Then it was time for sleep.
Words crashed around in my head like waves against cliffs as I slid between the cold sheets of bed. Images and phrases surfaced in the whirlpool of thoughts and I sat up and jotted a few down on the pad next to the nightstand. I thought, "If I don't do something, I'm going to be kept up half the night." I've learned that the best way to quiet my lexical mind is to use my iconic one. So I drew: A quartered globe. Two dots connected by a line. A telescope and a microscope; an Eye of Horus. A branching tree. A drafting compass; a paint brush. A book. A throne; a seat. A mask.
I was still thinking about the ending of my trip, but at least my mind was quiet enough to sleep.
The next morning, I tried to use story critique as a tool to figure out this story's ending:
In the manuscript of Pegasus Ranger in Portland, I see someone using artifice as a tool to search for an axis mundi. He dons a costume and begins his search with a train ride; he discovers that the meridians and parallels of the world are blurred. He thinks he's discovered an axis mundi in a temple of art, but his vision of artistic logos overwhelms him and he retreats. A fellow writer, a kind of shadow-shelf of the searcher, turns his attention to Death. Each of the searcher's encounters contrasts and compares chaos and order; control and surrender; expectations, fantasy, and reality. At the end, he tries to connect the dots into a paradigm, but they don't mesh perfectly. The story ends with the searcher almost home, passing a shadowed milestone.
I thought about the critique. Endings are supposed to be where you connect the dots. And as a writer I'm expected to connect them with a flourish and a twist. But then I thought about Georges-Pierre Seurat, who painted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte -- he didn't connect the dots. And so I think I've found the ending to this story.
The Geometry of Life is always Deconstructed by Entropy. But Life -- which includes its terminus, Death -- is not about seeing, it's about how one looks. The act of observation not only changes the observed, it changes the observer. Look well. Bring outfits. Look good.
5 comments:
So the change in the observer, in this case, is: be satisfied with observation? Because you always look good.
BTW, I gotta get me one of those shadow shelfs!
Also, this was a cool series of posts.
Hi Dave,
I was going for a "the examined life" ending. Maybe I will have to re-work the piece. I tried to translate Jay's quandary -- choosing to look at Death through a magnifying glass, opera glasses or a telescope -- to placing milestones on a personal landscape.
Death is sitting on the last milestone; our libraries turn into ruins and green mounds for the sheep to frolic on.
I think to live well, one has to look well at our lives, and I think to some extent our expectations and attitudes filter what see. I'm uncomfortable with this conclusion because it's easy for me to write "Bring outfits. Look good." right now. I imagine if I were closer to Death's milestone I might write something different.
One thing that bothered Jay was the lack of control, and how cancer/chemo robbed him of the ability to be an active participant in his own story. I ask myself, "How would a Pegasus Ranger face Death?" and then remember my grandmother, who bit by bit lost her adult self to dementia before dying of old age at 99. Luckily, she was allowed to meet Death as a happy, trusting child.
So, perhaps a Pegasus Ranger meets Death at the photographer's, and they sit down for a glamor shot. And then the photo is put into a locket for the Ranger to wear when he's very old and confused and in a home, along with the caption, "I'm Here."
Oh, man, I just re-read this and it occurs to me that people wear images of Jesus or other gods with phrases like "I am here", don't they? Ugh... oh the perils of being born December 24....
Oh. Right. Having Jay as a kind of shadow self only works because we are the same age, we think in similar ways (although I think he's smarter than I am), we're both writers, and we have parallel observations about family.
And that's the beauty of The Hero's Journey: anyone you meet can be a kind of shadow self.
The flip-questions are: whose shadow self am I, and is the pay good?
I'm going to share your paragraph about drawing as the sleep-allowing exercise when ideas crash about in your brain. Only a tiny part of your post, but it may be very very useful to some insomniacs I know. Love, Pomona
Post a Comment