Shut this blog down

The two novels, A Puma in the Tree and A Penny Drops, written over a three year period, show remarkable similarities such that I should revisit several questions as to themes and origins, these now in some conflict with earlier assertions.

Each novel features a heterosexual male around thirty obsessed with reflecting on past and just-passed events or interchanges, thereby convincing himself he has become more aware, maybe enlightened--he thinks so because of "discovered," quasi-touchstone principles he articulates not as well as the first or famous who did so. The distant past does not figure in retrospections except to suggest each "hero" should take a more careful look to see what if anything is really there to deal with, or that figures in who he is now.

The protagonists encounter in the course of their days people, mostly women, who intrigue and interest them, finding in the end that the most human among the women is the logical choice for deeper involvement. They, our heroes, abandon, for the most part, contacts with friends and girlfriends. Each is both predator and predatee and can't decide what or who to blame for acts and impulses they feel. Each suspects hormones, or whatever other physiological chimera to point to as excuse for never-outrageous yet to each extraordinary moments.

Each protagonist is drawn to beauty in people and places but they reveal little of their own attractiveness that others seem to find in them. Each thinks his some measure of sweeter-than-thou kindness, un-realistic openness and restraint, and hyper-protestant earnestness will save him, and the world? but salvation from what they don't seem to know. Each is subject to emotional setbacks, but return to persist in moral-like behavior without religious affiliation or other anchor.

Both characters find themselves in featureless rural towns in the western U.S. as newcomers starting again. They are prone to make observations about people and places that over time must be revised. Although work or career figure into plot progression, the stories are more about working through relationships and discovering each's identity. The importance of friendship and older, more experienced characters figure in both accounts. Eating and drinking at bars and restaurants provide settings for forgetting, avoiding, and superficial connecting. Each describes what he sees in details corresponding to needs and wants, including limitations because of age and stage of life. There is little notice or judgment as to gender or race or other demographic characteristics. Also, there is no violence or unpleasant character that the protagonists need encounter.

The titles for each work are telling in the use of the indefinite pronoun. Thus the tentative nature of things, uncertainties, unknowns pervade life as each character lives it. People somehow struggle through, evidentially revealing their essential goodness, and that is a foundation for acceptance and love to be valued in the end.

Enough already--thus to say in effect the two books are more the same than different. The experiment to create a second novel different from the first has failed, although one story might be more literary than the other (meta-fictional), or more interesting to follow the short journey to its conclusion (testosterone drives choice among three or four mate-material candidates).

This blog has been to sort me out. At the outset, I left that to the reader, should there be one, thinking that if interested:

Here is a bunch of stuff. People are complex. Now, see if you can get a picture of who is talking here. I hope you find in the process something interesting or entertaining or both. Or, please agree or disagree with me.

As evidence for sorting myself out, given that I gave the time and focus to what I have posted thus far, this post could be along the lines of,

Hey, I figured something out, that the so-called novels I was playing with also during this process, artificial things that they are, are just stories from flow states, or the recorded up-wellings from somewhere inside me. End of story and stories. They are as reflections or propaganda, not what I would have had them be, things outside myself to hold up and contemplate. Works of an impersonal nature, not reflections of my deeper self. 

I was wrong.

Writing for no audience proves instructive again. I am okay having come this far, but there is yet something more to be learned, and harder work to be done . . . to create and discover a truth or two without artifice.

In view of this milestone, it will be soon time to shut this blog down and let the next project take me to, please, a different and less navel-gazing posture.

Yet, it's been fun and challenging.

Danny, the true(?) fragment

One has good fortune if in earnest s/he catches refreshment from the font of imagination now and again issuing forth from dream-like states that insist, "Hey this is pretty good. Record and develop it."

This appears to be that from August 2010. Did I write this? if so, why did I abandon it? Seems promising now, including some of the wording. Evocative I would say, and with enough story paths to take with any of the characters named. It is a document called Danny.

Or did I copy it from somewhere and thus not really creative. I don't think so. I had to go through and correct typo-mistakes, signaling to me that I must have been writing and stopped.

If I am in error, enlighten me.

George, Danny's father, was the culprit, but no one except him knew that, although he has long since passed, and not that he had the  intelligence of what he did when he left Danny there. Danny became a foundling, and George made him so by setting him as a babe of ten days in that bush on the dogcart road between upper Sesson and Sesson proper on an early October morning. Once he assured himself that Danny was wrapped tightly against the cool morning air, George plodded off without so much as a kiss or wave good-bye. He disappeared like the morning dew, and no one saw him again, and we don't know what became of him.

George was indeed a plodding sort. A bit slow, some thought. Stubborn, his brother later said, and sufficiently alienated from his young wife and neighbors as to be almost invisible. No one missed him except Mary, at first, that is, for he was her lifeline to the world outside the house. She was a shut-in, as the locals described her. For her it was dread of the world and all she knew about it, which wasn't much.

We can think of George as having made a decision and carrying out his own disappearance and effectively Danny's and leaving others to sort out any complications. But as things were, the complications were few, the consequences great if measure we could.

Just after the disappearances, people in upper Sesson talked, which means they created plausible causes, conjectures really: that George stole Danny and left for another woman and mother; that he killed himself and the boy out of idiocy and desperation, life not being very interesting or tolerable with a wife like Mary; that George's relatives came and whisked him and the boy away deeming the life of a shut-in was contagious and that would be no way for the boys to live out their days. Other stories arose and fell with the wavering interest in things unexplained, but as with other events not fed by a few facts or creative gossip, the disappearance of son and father soon ceased to take up the time of the village gossips; and life returned to near normal, that is to the rhythm of uneventful lives being carried out by rote and resignation.

And why didn't upper Sesson folks take notice when Lara and Johan in Sesson proper began showing off their newborn son? In short, the Sesson's intelligentsia didn't talk, and Lara's claim of hardly showing during her pregnancy, plus Kathy, the midwife's verification of "a spotless delivery" where she did little more than counsel and advise the new parents of what to do in the first days after birth, well, there seemed to be little to notice, less to talk about. The proud parents went from childless to a threesome in a flash and each counted as blessing and a miracle that Danny, now Fitch, had figured in what God had intended by the holy sacrament of matrimony.

His Mother

Mary was always a kind and quiet girl, and when she married the village dolt, few, except her parents, commented. Comment. Seems too benign a word. Mary's parents accepted their daughter's choice of saving and educating her husband, but they never shut up about how stupid it was. It was a comment never far from the nicety of greeting that forever s

Sally was simple.

Mary