Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 46

A Certain Dream for a Certain Dreamer

Yes, I am lost, but I seem to be lost in a fascinating place.

One great advantage of being lost is that it forces you to stare at the dirt roads and low hills around you with a new intensity. It forces you to look for stands of cedar, for evening stars, that might guide you back to some place just a little bit like home.

From the unknown to the less unknown leads me to ask: what do I know about short stories?

Both Sean O'Faiolain (whose work remains unknown to me) and H. E. Bates (whose work is in the process of becoming known) have written about short stories, and they agree on certain principles.

Both argue that short stories bear less kinship to novels than they do to lyric poetry.

Both agree that no one has been able to define what a short story is. There seem to be no rules for the crafting of short stories, but only tools and methods. Some stories have plots, but many do not. Some stories extend themselves in time, but many do not. Some stories work by implication, but many do not.

Sean O'Faiolain has gone further, and said that characterization is not important in short stories. Lacking the scope of novels, they must present the illusion of character, the implied possibility of growth or change. What people in stories require is not biographical depth, but vivid perception of the moment.

I find this reassuring, yet at the same time, troubling. How many editors would agree with Sean O'Faiolain? How many, instead, would believe that short stories must be novels in brief?

For my part, when I think of stories, I think of circumstances, and settings, and images, and weather, and implications. The characters arise from these.

As important as characters are, they remain one component. To succeed, a story must present with conviction many components, held in place by the most important of all: the prose.

Prose in itself is not one thing. It is euphony, imagery, sensory detail, metaphor, clarity. When we say that prose is well-written, we have in mind not only the structure and flow of the sentences, but the pictures the words convey, the moods that seep from the language, the ideas combined and illuminated by the text.

This need not imply that stories must present cardboard people or stock players; what matters, instead, is an illusion of life, a suggested complexity.

Quite often, the story itself is characterization: an echo, a reflection, of a character's hidden hopes and fears. Things happen to a particular person because this person is receptive in specific ways, to certain hunches or hallucinations, in the same way that only a certain kind of dreamer can have a certain kind of dream. For example, what happens to Colleen Lambert in "Who Would Remain" is not explicable by human standards, but it does reveal her sense of purpose, her self-definition, and her protective stance towards other people.

I love this approach, because I am less interested in where people have come from, than in what they experience right now. Their jobs, cars, clothes, consumer goods, have no importance to me beyond what they might offer to enhance the story; what matters is what people do and say and feel and fear, right there on the page. For that reason, I question the need to write autobiographical sketches before I begin to write, because these details are beside the point. In a play or novel, this approach would make sense, because plays and novels are very much about the detailed examination of people over time. But short stories are most often about specific moments, and like poems, they are built upon the careful choice and use of words.

Am I wrong about this?

When I Was Five Years Old

By 1969, I had been dead
(Or so it felt in my dead-tired heart)
The previous five years; but if I lacked
Some spark of living other children held,
I carried in my head a sick sick ghost.
It dragged me out to watch the sunlight die
And bleed from every dusk; then it observed
My bleakness in the grey.

I was compelled
By pictures from the ghost to draw my own.
And so: a house, Victorian and lean,
With tower square, and crowned with narrow mansard --
Bellcast, bullseyed, black, with iron cresting
(Perhaps to fence in widows at their walks).
My favourite design, it drained my pens
And sprawled on pads of paper, stack by stack.

Soon I began to listen to the ghost
Who steeped my head in stories, and I tried
To waste my pens on these, but drawings failed.
Yet kindly women of my Kindergarten
Took heed of what I said (these endless tales)
And wrote the stories down for me. Then I
Would stare at every trace immortalized
By green or purple marker, and pretend
That I had learned to read. It was my trick,
My only magic flourish. It was fake,
As dead as any ghost, but fooled a few.

Where are these ladies now? The ones who chose
To listen while I babbled, and to write
The words that stood beyond me? Forty years
And five can turn a human into dirt;
But I can see their green and purple traces,
I can feel their kindness and concern
Even as the ghost felt mortal daylight
Cooling in the mansard of my head.

Blank Verse Blackness

Democracy, enlightenment, compassion,
All the living strivings of the past --
The stanzas and the standards, all the hands
Raised to paint or sculpt or scope the stars,
To challenge ears with music or with verse,
To point the way to observations new
And calculations inestimable
Yet bold with implication -- All of this,
All of these achievements, in the dust;
For we have cheered the wrecking of the past
And jeered at any future. We live Now,
Live only for the Now, and our delight,
Our fungus lamp and sigil of the age,
Is cash and cash alone. We have no worth
As loving, dreaming, depth-exploring beings;
We only live in what we buy and sell,
We only die to gain the banker's knell.

Dry Crystals

"Within a few kilometres of home, the night caught up with her.

"The full moon became an opalescent smear upon the sky, then darkened into black. In the beam of her headlamp, a few random snowflakes drifted and gleamed like
dustmotes, then increased to block her view in a blinding tunnel of cold stars.

"She stepped down from the bike, turned off the headlamp, and found herself in a bone-grey world with a hint of solid darkness on the left, where the mountainside formed
a rampart of ghostly aspen trunks. To the right, open fields vanished into nowhere. The only sense of life and motion came through the trudging of her boots, the sliding unsteadiness of the bicycle at her side, the cold melting kisses on the unprotected circle of her face."

From "The Vast Impatience of the Night."

But when I went out this evening, I felt as if grains of sand were being tossed at my eyes -- a shame, because the tiny dry crystals formed columns of light that swayed under the streetlamps, and they were beautiful to see... when I could see.

Slamming Doors

And here I am, that audience of one,
As always, after midnight, for the show:
That sick play self-produced, that ever-slow
Uncurtaining of all my never-done,
My never-can, my never-will, begun,
As always, night by night, within the glow
Of pointless hope and useless farrago,
As always, disappointing. Chorus? None.

And here I am, again, as always: Me.
I play the part myself, and all my schemes
Collapse to the applause of slamming doors.
I wear my childhood cloak: futility.
Yet I would rather fail in my own dreams
Than gain success in borrowed rags of yours.

-- Saturday, January 03, 2015.

The Most Accomplished Hero of the Age

"There was formerly a king, who had three daughters -- that is, he would have had three, if he had had one more, but some how or other the eldest never was born. She was extremely handsome, had a great deal of wit, and spoke French in perfection, as all the authors of that age affirm, and yet none of them pretend that she ever existed. It is very certain that the two other princesses were far from beauties; the second had a strong Yorkshire dialect, and the youngest had bad teeth and but one leg, which occasioned her dancing very ill.

"As it was not probable that his majesty would have any more children, being eighty-seven years, two months, and thirteen days old when his queen died, the states of the kingdom were very anxious to have the princesses married. But there was one great obstacle to this settlement, though so important to the peace of the kingdom. The king insisted that his eldest daughter should be married first, and as there was no such person, it was very difficult to fix upon a proper husband for her. The courtiers all approved his majesty's resolution; but as under the best princes there will always be a number of discontented, the nation was torn into different factions....

"While the nation was in this distracted situation, there arrived the prince of Quifferiquimini, who would have been the most accomplished hero of the age, if he had not been dead, and had spoken any language but the Egyptian, and had not had three legs."

-- Horace Walpole, "Hieroglyphic Tales."

From
THE WORKS OF HORATIO WALPOLE, EARL OF ORFORD, VOLUME IV.
Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, Paternoster-Row, and J. Edwards, Pall-Mall. London, 1798.

Old Footprints

I should accept that life is a line of peaks, plateaus, and troughs. They cannot be transformed into anything else; they can only be faced when we come to them. How we confront them is a clue to what we are, perhaps the one reliable measurement of whatever qualities we have. This measurement counts for nothing to other people, but for ourselves in isolation after midnight, it presents the starkest and most candid glimpse into why we persist, why we fail, and why we fool ourselves into treading these mazes of persistance and failure. Old footprints never lead the way, but they show us that we have been here before, and that we kept on walking.

-- From today's writing session.

That Fine Old Failure Dream

Tonight I dreamt that I was back in highschool. I had just failed the final grade, and within myself, I screamed at the prospect of being trapped in school for a whole new year. Why had I failed? Was it my fault? Was it the school's? Would I never grow up?

Then I woke up, anxious, trembling... in a world led by the likes of Harper, Abbott, Obama, puppets for psychotic businessmen and sociopathic bankers.

We're all failing highschool, but the rich kids think they're grown-ups.

Just Another Deadly Myth

In the last years of his life, my father and I often talked about exceptionalism. I could never understand it, but my father (born and raised in America) told me there was nothing to understand: it was a myth, and like any myth, required no supporting arguments or evidence to back it up.

People believed in exceptionalism, and in their minds, this made it as true as winter or sunshine or the midnight breeze. This made it possible to rationalize any crime, any atrocity, for the sake of Us versus Them. And if he were alive today to read about torture in the United States, my father would be appalled but unsurprised.

Love Never Heals

Sonnets are often used to present ideas and arguments, but at a price: the strict form of the sonnet can distort intended meaning, and too much emphasis on the idea can result in dry poetry that might as well be prose.

I love the challenge of squeezing my chaotic moods into a box, and as an exercise in writing technique, this can be instructive... but is it always worth reading?

And so I'd like to ask:

-- Is the idea presented in the first eight lines clear?

-- Do the final six lines feel arid, unemotional?

* * * * * * * *

Love never heals. It only shares our pain,
And witnesses the struggle we endure
As we defy those patterns that immure
Us in our prison-selves. Indeed, the chain
We have allowed to bind us as we strain
Against all things but habit, can (with pure
And self-directed strength as armature)
Be severed only by our own disdain.

The task is ours alone. But you, my dear,
With all your wounds and grief, you sought for light,
And so I shook with every sob you cried.
I saw your prison made of guilt and fear,
I offered maps to guide you from the night,
But you preferred captivity. I tried.

-- Tuesday, December 09, 2014.