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🦋 Archæology
Below the fold, something that might become a first paragraph of a longer piece. I'm sort of wondering if it's worth pursuing; if you have any reaction to the piece I would be interested to know what it is. I'll post a comment a bit later concerning where I'm thinking about going with it; my hope is that its rhythm will grab the reader (or a particular few readers) and make him/her/them want to come along wherever I am going with it.
 Waterworks
And here you see the mossy, crumbling pilcrows which some ancient, some too primitive civil servant tried to use to tame the torrent of this mighty stream’s cascade, to irrigate his country’s crops, perhaps, perhaps to keep his capital from flooding. One could climb out right here along the ridge, above the waters, rushing waters, but I frankly don’t advise it. The rock is slippery, the current treacherous, long since breached these lonely linebreaks, dashes, colons, marks successive generations used as all in vain they tried to save the rusty remnants of their culture, graveyards, crypts their fathers labored to erect, their ignominious remains all washed away into the void they tried to bracket off to still this flow of raging turbid froth and by the time we find historic record so much has been lost they’re really countless the millennia this flood has wiped away. We’ll never learn their names, these heroes, those who first laid in the grooves of language, grammar, channelled fluid shapeless fury, sorrow, ecstasy to give us meaning, give us truth and beauty, sarcasm and lies. Quite right, a good point sir. Humor is indeed grief’s daughter, buried with this history are laughter, joy and tears uncounted, unnarrated, unrecorded, darkness shuts the door and reason crumples lifeless, still, it crumples helpless to the floor, will never rise, its power smothered by the tons of dirt and clay and water, seismic, crashing doom. The names are lost, we worship them unnamed and unremembered, in the shadows of our legends where our quiet psyches grow.
posted evening of Wednesday, May 11th, 2011
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It grabs me.
posted evening of May 11th, 2011 by Barbara Soutar
Thanks, Barbara. I want to try and lay out a bit of where I am hoping to go with this.
The main thing is the rhythm of the piece -- I've been veering towards this rhythm in some of the songwriting I've been doing, this might be the most sustained example of it I've written to date. I really like the sound of it. I wonder whether I could sustain it for a whole story, and whether it would keep sounding good.
I'm trying to communicate a sense of the brute current of proto-language tamed and civilized over the course of the ages -- this is an image I am sort of lifting from Jaynes though the fit is not exact -- turned into narration and consciousness. And the idea is that prehistoric cultures are washed away by the torrent of untamed language -- I am using punctuation and grammar to stand in for the conversion of proto-language to a vehicle for civilisation and consciousness and the inspiration for this comes largely from Keith Houston's blog.
I am going to try to segue from this opening in the tour guide's voice into an actual narrated/imagined story of the pre-historic civilization beneath the reader's feet. This will likely be an adaptation of a Greek legend but how I am going to do that is going to take a lot of meditation. I am sort of committed to having the characters of the story not have names (the idea being that names are one of the key characteristics of verbal civilization). One possibility is to have them be Trojan war soldiers who are not any of Homer's named characters. (Ooh! Or how about, an attendant maid to Queen Jocasta?)
posted evening of May 11th, 2011 by Jeremy
"in the shadows of our legends where our quiet psyches grow" is kind of a throw-away construction, I needed something that scanned and I'm not sure how it works semantically. What I would like to get at here -- the "shadows of our legends" -- is that the legends occur in spotlight, but the context in which they take place is the nurturing soil for our consciousness. "quiet" has no meaning here and probably should be some other word, it's present for metric value.
Also: not totally sure about the tour guide's voice -- he might be unnecessarily obnoxious/condescending in points. The idea of him being a tour guide allows me to say up front what I'm writing about, but there is plenty of room for that to go wrong.
posted evening of May 11th, 2011 by Jeremy
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