Behind every great man
there sits a rat.
And behind every great rat,
there's a flea.
Beside the flea there is an encyclopedia.
Every now and then the flea sneezes, looks up,
and flies into action, reorganizing history.
The rat says, "God, I hate irony."
To which the great man replies,
"Now now now, darling, drink your tea."
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Our creative writing group got together every Tuesday night in a little red mansion at the end of the street. We had the room to ourselves for exactly an hour, bridged in as we were between a mindfulness session and an embroidery club. We were, by all standards, a weird collective. There were usually five of us present, but in theory it was an open group and anyone was free to walk in. Us five regulars were nothing if not productive, writing a complete story every week, often quite extensive ones too. I guess it was all standard procedure for such things: we would all take turns reading aloud from our work and then the rest would criticize.
First up tonight was Elizabeth, a tricenarian housewife from the absolute other end of the street. She wrote in a style that suggested book publishing as a trade had collapsed after Jane Austen passed away. Every sentence of hers was delicate, every scene perfectly arranged, the characters developed with exquisite precision through the course of proceedings and all the plot lines converged beautifully at the end. In essence, every week she came up with a variation of Pride and Prejudice. She shuffled up the daughters’ names, reversed some of the roles and threw some sons in the mix, but these were just variables in a set script. Today she had cooked up a family with just a son and daughter, so these could then set each other up with their own friends. After the obligatory courting and dancing, - don’t fret - the good guys and gals won. It was hard to constructively attack Elizabeth’s writing, because it perfectly achieved what it aspired to, but it bored the hell out of the rest of us. Try putting that delicately. As usual, silence ensued.
Next up was Tom. Tom was only twenty-eight – a young age for writers – yet he had already devoted a good ten years of his life on trying to write The Great American Novel. His widescreen narratives co-opted everything he came across, and were a well-nigh perfect counterpart to Elizabeth’s bucolic stories. He never left home without his copy of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Of course, this obsession of his did not fit our format of writing a story a week, so he basically provided us with subsequent chapters of the same storyline. By now, we all knew the characters by heart, because they were the constants connecting the dotted weeks. Today, Smith and Jones (yes, those are the protagonists’ names, I kid you not) were traveling through the South in a vintage Volkswagen van. They might as well have been scaling the Sixties instead of the Interstates, because they were running through all the usual suspects: discussions about Vietnam, rock and roll, public assassinations and how the government broke their heart on a regular basis. Smith and Jones represented opposite sides of both the Mason-Dixon Line and the political spectrum. Smith was from the Lower East Side of New York, and was a man of the future. He was constantly looking forward, embracing the changes floating through the transoms, applauding the civil rights movement. Jones, on the other hand, came from a small Kansas village and was hopelessly stuck in the past. He was weighed down by a false nostalgia for the Old West and the American Dream, for Puritans and top hats. These cultural notions – the canon of norms and values of the South vs. the North - are so ingrained in the American people, that they are hard to shake off. As wildly different as their subject matter was, Tom ultimately suffered from the same problems as Elizabeth. His concepts, while seemingly kaleidoscopic, were so clichéd, they hardly ever caught us by surprise. Furthermore, everything was spelled out, there was no space left for our imagination. There were no provocative silences, no quadruple spaces (to use a phrase coined in Me and Orson Welles). Every character explained his motives in threefold and every sex scene was described in elaborate detail. When Tom closed the book on his tale, we discussed his philosophical musings for a while, but there wasn’t really anything truly remarkable or new in there to ponder about.
Amanda was the third and middle speaker of the evening. I always really liked Amanda’s stories, they were one of the reasons I kept attending. She excelled exactly at the point where Tom failed: being suggestive and spurring the imagination. Today she had a story about a woman with a string of failed relationships, one-night-stands and in-betweens. As a leading quote, she cited Frank O’Hara:
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
It was a perfect quote to draw you in and it fitted the story’s female protagonist well. She was at a psychiatric session describing how every break-up left her understandably all the more dejected, but that she would always bounce back quickly and put herself on the market again. Lately, however, she had been feeling feckless and skeptical and was unable to overcome it. This being a psychiatric session, echoes of Morpheus had to come in at some point. The woman described a recurring anxiety dream: in it, she was at home, and recalled a favorite short story of hers. She felt certain about which collection held it, so she picked the book of the shelf and started flicking through it, yet never found it. In slight panic, she would then check the index, or other short story collections which might contain it, but it was as if the story had never existed. There were variations on this theme: sometimes she was aching for a favorite scene from a movie, only for the scene to be suspiciously absent on viewing, or she would long for her favorite song, pick up the corresponding record and once again found it to be inappreciable. Sometimes whatever she was looking for was there, but it was shielded from her in some way. For instance, she would find the right collection of stories and it would suddenly turn out to be written in Spanish or Portuguese. After the woman was done describing her nightly visions to her psychiatrist, she raised her eyes at him hopefully. At such critical moments was where Amanda shined in comparison to her two predecessors. A myriad of plausible explanations come to mind to explain these anxieties, but all the psychiatrist does is throw up some herrings. The narrator, who was up until then omniscient, suddenly fails to specify whether these herrings are red or not. This cycle of dreams at night and explanatory sessions at day repeats itself a few times, and while the summary advice of the psychiatrist varies in the same way the dreams do, you as a reader are unsure whether there is actual progress involved. The story abruptly ends after one of the dreams and you are left to scramble together the remains and finish the puzzle. This last dream described is a lucid one, where the dreamer knows that if she wants to, she can will the story into being included in the book. She decides not to, because she is afraid that it will not be the story as is but only as she remembers it. Fittingly enough, Elizabeth and Tom would always start questioning Amanda right after she finished, trying to fill in the blanks. She of course kept enigmatically shtum on the subject. I usually kept my interpretations to myself. To me, that was how I liked my stories: ambiguous. If I can read something five times, and get five vastly different experiences out of it, that’s infinitely more rewarding than a clear cut narrative.
Now it was my turn. As supposedly everyone does, I would like to think of myself as an exception. I would like to reify myself as a man not subjected to the limiting writing styles that I sketched for my peers. I would like to say that every one of my stories is an experiment, the scaling of unknown territory, a feat of mapmaking. Sometimes I sincerely think of myself as such a megalomane personage. Most of the time, however, I am quite aware of being subject to the same limitations that hold for everybody else. Nevertheless, I cannot describe my aesthetic to you in the same vein as I did for the others. So I will just describe my story and how it came about. For months now, I have been struggling with notions of perfection. Perhaps I have been reading too much Borges, whose main themes strike me as infinity and flawlessness. Perhaps it is a common feeling for writers, but with every sentence I write, with every plot line I add, with every word even, I feel my story floating further away from perfection. Does that mean the tabula rasa is perfection? Perhaps, yes, but a useless kind of perfection. I like to think of perfection as encompassing all matter. If the natural sciences are looking for a Theory of Everything, surely the literary community should work on a Tale of Everything. If, in a story, every sentence and every thought constitutes a choice by the author, that means that countless possibilities are opted out with every added word. However, this depends as much on the reader as on the writer. Should the reader not understand the consequences of what is put to paper, all roads remain open. Poetry can achieve such a feat, and so can lulling the reader to sleep in some manner, but I opted for another way out: writing the bunk of the story in Dutch, my native language. I hardly ever used it anymore, so it was rusty and elusive even to me, which was all the better for my current project. In my narrative, I posed an epidemic that would cause everyone under its spell to momentarily lapse into Dutch while speaking every now and then. Apart from this, it was a completely uneventful story, a slice of life thing where people just attended to their quotidian chores. Naturally, the Babylonian confusion that arose from the epidemic was bewildering. However, since in this fictional world the disease had been around for ages, everyone had accepted miscommunication as a fact of life and their obeisant acceptance of this was even more bewildering than the former confusion. To be frank, I was quite happy with the results and, after finishing my recital, looked triumphantly around the room. The array of facial expressions ran from annoyed to amused, covering everything in between. Amanda obviously appreciated my unwillingness to commit to my own storylines and her look was mostly one of admiration. I truly felt there and then that I was on the right track with this, finally.
Last but not least was Errol, a longshoreman who grew up in a small town in the Highlands of Scotland. He invariably wrote his stories in Scots, with tinges of Gaelic and local accents added in. It was often hard to follow, as anyone who has ever heard two Scottish people conversing in their own tongue can testify to. The great thing about Errol was his complete lack of pretension. He did not think of himself as a writer but as a storyteller. He had not finished any remarkable education, but made up for this with an abundance of street wisdom. A School of Hard Knocks laureate, you might say. His work was not really fiction in the strict sense, since he would simply tell of what happened around the docks. Today’s story largely mirrored the Marlon Brando feature On the Waterfront. It was a battle of the union workers against the big bosses. Socialism versus capitalism, but without the theoretical framework such stories are normally poured through. Despite the whole story being in an undecipherable dialect – at least to my ears – I got immense enjoyment out of it. There was an obvious sense of good versus bad in it, and a strong attachment of the narrator to the former side. You did not need the semantics and translations to figure that out. The story was a subplot to the morality, really. Emotion trumped everything else. Errol was doing effortlessly what I had been trying to do for ages: keeping the story perfectly open while still pulling at the heartstrings. To my surprise, the others weren’t too impressed with it, forcing me to be extra munificent in my encomium, as if to make up for that.
Just as we were wrapping up for the night, with only five minutes on the clock, a short, stout, weird-looking man walked in the door. He had an eye patch over his right eye and hopped more than he walked. Without addressing us, he sat down at one of the chairs and waited. We all looked at him speechlessly, our supposedly overdeveloped vocabularies failing us. After a minute or so, Errol finally addressed him and asked if he was here for the writing or embroidery event. The man, nodding as if he understood the inquiry perfectly, got a paper from the back pocket of his jeans and started reading aloud. At first I thought he was talking in a foreign language I simply could not recognize. But as some time and many syllables passed, I realized it was just a nonsensical pseudo language. The man did not append any intonation to the sounds, nor did he ever pause. Every word was made up of three open syllables, and every sentence was made up of three words. He read every sentence in the exact same rhythm and cadence, as if he was reciting a shopping list (perhaps he was). I realized with a slight shudder that he was the specter of my wildest dreams. He was where my prose would end up if I pursued my goals of perfection to their very end. It was the literary variant of the most avant-garde modern art, and I had yet to decide whether I loved or hated it. There were no moderate in-between evaluations available, what was asked of me here was an all-or-nothing decision on which the future trajectory of my work depended. It was only when I searched my fellow writers’ eyes for help that I realized the room was empty. Even the mystery man was gone. I walked out into the cold night and inhaled the fresh air. As I looked to my right, I saw the mystery man shuffling away. I contemplated following and questioning him, but then someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Amanda, offering me a nightcap at her place. There was no postponing it any more, I had to decide now. To my right: the impenetrable darkness where the street ends, with somewhere in it an infinitesimal chance at perfection. To my left: possibly the love of my life.
It was only then that I realized how easy the choice was.
It turned out to be a pretty great school reunion after all. In the weeks before, I stubbornly eff why eyed the two friends of high school I was still in contact with that I was not attending and that was all she wrote. But in the end I did get itchy feet, put on my Sunday best and sauntered over to the old schoolyard. And just seeing all those faces again was such a delight! A trip down memory lane, forsooth! To be honest, I never had the best friendships in those days, but time can do so much for your feelings toward people. I was long-time-no-seeing with the best of them, throwing triple exes and ohs around, and generally being more sociable than ever, and I was not the only one. Everyone was all colon dee and no apologies. There were ell oh ells all around and the bracketed b’s flowed like never before. Of course, old grudges are the worst when they finally bubble up and rear their ugly head. When that head is fueled by alcohol, something has to go down at some point. Two men were starting to cause a bit of a fracas when they started discussing their crushes and remembered how they used to always be fighting for the same girl. That girl was Lucy, and she had been the it-girl of our year. Now, they were both claiming they still less-than-threed her and each strongly suggested the other to back off. Of course, Lucy, as girls at that age – or any age for that matter - tend to do, only had eyes for the older boys and ay aff kayed all of us. I had an itsy bitsy crush on her too at some point but never fancied myself in with a shot so I never pursued it and had forgotten about her long ago. To my great surprise, then, she came up to me hoping I could resolve the problem at hand and eff-one her out. After I separated the two brawlers in a particularly gentlemanly manner – I basically told them to turn off their caps lock -, Lucy ohed me as a tee why and then inquired after my skype-name. I was a bit colon ohed by this, and half-expected this to be one of those sick pranks that the beautiful ones tend to play on the not-so-beautiful by pretending to less-than-three them and then control-alt-delete the venture at the very end - to a ringing roar of ell oh ells. By the time I went through this ritual in my head my face had shifted to a colon ess, but I finally decided we were not in puberty anymore, that all was gonna be a-okay, and copy-ceed my skype nickname for her. She seemed sincere about the whole thing so I was kind of on a high from this point on. Everything got a bit low contrast and dimmed brightness towards the end of the night and after I sat staring at the woebegone tennis courts next to the gym hall for a while, I decided to cut my losses and slash-quit the party.
When I got back home my computer was flashing at me and roping me in, and I got on just in time to catch Lucy online. She said she was just signing off, and right when I was about to bid her N-eight I woke up. In a haze I walked into the bathroom for an eff-fiving shower, where I contemplated my dream. When my initial annoyance at signing back into my real life had passed, I wondered what it meant. There was something about Lucy – or the idea of Lucy - that must have been essential to me and my whole adult life, but I couldn’t figure it out there and then. When I got out of the bathroom all soaped and brand new I was shocked to find there was a girl sleeping in my bed. It was Lucy - beautiful, desirable Lucy. And then it hit me: my wife, that’s what she was! Dreams can be deceitful.