Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Literary Exercise #6--Description

If you ever read Dickens, you'll notice straight off that description is a huge part of his writing style. He delights in bringing to light the most minute detail of existence. Description can be both exposition and imagery--and those two can intermarry and divorce at any point. The interesting thing is, while audiences have lost their taste for longer, descriptive sentences, they have become infatuated with imagery--images in film, media, modern art, and advertising. I can't speak authoritatively about the whole system, but I think that literary imagery was lost (along with poetry). Unfortunately. I don't know how we should reclaim it. I have suspicions that it will have to reflect the images--The Science of Sleep, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dizzying camera movements, rapid scene changes, a sense of beautiful disorientation. We'll see. But until then (or during then), I offer my sixth exercise. May you fall in love with the nouns, verbs, adjectives of imagery--again or for the first time.

Sitting outside on my porch--my writer's porch, my thinking porch, my peaceful porch, it's easy to get reminiscent. I use the same tactic every time...a cigarette, a glass of water, and an inspiron 700m. Water can be subverted by beer, my laptop by a lined notebook, and cigarettes by self-control, but the approach, and result, are always the same. I don't come out here because I want to--because I need to. It's when you don't breathe to survive but to take in the cold, pure draughts atop a 6,000 foot mountain. It's when finding water in a desert becomes second to riding a camel across sun-baked sand deep into the Arabian night. It's when religion stops being a homework assignment and becomes a mystical journey. It's when your parents stop raising you and start living alongside your life.

It's because it's in me. I can't get away from it. My fingers are conduits, my nerves switches, my heart electricity that pumps neurons out to the page. I can't stop. It's part of me. It's living instead of existing. It's talking instead of responding. It's feeling, idealing, revealing, and healing. And it's reeling--for anyone able to cast out the line. I wish you could see it, and pick it up--rub the fine material with your dominant hand, and wrap it around your finger a couple of times. It's in this lighted cigarette, when the heat is white and the lighter an orange bic. It pulls back like a dragon and releases like a cloud. It comes with all the anemities you could ask for--that crackling, popping sound like a boyscout's box-fire, that comfortable position between your fingers a smoothly worn couch, and that glowing embers that points to more than just long cancer--imagination. Give me a riddled body with dying organs and an unstable hand--but give me a heart, and give me a mind. And let me explore the disconnect between the two until they're algamated into my soul. And give me ideas that flow like rivers, or strong, choppy waves in a harbor. A lighthouse to peer into the unknown. A cave to follow down to its roots. A life to lay in suns and moons--a love to bring it close to others. Give me all these things, and watch me try--watch me try to deny my nature for anything else. It cannot be done. It cannot be stopped. It cannot be lost for long...it can only be my long-lost love.

 
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