This Friday finds me coughing, doped up on Zithromax and codeine, the chemical results of an absolute refusal to take seriously the creeping mold of old age. Older age. However, it gave me, in return, an evening of rain and coffee that has allowed me to sit down and focus on revising my first story. The rain is actually digital, playing alongside a synthesized keyboard that threatens to lull you to sleep, a melancholy discordia, off just enough to key you in that something is wrong with that rain. The coffee is real. Some of the coffee is also digital. Apparently there’s also a guy lazily flipping a knife up and down in his hand, sitting with his boot propped on a windowsill overlooking the puddles in the street outside, sipping his coffee.
But so, in speaking of coffee, I find it is one of the elements that continuously bubbles up in my story, percolating, and as such, it seemed it should take on more significance as a symbol. It already had a symbolic meaning, but only vaguely, so winnowing it down and using it to underscore specific statements, certain actions and just overall tone should undoubtedly help to give more thematic cohesion. You wouldn’t believe how much time I spent in picking adjectives and verbs and prepositions in this throw-away bit of elaborative paragraph here (just a side note, I suppose; more on that later).
Anyway, symbolic coffee begs the question, “What does the coffee represent?” Well, at its simplest level it’s a drug. It serves the function of escapism and mind alteration. Very slight compared to, say, a fair amount of codeine, but a chemical doing what chemicals do, all the same. Coffee calls together mood states as well as any though, and ironically, at least in my mind, they aren’t ones necessarily in tune with what coffee actually does, mechanically I mean. The moods it conjures are ones, negatively, of tiredness and ennui, or, positively, of meditative contemplation as you stare into the mug and see a dark reflection, distorted by ripples as the cup dances on the counter to the vibrations of passing trains.
You know, the coffee shop in my story was a real building once. In downtown Jonesboro no less. Torn down long before I was born, it doesn’t look anything like the one in the story, with the only thing resembling a patron now being a man sleeping under the overpass that rainbows the shadow of the former structure. It recalls imagery of Jung, but I can’t quite say why. Well, I could, but that’d just be a bit on the nose right now. All the same, this phantom building is the image that’s posted alongside the story on the blog. I should make a point to visit it. The foundation, not the blog.
But ah, yes, I finally got the blog up and running. I do apologize for the delay, but I wanted to do it right, so it took a few calls to my hosting company to get everything smoothed out. I wanted to use my own domain, as I’ve been meaning to put it to good use for a long time, and I can think of none better. I’m still saddling the mechanics of running two Wordpress themes at the same time, but anyway. Toposkoinos.com. It means “common place(.com)” in Greek.
Greek symbolism tends to sneak into my work a lot. Not front and center, not most of the time anyway. It took me a long time to figure out why. Then I realized that comic book tropes sneak into my work a lot. It took me a long time to figure out that too. Maybe I just like ’em. Oh, I do. But of course, again, begging the question here. Greek gods and heroes are very similar to comic book characters. They stand tall,with chins up, as – oh, how would O’Connor put it – grotesqueries of personification. Vainglorious in their surety, but in so many cases encapsulating so perfectly a very specific image nonetheless. I give you Spider-Man. I liked to hear Gardner talk about him this week, even if he only gave him a paltry sentence. Anyone who uses Spider-Man as a referent is alright in my book, even if it’s not in the context that Parker’s normally used, and since it is part of a segue into a conversation of the Greek epic form, Homer, and best plot practices.
This week’s chapter is indeed a forty page trove of best practices (with examples!) They are too myriad to not warrant a second reading. A third. A lot of underscore. The chapter deserves to be committed to memory. And, for what it’s worth, I’ve made efforts to keep some of those ideas front and center as I work through the first story’s draft, particularly the Aristotlean notion of energeia (there goes the Greek symbolism again; philosophy-flavored this time).
And on a tangential note, I’ve begun work on a second story, tentatively titled “If Rutger Hauer had the Power (he’d still die in the rain).” It’s a story about super heroes. And nerds. And crickets. Never have I met crickets so important. Oh, and gorillaz – real imaginary ones, and even a few cartoon ones. Strange really, how all it takes is a few bugs heard over the cord, and a few minutes of Her Name is Yoshimi, and then there it is. The treasure of creation manifested. Shadow vanquished. Persona extant.
Still too on the… eh, who knows?