If you click on this cover you will open a brief essay regarding fiction, presently. I find it interesting, challenging, and compact. If you have an interest in writing as discovery, as research, as emergence, as investigation and creativity, I encourage you to read it…
Mirrors & Shadows
“Ten times a day you must overcome yourself. You must want to burn yourself up in your own flame.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
“the lesson is clear: one is multiple, the same is different, the representation is the negative of the person…both original and copy, identical and different, they are the same and the other, interchangeable and monumental…In the dark room of his studio, Warhol develops himself. In so doing he ‘unmakes’ himself.”
-Victor Stoichita-
“Death follows artists around like their shadow and I think that’s one of the reasons artists are so conscious of the vulnerability and nothingness of life.”
-Francis Bacon-
Children singing choruses. Joyous chants and rhymes. Distant. Repetition forming memory.
Chasing shadows, or running from. Self-same body blocking sun. To be sought, to be feared. Identical and strange.
Known alone in traces and reflections.
I say that “I” was young once. That it’s only patterns of light, only the passing of time, only angles of vision.
I repeat myself.
Each day reassembling, developing, dissembling, to reassemble again. My body a gathering post.
Mirroring image has gone from the closest thing to self-awareness we might uncover to a flat reflective surface full of nothing. Ephemeral and changing by the second, dependent on the looker, a vacant mirage.
Shadow has proceeded from a designator of real presences to an outline of actual vacuity. From a measurable symbol of substance to a vague hint of objects passing.
Voices like a bag of small bells and grass. Something shaking and stirred. Snippets of a tune, the catchy parts.
What I can tell I read, observe, attend and consider, opening a dialogue of days. But I only get to see in glimpses and portions. A hand moving, holding an instrument here; flat feet from crossed legs there; a shoulder, some hair of a beard, the frames of glasses. I don’t see myself seeing, nor see myself as seen.
There’s the mirror and the shadow – intangible, eminently interpretable and malleable “things” – emphases of the transitory. Receptacles like language – merely signs or indices – pointing back at absence.
Moment, moment, moment…now then now then now…endless fantasies of dissection moving round the room, faster than shuttling clips of film. A self presenting / representing itself after again, appearances only, shimmering skein mingling veils of light…
While they sing like breezes dreaming – “Who sees?” and “What is seen?”
He who has ears let him hear,
bypassing illusion,
in marks and gestures
Waters I’m Swimming Today
feel free to join – the water’s fine!
Family: A Fiction the Fifth
to browse the gist of things…a little where-its-coming-from-where-its-going, start here:
otherwise, here’s the newest particles:
5
There being always more sides to the stories.
Building blocks of broken bones.
Families at bone-splintering nearness. Whether abusive or conditional; assertive, supportive, overindulgent or neglectful. The pressures in an atom wiggle and hum, each entity squeezed and redirected into another, without foregoing elemental ingredients.
Why drawing so close hurts so much, compounding all the bruisings.
Take seven shattered anatomies and circle them into a hug. Ouch, oof, shrieks and tears. Sounding like sport or war. Ahem. The game is designed to figure out where it’s safe to rest and heal. Together. Every press accentuates wound, but may also set the fracture.
The littered trail. Fragments, chips, and joints. Ankles, ribcage, skulls. The longer held together, dwindles the percentage unharmed. Increases deformation, reformation, and strength in the bindings. History makes the call. Families get made this way.
Alpha male’s left-side stress-fractures filigree – he brings them in close to the mama. Pain ensues globally, harder gripping cuts and tears her. Dislodging hip and rib, she wails back, threatening to come undone, wrapping and withholding fragile loins. Glass-cracked between the eyes evincing wince, he lumbers to the bottle – an anesthetic, fog-inducing ICU.
Boys pummel and cling on trampoline. Superheroes blasting at their foes, setting right the world. Divine ninja tricksters, eluding all blows, fending sacred space from viral intrusion. Morphing Jekyll into Hyde. Two-against-one turns to three-on-three, searing yelps and hollered rage compound the fractures and spread the lesions until a fuming heap of shame remains.
Emotion rivers throughout a system. Elaborate table-game of chance, every draw altering rules. And conditions. One discretion cheats them all.
Resistance (fear) and just revenge. Creating hypotheses – infinite dis-ease.
Tuck them in with tender warmth. Dabbing sores with salve. Reconnoitre, reassemble, holding court, calling assembly. The luxury is not repeating childhood, home is not a corridor of labs. Parent positioned now as doctor; infected all the same.
Blood is issue, possible transfusion, tearing tissues. Don’t ignore, curing is a share. having invented them in this inventive world, they must also be wriggled through. Calls for help, from any corner, equate a demand.
The family as quarantine.
To serve and protect.
Seek. Assist.
Quarantine.
Sanctuary.
Sanitarium.
Touch base.
Proceed.
“The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response. Most days begin with sentences that are typed into a journal no one has ever seen. There is a freedom to this; freedom to write what I will not proceed to wrestle with. The entries are mostly quotidian, a warming up of the fingers and brain. On days when I am troubled, when I am grieved, when I am at a loss for words, the mechanics of formulating sentences, and of stockpiling them in a vault, is the only thing that centers me again.”
From Wikipedia:
Jhumpa Lahiri (Bengali; born on July 11, 1967) is an Indian American author. Lahiri’s debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), won the…
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Fiction Family 4
Pieces that precede can be read in order here: FAMILY: A FICTION
section three closing thus….
They build a monument, calling it travel. Stripping each other of context, providing a different forum. Humans tend to revert to familiar. Habitude of experience. With no experience, alteration comes to bear. Predictable as weather.
No one’s leaving home.
Other words coming to mind.
4
Resistance.
There is, it seems, in families, this propensity.
Whatever is said, corrected, even when agreed.
Existing to clarify his spouse – to illuminate and exhibit. In turn, she elucidates him. Providing bases or cause – extrapolates. Siblings arguing each other, united they stand, all as deserters. Seven eventual versions of the parental wake-up blare: AWOL.
It’s good to be king. Graph the assassination attempts – looks like innards of clocks. A searing clap of surprising betrayal each time. Unlike the spurned and necessarily nutrient mother. Shagg proclaiming the law (as devised and developed by nature – read lifegiver/lawgiver “mom” – female coupling nurture and structure within dependency). He handles rebellion, warding attacks and spying the skirmishes, she breeding resentment from ongoing need.
These are general patterns, biologically driven, no symphony the same. With eight keys plus a half, on a twelve-tone scale, the songs recognizable according to differing orders. Typify and characterize. Declare it false.
Scraggydad is nurturing, allowing/confirming resistant responses and recumbent emotions, shame-shirking under her gaze. In other words – as one of them – a remedial complicity. Which she echoes into her drama – the leadership, the guilt, the collapse.
Each wanting to be cradled – rock, paper, scissors style – with an occasional simultaneous Bingo. However unlikely, it’s what probability’s for.
Thus every level its lingo. Select a word (sex or heaven, death or boy) and provide a taxonomy of related meanings from the eldest parent through littlest child. It comes clear. There are altering thesauri of usage.
Family as a game of Scrabble on the board of Life, each settling Catan. With beeps and whistles and a slew of avatars.
A technique known as mapping provides lay of the land, similar to a geneologist’s tree applied to the present. A thing to be explored or verified. Corrected through each journey. In several dictions.
The family edition.
this is good stuff
George On Approaching Writing
I don’t believe at all in the Deep Dark Secret theory of literature: this idea that there is a right or a wrong about a given story or a given approach. My own pathetic output is proof that, at least in my case, Mastery is totally elusive. For me, every story is a whole new set of problems, expressed in a whole new language, plus my glasses are out of prescription, and its raining. So I am a very humble writer and a very humble reader, flinchy even.
George On Confronting the Real Story
We all try to skip around the heart of the story. It is a form of avoidance that all of us do. I don’t know quite why, but I see it all the time – in my work and in the work of my students. It’s very odd, and very universal. Maybe…
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A Family of Fiction, pt. 3
“all attempts at interpretation must abandon any pretence at direct understanding and concentrate on second degree understanding.”
-Victor Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow-
FAMILY A FICTION (the story to now)
Section 3:
3
Girl-princess-daughter, her experience as only. Not quite true collectively, there being also steps- and halves- another, older, never cohabitant, but still. The members were stacked. Against or for, another matter. Depending.
The younger, caged one, doesn’t eat. Is self-restricting. Flutters like a bird. Her brain engulfs her self, a genetic trait. Possessed also, in some measure, top-down. Each with their own rendition. One definition of family.
Cohabitants. Genetics. Affinities. Their opposite. Relations. Some, after all, being half-habitants, some post-, some occasional-, some rare-. Or endangered. Or in transitions.
If there is a nucleus, it is Scraggly and Self-aware, both co- and in-habitants constantly, at least according to them. In the minds of their children. Whenever they were. Adding an unknowable “if.”
The grown and growing exhibit it. The three on their own. Three nearly capable, at least two of which: disinterested. This is not about them, not a descriptive analysis. Maybe more like a song, composing a fugue: each line for itself replete with recurring variations, cringes of dissonance and harmonic highlights. Something like a family, a novel, a history, religion.
Oscillations that swivel near a truth, only to loop and to veer into something more real. Being actual. That is to say, is happening.
Inopportune call and subsequent jail time. Jealousies and rivalries, differentials of power. Stirred with a paste of abuse and traces of –isms. Coupled to all the unpredictably brave accomplishments. That sort of thing. The life of a species.
With no one sure how to tell it. Who solos, who’s chorus. And when. Where hardly matters in webs. Or does it? Authoritative nights at the table, father propounding to a coven of illumined and down-turned faces – forged not of incantations, but synergies of private networks. Ubiquitous strands of escape. Virtual tunneling. Not to mention insolence. Or simply vanishing within. Daddy lost in thought. Or mum diagnosing (she doesn’t like to think it that way). Seldom either/or.
They build a monument, calling it travel. Stripping each other of context, providing a different forum. Humans tend to revert to familiar. Habitude of experience. With no experience, alteration comes to bear. Predictable as weather.
No one’s leaving home.
Other words coming to mind.
Family is Fiction, part two
2
Quick to give up, or in, to description. Sidelong glances, or enough periphery, and it’s known – they are there. Are here. Which is firstly what needs be established. Shaggy in-turned male and self-consciously-nondescript-as-a-waged-war-within-herself – are here – whether explicitly denoted or not, for that is not what this story’s about. And all of their children – as if we’re in shadows – near presences felt.
If the man were currently reading (he is reading now), and is sitting at his desk, surrounded by more words, words bound up to burst and licking the chops of their leafy lips, prepared to murmur and shout. It seems to him.
And she would be (read “is”) pushing a broken body into limited stress-inducing motions purposed to loosen and tighten. Laying on a mat on a floor watching women on a screen count and stretch and breathe, mimicking them with her own limbs and torso. Accentuating her “core,” strengthening her “self” for this losing battle.
The children are learning and eating, playing and working – whatever it is youth do to fend for themselves and their futures – their shadow-dance with age.
Unable to say it as is – the is too complete and far from attainable – in segments and particles, or a falsified whole from great distance. Oh nature. Oh being. Because of the facts, we have to just enter, and being recursive it matters only slightly where or when – inception/conclusion are unrecognizable to a decentralized everywhere, connective and mobile.
Some are known by their doings, some by their fathers’ or mums’; others according to their works or the times. Some hardly known of at all. To speak of them is to personally encounter – as if face-to-face – an intersubjectivity of optimal expressivity.
Or not. Language gets carried away. When we search for a meaning or some explanation is it not because we already believe it is there? Something already imagined? What remains is a tying together in idealized systems like logic – building a case or crafting a theory, replete with supporting cast of regulatory theorems. Which demonstrates little but our ability to make science out of anything. Exercise in closing the systems. While all remain open.
The rugged male shifts from his papers, given possibilities, which it turns out rhymes everything. She teases her hair nonchalantly (she hopes) and attempts to forget her over-calculations by delving into them – representing them – externalizing image and textures. Viewed askance not head-on, but in outlines and shades or peered at and through, as we’d envision a form from behind. Anything to remove the scrutiny of mere appearance – incorporate more and defraggle illusions of skin.
She scribbles it onto used papers, ready surfaces already marred, turning scarrings and blots into figures and wounds; while he accentuates the peculiar, alarmed by specifics and seeking connective similitude. If a thought comes queer, he tattoos it with ink until it sounds available.
Both, in a way, finding commerce, a transaction with others engaging/avoiding themselves. Feeling so like and unlike. A pestilence of the species, er, human condition – overwhelming similarities of form with infinite intricacies of difference. Everything related – never one without another – a closed system of incalculable possibilities. They labor in.
Male smells sour in just a few days, not accustomed to shouldering public, perhaps what allows for his mess. Adapting to the threat of her attention, though in the absence of comprehension. She allows him his comforts till they confront and offend. Peaceable enough – this arrangement – and duly provocative: they enhance and combine, stimulate and remind one another in a struggling intimacy – they love. Not without precedents or fear, but they love.
And in their sleep, the gears will turn.
He writes off stuck places – the uncanny processes of dreams.
The children behave like loosely arranged magnets, at times slamming close, or sullenly repelled. Usually vibrating, tensely, between. The volatility of past and a future reacts in young bodies as now.
Viewed collectively – it’s an inter-&-co-dependent mechanism, sketchy and atomically diagrammed – similarly potent (at least potentially) in its splittings and pressures.
Live things best metaphor themselves.
All my Words are Silent 