disc is in effect no different from the three-foot by four-foot photo of your late dog, or the oil portrait of her, or the photo of her as a two- or three-year old, residing in the kitchen bookcase.

In the spirit of devotion and that complex bond between dog and human, you've had any number of conversations with her that were more verbal essays, ideas and concepts floated before her as though she could understand them and partake of them, then help you form some sort of resolution or decision.  The many times you asked her, for instance, "What about it?  Eat in tonight and finish off the pasta with the Bolognese sauce, or perhaps The Habit and a burger for you and the albacore tuna for me?  Or perhaps we go sharesies, half of each for the two of us?"  Did you expect a finite answer?  No, of course not.  Did she understand the implications?  Probably not.  Most probably not.  

But she did understand the intonations of your voice and through those tones, she had a wide spectrum of your emotions and attitudes, which became tools for her and the ways, particularly through eye contact, she conversed with you.

You've spent a major portion of your life focusing on ways to communicate, which means you've had to learn how to extract information, how to process it, how to infuse it with your experiences and the conclusions those experiences left you with.  Many of your tools have been from visuals such as books, film, canvases, walls which were receptacles for frescoes.  Many of your tools were recordings or live performances of music.  Other tools were conversations with individuals--family, friends, mentors.  Still other tools came from your internal essays, your conversations with and within yourself.

On April 15 of this year, you left a tribute on this digital wall to the friend who'd left you hours earlier.  You called it "A Thirty-Pound Learning Curve," essaying some of the internal and external conversations you'd had with her since the November afternoon in 1997, when you brought her home from the Santa Barbara Animal Shelter.

The mechanical devices--computers, fountain pens, and the recording device on the cell phones--captured what you had to offer with an admirable kind of objectivity you'd not expected.  There were all your notes, as written or uttered, first of all for you to see, then to revise and correct.

Sally captured all you had to offer as well, with a significant difference, and after all those years you had with her, you could experience that difference every time you made eye contact with her.