.diminished discords (x)
stories, spells and music
true progress comes from small things, and small numbers. have we learned nothing from any story ever told, or from looking around.
.
evil cannot be defeated, only banished. death cannot be banished, only defeated.
.
facing north, the west is to the left. facing south, to the right. westerners need to choose which way to face, and what to be. facing north is choosing freedom, facing south tradition. which is why current left and right are incoherent, and doomed to fail.
these things go well beyond this life and this earth.
they scale up and down and to the sides.
.
my perception is that for most americans jazz might as well be european. like football, or soccer as they call it. except even more boring and pointless and incomprehensible.
.
spelling things out is exactly what it sounds like. to take the spell out of them. i don’t want to do that.
.
nothing actually happens in books. the story is all in your mind as you read them. so it’s like a spell. and how do you cast spells. by saying the right words in the right order. writing fiction is discovering new spells.
.
my new book is taking a while to do right. it’s structurally very… unsound (this word choice will be funny in a moment). by unsound i mean complicated. the idea to do a series of interconnected shorts focused on a single unusual day seemed like a walk in the park (incidentally, there’s a walk in the park chapter). but in fact, it’s proving way more difficult than i imagined.
(the strange structure is thematically relevant, however, so i wouldn’t want to discard it even if i could.)
specifically i have to find creative ways to give context to the people experiencing that one day. and it can’t be the same gimmick in every chapter either. (well it can, but it would be terrible). so anyway, it’s taking a while, mostly because i don’t know how to force it. if it’s not flowing, i know it’s not the right frame and must wait until it’s revealed.
luckily the wacky structure also has its benefits. if i’m having trouble finding the key to one chapter, i move away to another, and often the key to the other one is there. since the chapters are more or less happening simultaneously, i can jump at will.
but it’s a lot of work. and i’m not really all that orderly (i’m trying to avoid the word organize; like all words with ize and izing and ization, it is very very ugly, and unnecessary).
lastly, the overall sensation as i jump around from character to character and setting to setting is one of disorientation (but again, this is thematically relevant).
a few more months of this and i can write a book about madness. there’s always a silver lining.
.
i think composing new music is also occupying a part of my attention and creativity that is necessary also for fiction. (call back to the word unsound). some people see music as storytelling, but for me it’s more like the opposite. the story (the melody) makes sense if it has the correct layers of meaning and feel below (harmony and rhythm). something like that.
.
written language has the added concern of appearance. for me it’s important how the words look on the page to best induce the feeling of listening rather than reading. the shape of the paragraphs is particularly important. empty spaces are breathing space. but my aim is total immersion. hence both the lack of tags and paragraph breaks for dialogue, specifically.
having said that, my paragraphs have become smaller overall. rarely now do they go on for page after page.
.
about lofty ideas and themes in fiction: you can be profound like a secret cave full of treasure, or like a sinkhole. it's not about how deep it is, but about what’s at the bottom.
.
there is beauty in tragedy. not in every tragedy, but in tragedy itself. we can know this intuitively, through feeling. and we seek it in some sense. sad music. sad stories. whatever. i think the fact that we see it, and thus seek it, is that something in us knows there is some kind of hope beyond loss.
.
today’s musical portion is Mingus again. he’s probably my oldest jazz favorite. we go way back, and other than Wayne Shorter he was the only one i listened to in the fifteen years where I sort of set bop aside. when jazz came back into my life, as a result of the Alice book, i listened again to old Mingus favorites, and also new ones. and i was bound to stumble upon an obscure live recording from nineteen fifty nine. it’s been released a few times since then with different names, never to great success. probably because fifty nine was such a fertile year for Mingus, this one gets overlooked.
but not by me. the closing track is called Alice’s Wonderland. as far as i know Mingus never said anything about it. it’s likely that the Alice in the title is Carroll’s one, not mine. or at least Mingus probably thought so. but he’s wrong. the tune is so beautiful and melancholic… it goes much better with my Alice book. he just didn’t know it, because it didn’t exist yet.
so now it is the official theme of my book. i can do this right… just decide it. i guess i can. i need to update the playlist. anyway, if i ever make a movie out of the book, i will force it onto the credits.
enjoy, it’s really beautiful.
