Standing in front of the ‘new movies’ shelf at the local vid store, the serious writer wondered if watching flicks like “Last Day In Hell”, “Vikings vs. Aliens III” or “The Grand Rapids Sawdust Massacre” would help him understand plot and become a better writer or if they might short-circuit his already overwrought mental machinery.

After some deliberation, he finally settled on an indie called, somewhat obscurely, “Julia, Julienne, Jules And Their Incredibly Indelible Love Affair Between The Sheets Of A Greek Tavern In My Neighbourhood”.

This movie also ran in the local cinema, whose Art Deco exterior was modeled after the first Nanking movie house.

I found this among the papers of the serious writer that were passed to me after his death. I offer it without an agenda, like a pair of well-worn gloves for your dashboard compartment. Do with it as you wish. I think he might have liked for you to read it closely. As always, his writing throws up more questions than answers. Some might call this a condition of modern man. Others call it inferior insight. I call it common.

The serious writer always knew there would be a last story but when the time was near, he felt ill-prepared.

One day, after settling in his favourite chair by the window but turned away from it, he told a visiting friend: “It’s well arranged that you don’t know which of the many will be your last: your last piss, your last time being touched by someone, the last warm cup of coffee in the morning. The last chat with a friend. The last supper. You enjoy all of these in the most present of tenses, carried by the hope that there may be another one, and then another and so on. And since we are an ingeniously lazy and trusting species, we take the routine to be a principle and we shrink it on the occasion of its repeated occurrence without further thought.”

The friend lit a pipe and said: “I think I see where you’re coming from. I understand death is on your mind.”

The serious writer shifted his weight in his chair and looked at the pipe with longing. Having stopped smoking years ago, he now afforded himself only the second hand experience. He made a mental note regarding the loss of certain pleasures over time.

“The older I get”, he said, “the less I appreciate the fact that one of my stories will come round and not leave, (like a hot beverage going entropically from scorching to lukewarm to cold), and then what? Become an epitaph?” He chuckled.

“You know that Koschinsky has begun to write your obituary already, I hear. That’s outstanding”, his friend said and found himself obliged to clarify: “Given Koschinsky’s reputation as a critic these days, of course.”

“I have not only heard it, I suggested it to Koschinsky”, said the serious writer. “I thought: why not take the initiative in final affairs while I can?” He crossed his legs, laid one hand on top of the other, rubbing them so as to feel the knobbly bits.

“I have recently disregarded my bodily needs terribly. Come to think of it, I also have not listened to my inner voice lately. I don’t know why. Perhaps because otherwise I won’t write that last story ― I’m afraid to leave an unfinished opus behind, you know?”, he said and his friend nodded, churning out blueish clouds.

The serious writer said lightly, “I have always been a great fan of the auto-da-fé as a way of maintaining a certain degree of control beyond the grave while at the same time keeping your fans giddy and guessing until Judgement Day: ‘Did he or did he not…?’, ‘What if he had…?’, ‘Could this have been…?’, ‘We wonder if he…’, and so on – it keeps me young I think. But the difficulty with burning your stuff in reference to the possibility of your death is two-fold: you don’t know if you’re wasting your time because you might be alive for another X years; and it makes you think of your own death”.

“It would be a terrible crime to do that. I don’t think your readers or your critics could ever forgive you after your death,” said his friend. He didn’t seem to notice his own tactlessness.

“Well”, said the serious writer, serious again, “as you know, I abhor both waste and thoughts of death. Hence I only carry the idea of an auto-da-fé around with me, together with a small canister of gasoline and a matchbox. Rather like the plan for a certain prayer and a rosary, which I never touch. I don’t know if I fantasise that I might burn not only my work but myself, but I am certainly stocked up just in case.”

The friend shook his head gently, trying to disperse the thought, and waved his hands, or so it seemed to the writer, because the fumes had become so thick now that he was separated from his visitor by a grey wall of smoke. He went on voicing his thoughts aloud, as was his habit even when he was alone.

“The stories I will write before that last one will be as prayerful as anything I have ever penned: the characters will be mild and philosophical, apt to hold life’s whole in appropriate balance, with an even demeanour gracing my own age, like a study of butterflies at the end of their long, ardous journey. These not quite last stories shall, I think, test my very existence by throwing up many questions that had plagued me for a lifetime of serious writing, like the question of whether we determine our fate or are determined by it.”

He heard his friend mumble something across from him and took it as approval to continue.

“One of these stories will be about a man who sat across me once on an underground train: his right arm hung limply as if he’d had a stroke and he looked at me open-eyed and yet guarding his self behind his condition. He had to lurch forward three times (as if performing a secret ritual) in order to shift his centre of mass and get up at all, ignoring me throughout this maneuver and finally smiling – unless it was not a smile but a strained grimace. I wonder: did this man feel that he chose his partial paralysis by making a silent wish between clenched teeth, or by dreaming it in advance? Perhaps he felt that he’d been dealt a bad card, not quite the last one, by some god not merciful, overlooking him, with respect only for the fabric of everything but not this particular man’s happiness?”

The serious writer realised in that moment how the word ‘happiness’ betrayed its own meaning, because in reality it boiled down to mundane things like chicken soup, which he then dressed up as something less plain than farts and farewells. But he was not ready to interrupt himself quite yet and continued:

“Or is this man, let us call him Max (a good, solid, reliable name for this type of man) like me, refusing to take sides on this question of questions, perhaps, again like me, writing for his passage between the Scylla of providence and the Charybdis of randomness? A passage not to anywhere, a time filler, an artful avoidance?”

“You tell me, my friend,“ he invited the other. There was no answer, only the sound of the floor boards creaking.

“Here’s another question that bothers me – no less than the first: how much of us is unique and how much part of a grand collective of souls? When we breathe in and out, do we choose our own rhythm or do we enact an unconscious concert? Do we only imagine that we create our own thoughts but actually just sculpt an identity out of one and the same shared material? Is our whole concept of individuality just nonsense?”

He broke off because he felt exhausted all of a sudden. His ideas, his questions all seemed unclear and somehow impure to him. As if there was a truth behind the words, but the more words he piled upon one another, the less visible was this truth. He put his hands over his face and felt their soft insides now on his temples and the bones around his eye socket. On his cheeks, the palms pressed down on his the beard. He felt himself.

“What a powerful illusion the self is, especially for me, with my oeuvre, my life’s work, which I, in the hubris of the great individualist who also happens to be a snob (a most convenient combination against the power of the collective) trace back to myself: me, me again, me also, me-me, meee – these are only some of the variations on the person at the centre of my consciousness, who is really only a persona and does not contain my soul, though the fingerprints of my soul are certainly all over it.”

He felt himself to be alone. Sometimes, for some people, the Me broke down almost completely, very close to disappearing without dying altogether, he thought and closed his eyes.

He wanted to write another story in this one-of-the-last-stories category about a man, always only called ‘the patient’, who emerged from a car accident as a vegetable, his brain shut down until, after five long years, he suddenly began to respond to questions again and finally awoke, but as a different person. Perhaps his coma had been a form of cocoon, a phase he had to undergo in deep sleep in order to become who he needed to be. Perhaps he wasn’t really asleep but communicated with non-human beings differently throughout those years. Perhaps he forgot all about it and, having rejoined humanity in its customary upright shape, could no longer understand the language of trees and interpret the trembling of the sides of his intensive care bed as he had when comatose – as the thought pattern of Earth itself.

The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.

“But my last story will not be about art or finding myself”, the serious writer said and opened his eyes. The air was clear again but his friend had left and robbed the writer of his audience.

“My last story will be about love”, he said bravely.

(Possibly inspired by the death of J.D. Salinger and David Lodge’s novel “therapy“. Comments on Fictionaut.)

Entry for a contest at Metazen – Image to Text Conversion Experiment. Picture by Metazen – an online metafiction journal edited by Frank Hinton.

The serious writer looks back on a long and distinguished career as an herbologist. Her favourite bush grows in Central Park and is called Noah’s Ark by the residents because of the myriad of animals that it shelters. The serious writer has given a name to every leaf and branch of the Ark, and when autumn comes, her heart slowly withers, pondering decay as the shrub sheds its summer splendour and returns to the raw.

The serious writer lifts his ideas like limp lychees from anywhere and anyone. Anything and anyone crossing his path becomes material. He turns silly stuff into junk and junk into art. The serious writer will defeat his demons and crush them under his ferocious foot purely by the power of observation.

In good company the serious writer uses the cognomen  Watson. In bad company, he’s known as Professor Moriarty, and in haughty company, he appears as the cool icon of logical deduction, Mr Sherlock Holmes.

The serious writer hardly writes. When he does write, he uses a glass quill and fifteen different kinds of ink. He creates without getting his hands dirty, a God in his own house.

At night, the serious writer eats steak and smokes bamboo stalks. He washes the day down with a glass of scotch. His bed is a wet concern at the bottom of an iron lake where he tells himself lies, ambivalence-stricken, looking for true feeling, alone now, a ferruginous plant, watered by the people in his life.

(I’m participating in NaNoWriMo. See also my weekly blog entries at Virtual Writers, Inc. This is an excerpt of an in vitro novel “Bloody Management” only. Unfettered, unedited, but not dispirited. From chapter 6, “Hearth”.)

As she walked through the entrance hall of her Chelsea appartement house, she glanced at herself in the mirror. This was an old movie trick, she realised, and one she cherished: the female lead, whose deeper motives would not become clear until much later in the story, needed to check in with herself, and the viewer needed to check in with her – not through one of those full-face-all-wrinkles-and-pores shots of the head, but instead by following her discreetly, as she, with the same degree of discreetness, glanced at herself in the mirror. She liked what she saw and she didn’t like it at once: a pale face looked at her framed by a black thing frazzled at the temples – this was her hair; the nose seemed to peek out of the dough-white mass like a periscope (perhaps there were little grey-uniformed men hidden behind it, who followed her around); the eyes, green marble-like eyes, were shadowed by too much mascara as if they were looking for an excuse not to shine. She held her head like a bird, slightly forward from the shoulders, at an odd angle, as if she were a bird threatened by extinction. Maybe she was. She felt intensely Napoleonic at this moment, and the mirror with its brown chiseled mahagony frame (what else!) and its glass, which had a foreboding of its coming blindness, underlined that sentiment from which it was only a tiny step towards Hestia’s secretly held, but strongly and boldly defended view that she might be the reincarnated counterdraft to Jane Austen. Jane Austen without the talent for writing, but with the soul of that most sinister sister of all women writers. That Austen had been sinister was the only rational conclusion that could be drawn from her novels: hadn’t she encouraged the females of her time to rebel against social injustice and relinquish a position that women had occupied for hundreds of years? Hestia saw herself as the keeper of the flame, the calm center of the household, the place to which the man, the hunter, could return when the elements in general, and his drive in particular, were beginning to overpower him. She viewed man as the crown of creation and herself as a willing helper and bearer of children, a heroine more like Goethe’s Lotte than Austen’s Lizzy or Emma. She moved on, past the historic magical mirror and, walking upstairs instead of taking the elevator, felt her barrenness constrict her like a tight, unadorned belt. She dreaded the emptiness of her appartement, and she wished she could stay home instead and await the arrival of her prince, no, her king, ready to bring him his slippers, take him by the hand, lead him to a set table and receive, in return, the praise and the adoration befitting a goddess of the hearth.

Gray shallow waters stay with us on summer mornings when Lucky Pierre (an out-of-control puppet built around the fleshly fantasies of novelist Robert Coover) and others shag themselves shackle-free to escape their living conditions. It’s all a bit kinky these days. And at the same time more prudish than ever before. Bare breasts wherever you look while … uh, how to finish this sentence so it sounds true?

―Sometimes I write just to write, said the bearded writer.

―Well that’s ok though isnt it, said his wife who supported him through thick and thin suggesting that the couple wiggled through a variety of physically challenging circumstances. You just need to get the junk out first to get to the jewels beneath, she said.

―OK then I just go ahead and write what comes into my fat head? He asked again, but she was already in her thoughts a busybee by her very nature: she was placing coloured squares of Japan paper on top of canvasses, which does not sound exhausting, but it was because of the infinite number of choices involved.

This is perhaps the very crux of art, where the true artist meets his fate, when wheat separates from chaff – making choices. The true artist will not try to whittle them down in order to reduce his pain. Most of the rest of your life is a slow process of getting to less choices: it’s like losing cutlery in your house  –  finally, you’ve got one fork left and you’re stuck on its end. You might or might not see the famous light at the end of a tunnel which you are supposed to walk towards. (As a child I asked myself: what happens if you don’t do that? What if you simply stopped and waited for someone to beg you or show you the way, or explain to you what’s going on? Or if you went backwards like a rebellious fly flying away from the light.)
But hey, it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings.

―Sweetie how do you do it? he whistled, sweet as pie.

―How do I do what?

―How do you decide which colored square to place where.

―I don’t know, honey, I really don’t know. That’s called composition on the page. How do you decide which word comes next?

He paused for a moment. Considered his process, you might say if you were managerially inclined. He drew a moment’s inspiration from his dirty fingernails, transfixed, using the thumbnail of his left hand to try and clean the nails of the other fingers. It didn’t work, but the answer to her question came anyway:

―It just comes to me. It just flows you know when you press hard enough, he said.

―Sounds like puss to me, she laughed, and tickled him, and he stopped doing whatever he was doing with his nails at the time and dug his chin under her chin giving her a big, sloppy kiss which, for a moment, felt on her skin as if she had collided with an ice cream cone. Good heavens – lovers!

© Finnegan Flawnt (be-mused by @memebee who provided the idea 4 the title)