Legitimate Query? or "Bah, Humbug!"
Your opinion is
requested. Among the scads of e-mail residing in my inbox this
afternoon I came across a certain item in a maritime business group e-mailer.
Why or how I got on this maritime list is a mystery, but I forward these e-mails
to a pal who might be interested.
Glancing through the mailer
(voracious reader that I am, of course I give the e-mail a quck scan) I
see a poem with a nice little comment attached afterward. I read
the poem, understood the spirit and intent, but something about it made
me think there was a flaw. Somewhere, either in the logic or the
telling of the story, brief though it was. Here, take a look, it
is a short little poem:
Boarding House
The blind man draws his curtains for the night
and goes to bed, leaving a burning light
above the bathroom mirror. Through the wall,
he hears the deaf man walking down the hall
in his squeaky shoes to see if there's a light
under the blind man's door, and all is right.
Ted Kooser from Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985.
Okay,
fine. Nice little poem, warm sentiment. Easily
appreciated. But I realized on second reading what bothered
me. And the fact that it bothered me is even more bothersome!
Here's the rub: the blind man draws his curtains for the night.
WHY? If he's blind, is the sunlight going to bother him?
Well, no, he's left a light on for the deaf man to see. Is it
vanity? If that's the case, well, okay, maybe I grasp it.
And there's more. If the blind man has a fall, or --worse
yet-- drops dead-- the light will remain on, the deaf man (who surely
won't hear the blind man drop) (or, if he dies in his sleep, no one
will hear, for that matter) will remain assured that all is well.
The light is a signal only, actually, that a light has been left
on. There's no on/off new day pattern here. A light left on in
perpetuity might be miselading to the deaf man.
Were this a mystery story or a plot line in some fiction, it would be a
weak link in the story development. Wouldn't it? Ya think?
So am I being too much of a nitpicker? Am I turning tail on a
sweet little poem with such a pleasant, hearwarming
message? Or is my query solid, based on following some
logic? In no way to I seek to demean the poem or the
author. Actually, I appreciate the mood expressed by the poem, and the
implied attitude or narrative aura .
But that curtains thing is like a squeaky wheel, a knife on china,
chalk on a blackboard. The taste of peas. You know, things
that can bother you senselessly, and drive you a little crazy.
So
tell me, is it a worthy query, or am I tipping the scales on the side
of Bah! Humbug!?
Sensible Writing
For a long time I toyed around with writing a murder
mystery. I had an idea for a series of stories (all small novels), a group of
characters, a central place where they'd gather as well as other
secondary locales. The problem was in coming up with motives,
murderers, and the murdered.
Evenutally I solved the problem of developing murderers and their vicitms. But motive
kept evading me, or at least motives and the attendant elements of
mystery that would have made sense with the character ensemble and
environs.
I came to realize that what I really had was a series of stories
relating around a location and the regular denizens of that and some
associated areas. Murders would serve as a unique story line with
a beginning, middle and an end. The real draw, the attractive
aspect of the stories would actually be the associated tales,
foibles, and events relating to the running characters and the
locations . And these characters and locations would be a
continuous, running theme throughout the series of stories.
It also occured to me that I could better flesh out the tales and the
characters by discussing them with people. The larger theme was
loosely based on a place known to me and a bunch of friends and
acquaintances. The characters were to be the regulars at the place, and
there existed a stockpile of incidental characters worthy of
documentation and categorizing by Central Casting .
I always viewed this is as a series of stories that would be the size
of novels. Short novels, page turners, entertaining with a little
mystery. And the more one read the series, the more familiar the
characters would become, and the more I would develop various ones of
them. It was suggested to me that this might make a TV series,
either a sitcom or a weekly murder drama. I rejected this, as the
story tone and character development I foresaw was not on the
order of the neatly packaged thirty or sixty minute series fare on TV.
To me it was a quirkier sort of storytelling, and not perceived with
the formatic sort of structure required to make a series work on
network television.
Why tell you all this? Why post this on the blog? Here's
why: if indeed I do finally get around to completing some
tales in this ongoing series, I want to be not just fact-checked
for palatability and continuity, but also for symbolic elements
that hold no water to people who query such points as:
After all, one does not want to be guilty of doing what --in others-- one finds disturbing . To put it another way, I'd rather not cast the first stone.