Reedsying and Writing, but no 'Rithmatic: Meditations on Perspective

REEDYSING AND WRITING BUT NO ’RITHMETIC

Meditations on Perspective

It was Monday evening. She must have come across the fields. There she was sitting across the bench from me. It was a late spring evening and it already seemed warm enough to sit outside the pub. The sun was low in the sky and its light was flashing through the trees on the edge of the fields. It was right behind Ruby.

“Tell the story through Quentin”, she said.

It seemed the most natural thing in the world that she should say that. I’d been wrestling with my Faulkner screenplay, the biggest act of hubris so far in my writing career. Sure I spoke of it to other people, it had taken hold of my life, but Ruby? I guess I must have done and why not. She knew my writing better than most.

“There are so many points of view in Absalom.” I said. “The Aunt Rosa, old man Compson…

“But it’s really Quentin’s tale”, Ruby insisted “It’s really his own inner dream carried over from The Sound and the Fury”.

I looked at her. I had been wrestling for long enough with the connection between those great works and here was Ruby encapsulating it all in one cracker of a sentence.

“Combine the two of them in one screenplay”, she said.

What a suggestion. She was way over the top in her estimation of my writing ability, but the idea was dynamite and I would never forget it.

The sun had all but disappeared, just the remnants of a red ball behind the trees. It was growing dark, and Ruby was disappearing before my eyes.

**********************

Writing is mostly preparation. Sometimes I allowed ideas to marinade in my head for months, years even, until they had to come out or grow sour within me. Men too can give birth. But things change as you age. Was I done with original ideas? Did I now have to borrow both character and plot? They gave you a week to write your tales, a very different situation, where you needed to ransack your own library, mix and match, find a few notions and apercus and stitch them together into something apparently new. My tired old brain was full of that sort of stuff. Perspective and point of view had obsessed me since I was a child and there was that other word I was searching for.

Sitting outside a pub was as good a place as any. Drink brought things together. Memories came back like islands from a watery land inside my head. I needed to construct the bridges and the causeways to give the illusion of connection. That was what writing was about. But with four days to go the drinking and the thinking had to end somewhere. Think in drink, but write in the light.

**********************

Tuesday morning was a sunny affair and I forced myself out of bed to partake of it. Getting up was usually the hardest part of the day. Something awful had to happen over the next seventeen hours to rival the horror of getting up, At the moment there was nothing like that on the horizon which was good for the soul, but perhaps not so good for the writer in me. Of course we all have bad times though many have much worse than mine, but I had realised I had to mine the bad bits for material. I was by now sitting in my favourite coffee house and although my thoughts were in free flow they were not germane to the piece I needed to, and indeed wanted to, write. My observational skills had not yet got beyond remarking how a beautiful morning could go so pear-shaped by the afternoon. Why pear-shaped? Oh the number of dead ends a thinking reed has to go through before something worthwhile emerges.

So I concentrated on the word and the phrase, perspective and point of view. While searching for the word beyond them that I could not yet retrieve.

“How ya doing, bruv?”

The guy in the coffee house was bringing me my second. I was sitting outside again. He and another couple of likely lads ran the place, and very well they did at it. There was a board beside me with a selection of moods- good, bad, happy, sad, tired, restless etc and the remedy for all of them was coffee. All except anxiety which needed “decaffeinated”.

“Got something on your mind?”

“Nothing bad”, I replied and he nodded and smiled, satisfied.

I remembered the city of my birth. How it looked from the various approach roads into it. How the twin towers of its pomp, the cathedral and the town hall, looked nearer or further apart depending. Yes depending. Everything depended didn’t it. Most questions could be answered “it depends”. The leadworks too, long gone mostly. Processing the metal mined across the Welsh border by the Grosvenors. The set of chimneys it needed changed order, where they were in the line- depending. I found that quite astonishing as a child. Now they were all gone save for the shot tower which must have had a preservation order on it courtesy of Grosvenor City council.

I came back to the present. Faulkner? No, Old Bill could wait though Quentin Compson fascinated me. He has a plaque by rhe Charles River near Harvard University where he studied. He had drowned in the river. Suicide. Except he hadn’t, not really. But I was the last person to complain about the muddying of fact and fiction particularly given recent events. But for the moment I must concentrate on the Reedsying and Writing Competition. Once upon a time there would have been the A-Rithmetic bit as well. The Three Rs we Brits called it, the fundaments of education though only one of the holy trinity began with that letter. What sort of example was that?

I was beginning to realise that the piece in question was writing itself right here in front of your eyes although you won’t see it for a little while. I finished my second coffee- that was my limit for the day- and prepared to leave. There was a bowl of water on the payment. I think the lads from the café put it out presumably for dog walkers (or rather for their dogs- it would have been too far for them to bend down). But a seagull had appropriated it and my was he thirsty. There was hardly any water left by the time he had finished.

I went home and did a bit of work. What? I’m not that sort of writer- the sort that earns money out of it. In sixty years I’ve earned barely £100, not a particularly impressive annual return. Note the ironic use of the word “particularly”. In the evening I had a drink with Simon in a different pub from the one I'd met Ruby in the night before. There were good reasons for that.

Most people aren’t too interested in writing and I knew I wasn’t going to get much return from Simon on my quandering. That’s probably not a word but writers make things up you may have noticed and that includes words. Simon was having problems with an adoption agency which was a long-running situation. Is displacement a form of perspective? Never mind the games though, this was a time for empathy and I did really sympathise. We writers can get awfully self-centred after the waters have broken and birth is imminent.

I needed to put a notice in the appropriate part of the local rag Gary Portcullis today gave birth to a four page, 1900 word, story. Both father and story are doing well

But I did show Simon a couple of old photographs I had taken some years before while driving around Suffolk. One was clearly from the road and showed a grassy field behind a hedge. In the field there was one pylon. All alone as I told Simon though he could see that for himself. But in fact it wasn’t. Originally (by that I mean 200 yards up the road not 2000 BCE) there were two long lines of convergent pylons but if you got the right place in the road all the others disappeared into one straight line behind it. Follow my leader.

The other picture was taken further up the road and was emptiness save for a distant white spire. The weather had been getting stormy I recalled and I had had some sort of vaguely threatening spiritual moment. “This alone shall I save” said some god.

******************

The next day was Wednesday. I was still a bit rapt on Old Bill from Yoknapatawpha County but less so since I realised that some moneyman was gathering the entire Faulkner oeuvre into his own pot. And if he went after Woody Allen (which he did) he would certainly try and get me by the short and curlies. Displacement of reward I’d call it. I wondered whether Bill ever experienced what I had (and about him if you recall). Thanks, Ruby, a clever gal. But perhaps I could do an essay on the role of the French Architect.

Old Bill Faulkner may not be much read these days and only a small proportion of you Reedsy cats will be familiar with all this. Bill’s just the MacGuffin. So back to the world of perspective and point of view from more accessible sources. Perspective and point of view and… It just came to me that word. I’d been suffering from a bit of constipation. I will say no more on that subject don’t worry, but the word is parallax and it explains all that stuff about pylons and demolished leadworks. I fear I’m going to break a promise I made only two lines back but people particularly women (no I’m not being sexist; I speak only as I find, particularly in TV adverts) spend a lot of time these days talking about bowel function so some of you may be more interested in para-laxatives than parallax

**********************

It’s Thursday and I’m ready to go. Why no ‘rithmatic? After all we Reedysians like most compy junkies work to word counts and I’m in that magic place between minimum and maximum (a bit nearer minimum but I am often a man of few words). Once upon a time- not a new story don’t worry- you had to count the damned things but now we have automated word counts when the Gates of technology, was it, swung open. If so thank you, Bill, the second of that name to appear here.

I was interrupted in my musings by the arrival of Karen. “Just dropping in” she said cheerily. I like Karen so that was fine. A single man, as I was back then, needs good friends. In particular in my view he needs good female friends who will go places where other men fear to tread.

“Coffee?”

“Please, Gal”

The Nescafe Gold Blend jar came out. Gotta be Gold Blend for me. And indeed gotta be Nescafe. Beware supermarket own brands.

“How’s Bill Faulkner this morning?”

“This and that” I shrugged “They can both get in the way. But I’ve solved the point of view problem. Or rather Ruby solved it.”

“Ruby?”. Karen looked both confused and amused.

“Yep”, I said proudly “Ruby. And that’s the first time I’ve ever dreamt of one of my own characters”.