I don't know much about my new novel yet. I do know that a wannabe comedian who works as an Asisstant Manager on the night shift at a grocery store is approached by Death to go to the underworld and bring back his (Death's) son. Death isn't able to—deaths are determined by committee—and so he asks my protagonist to do it. I have this basic plan and as I write, I discover things all the time. Does Death's son have a mother? I'm not sure. I was thinking of making him (them) non-binary and having reproduction happen in some way that Death could be the mother and father. But then the idea of Death being somehow estranged from the mother is intriguing. Of course the "mother" doesn't have to be female. I don't have to have binary genders. Or even gender at all. Maybe Death could have a partner who was non-binary or male, or else some other thing in the universe that I'm creating. This morning as I was writing, it occured to me that maybe the son died by suicide and that Death is filled with regret as well as the grief he feels for the loss of his son. All these ideas are in the air. Also, I'm trying to figure out what to call my underword. Afterlife. Otherworld. The Beneath. The Thereafter. The Whatafter. Whereafter. If you have any idea post them in the comments section below. I emailed a friend (Craig Conley) who is a lexicographer and master of the arcane. (He wrote a dictionary of one-letter words!!) He wrote me a couple great replies with suggestions, but, though great, none were quite right yet. So do let me know your ideas. In the meantime, here are some brief (and unedited!) passages from what I'm working on.
* * *
What's the difference between a giraffe and a sad life?
You don't have to live a giraffe.
* * *
"How astounding that things are alive. That materials of flesh and bone, blood, chemicals, electricity become life. That they can live.
My dog so profoundly the same as I, possessing life, thought, emotion, movement. At breakfast, he looks at me intently. We connect as living things, yet appear so different to each other through the medusa of our brains.
Birds. Squid. Fish. What is it to have life completely fill such different spaces, such divergent bodies? To have such a life in ocean, in air?
A 300-year-old tortoise, moving slowly over land, through time. We share this thing. Life. Though our time and space, movement and being seem hardly related. Lonesome Georges of our reality.
And then the awareness of not-life, of the materials, of the energy, disentangling. Of writing becoming ink and paper again, separate, other.
A joke. A story. Elements joining together to have some vital life force. Some energy not apparent until made apparent.
Outside of a dog, life is man’s best friend. Except when it isn’t."
* * *
[He writes about Vincent Van Gogh & his brother Lenny]
A joke about sending unsolicited pics of your aura to people. Your femur or uvula.
Would a modern day Van Gogh text severed earlobe pics?
Ok, so not funny but you know what makes me seethe. That song about Van Gogh that says the world wasn’t meant for someone as “beautiful” as him. Nevermind giving the poor guy the right medication, the world should get it together. It wasn’t “meant” for someone like him? Was it “meant” for anything? I know how he feels, but that’s just making something romantic out of people being judgemental and lousy. Maybe it seems like it is the world, like it’s made out of some stuff that doesn’t include you, that it has a bunch of rules, a kind of physics that means you can’t succeed or be happy, but it’s not you and it’s not the world.
My brother Lenny was beautiful, even if he wasn’t a great artist. Being real counts for something. He saw how things could be. He hoped for them. Sometimes, maybe when I’m drunk, when it’s night, when I have my guard down, I think that I sort of am, too. Why the heck not? I know I’m just some shmuck sitting at my desk in a shabby office writing things that aren’t even funny, doing a lot of waiting for life to really get going, but that’s its own kind of being Vincent, too. Maybe I’m a milliVincent or a centiVincent, but there I am, on the Vincent scale. I mean really, who isn’t. Even if they’re only a picaVincent. A nano one.
But this makes Vincent seem special, the most Vincent. Are there people who would be Two Vincents? A Vincent-and-a-half?
Obviously he was a great painter, but more beautiful than anyone else? More special? Maybe he was just really “in tune,” like Lenny was. In tune with what I don’t know.
He knew that there were rules but that not all of them had to be.
It’s the rules that make the exception.
* * *
No comments:
Post a Comment