When David Lowery said, underneath the brim of his kerosene hat, that he went to Athens, and slept in a fountain, it left me wondering for years if he meant Georgia or Greece. Surely both have fountains right? Some more antebellum than others, and sure he mentions Turin and Barcelona, but still, the song reeks of something you’d hear at a run-down honky-tonk or juke joint. I mean, Eurotrash girls come to America! That’s the whole term! Surely they can make it to the South. Surely one can find them there, right? Right?!
Voice can create something totally different out of the facts that are presented. Look at Christopher Walken’s soldering-iron stabbing of the Oxford comma debate. Q.E.D.
Topos is a city I built. Some eight or nine years ago. It was created in the mind of a character, a narrator I built too, around the same time. He sits around a fire that has been burning for a very long time, in a rotted-out barrel, half the the size from the top down of a standard oil drum, burning continuously a street over from the waterfront of a little town that is tinted, and simultaneously gray-scaled.
And he tells stories about this Topos, this place, about its landscape, its people, architecture. He ponders on the fact that the predominate color of this city that exists inside him and above him, this city on a hill, is also a graying shade of blue. In my mind, he looks as much like Pierrot as one could and still look like a normal human being with normal human dress, like someone who would be arrested for an expired performance license. He wears a ring. He could be a saint. He’s also not that hackneyed. Unless he wants to be. He talks about shaman and shamisens and television programs there’s only a faint possibility he’s ever seen. And there’s a better than even chance he even sounds exactly like me, with a touch more whimsicality. He tends to riff more. And you can’t really believe a word he says.
There’s also a little girl. She walks around in tatters with dirty blonde hair, across sands and rubbled streets. She has a bodyguard three times the size of her that’s always smiling at something in the distance, and she carries a book inscribed with flame, pages of glittering, boiling letters, orange and white. It tells the future, that book. She says things that no one of her age or intellect has the right or capacity to say. She doesn’t know about Pierrot and he doesn’t know about her, but she reads and records something very important in that book with a pen that looks like any normal pen. She likes shaved ice. She postulates on the structures of diamonds. And there’s a better than even chance she sounds exactly like me.
And that’s what bothers me.
This is something I have not, to date, been able to develop successfully in my writing. Another’s voice. Maybe I just haven’t written enough. Or enough other voices. Maybe that’s the solution. Maybe that’s hardly a page.
I wonder if it was all of that technical writing. That requirement to stand back from something. To chronicle it factually and nothing else. To have one voice. Most reporters measure in word count. College classes tend to be pages. Weird thing. Hard to adjust to. What’s a page?
Or maybe all of that philosophy. Maybe those things drive toward a cohesive sense of argument, of speech, soliloquy. And that’s not what I want. Not in this endeavor.
Maybe what I need in my writing is less cohesion. More drifting off. Looking in that window over there. Almost getting arrested for looking in that window over there. Who could have known it was a super secret presidential library (that really happened! Not to me, but go look it up; world’s a weird place)? Maybe just less disinterested narrator.
I talked a lot last week about how music gives thematic drive to my writing. Or it tries to. I’m a lousy conduit. I wonder if such a thing would work for a character. For a voice. Maybe I should spend more times describing knives to Iggy Pop.
Maybe it would be enough to just make more effort to understand them as people. Or just watch them be people, instead of conduits. In Gardner’s terms, make an effort to temporarily suppress the “mental constructs through which [I am] peering.” On the few occasions I do remember giving those weird little head creatures the full agency they desire, deserve, they seem to run with the threads rather quickly, in unexpected directions. Rather like real people, I suppose.