Philosophy From Behind the Bars
The main idea for “Darkened Time Stands Still” came after reading Stephen King’s “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” story on which “Shawshank Redemption” movie was based. I watched movie first, years before, and I remember my fascination with the “hole” cells where the protagonist gets locked up. Prior to writing “Darkened” I wrote a short story called “Inmate in Me” about a person in jail, and I believe the storyline for both King’s story and then the movie influenced some of it. By this time I think I am not a big fan of prison theme in movies, but I watched some of them and I read about real jails as well (“Square John” by Webber and McGilvary). I also wrote to a couple of people in Canadian and U.S. jails who I met through Metal Maniacs magazine (R.I.P.) that were metalheads trying to reach out. So I had some idea of what it is like to be in jail, at least just a bit.
However I didn’t know what it was like in solitary confinement and I didn’t know what it was like to be in “hole.” The good kick up my ass to figure that out was given by reading “Rita Heyworth…” King described it really well, especially by providing some history of where the “hole” originated from. That gave me some good atmosphere to get somewhere.
The main character, though, I wasn’t sure what to do with him. I had an idea I am writing about a guy in solitary confinement, perhaps serving his term for something he didn’t do, and he is to be thrown into the hole. That was all I knew. I started writing it while working in the drunk tank in the homeless shelter, night shift work, which in a sense felt like solitary confinement. I stopped writing after I had two pages done, and I didn’t touch the manuscript for almost three years.
After screwing around with other larger stories and finally having “Wolfscent”, the largest one for that time, completed, as well as having “Day Mare” done, I came back to work on the “Darkened.” It was fun making a person who I liked a bit more out of a person who was completely apathetic to everything that made sense and was fun to me. In the middle of the prisoner thoughts this time (compared to “Inmate in Me”, see next!) was the idea I carried out from my philosophy class, the argument of Socrates with his student. In jail. I wrote a paper called “Grey God” on that whole thing and my instructor (hello, Dr. Schuurman!) said it reminded him a lot of Nietzsche ideas. He was right. Huge part of my outlook at the world is cast in the thinking the protagonist goes through.
In the end it turned out to be a good story with dark, claustrophobic atmosphere, with despair and anger so thick it can run through you fingers for hours… and yet there was definitely a light in the end of the tunnel which is the way I prefer most of my stories!
“Inmate in Me” came to life, springing from an assignment I did for the Short Story class in Concordia University College. I tried to take something similar in TKUC where I was still enrolled, but they cancelled it. So I had to go to CUC, and it was probably the best. No familiar faces, students or instructors, and I could thoroughly concentrate on work. I wish we had more of it.
“Inmate” was a hard child to raise, because it was the first try to write under instructions. It was the first time I wrote for fun along with the guidelines of course. I had to write out the small biography of the protagonist, what he likes, what not, and all that, which was a lot of fun. Constructing the whole thing “the way it is supposed to be” was fun too, because it didn’t mess with the story itself, at least at first. And then…
The day we were given the assignment I started to scribble like crazy and had most of the writing figured out: how Samuel came to life of this that he got to jail fro something he certainly did and what he saw the rest of his life to become. It all looked great, each detail shined bright with its importance. When all this came to light it also dawned on me that a lot of it will have to go down the trash, because I had to write a short story, not a novel! Not only I had to perish the whole pre-story, the betrayal, the blood, the care (or lack of one), I also found it hard to fight for each of the words I could use to fit into the right amount. I felt stupid sitting in the computer lab, chopping my story into hacks, saving goods, savings bads, throwing both out…
However in the end I saw it was a good school for me, because after all I was in the short story class and had to do it the way it is supposed to be done. If I ever get to writing the whole story of Samuel Clovenhoof, it will be long and detailed, but that will be a different story. As of now, I am quite OK with the way it came out. In the beginning I didn’t even think of putting another person in, because I thought Sam was quite OK on his own, after all, that was all he wanted. But putting another character in whose personality was completely the opposite, and still the characters understood each other, that made the story shine even brighter. Perhaps, only fans of sociopaths would find the story if I made the “Clovenhoof” story longer and detailed, and everybody else would cling to their pillows and snore. And oh yeah, saying hello to Nietzsche again in the same entry!
to know or not to know?
I was going through my “Completed Stories” folder and found “Knownot” and I wondered for how long I didn’t touch this story. I guess I didn’t open it since I wrote it, and the only other person who read it but me was my counsellor Janet who witnessed me making it from a mess into a sober person who can accomplish something in life. Reading it again was like diving into that time and remembering it the way it was. Sort of a piece of history for me!
Following the previous writing I did on perception, I think “Knownot” is a good story about perception, just from a different angle. The first thing I think when thinking about it is “fantasy.” It is not about dwarves fighting for gold and it doesn’t have dragons in it. It is a story about two modern time people and there is nothing magical in it. Well, maybe there is. Romance always has something magical about it, no? This one was probably the first romance story I wrote and for a long time it was the only one I wrote.
I can say that partially it was written out of desperation because I didn’t see anything working out for me on the romance front. Next to despair were glimpses of insanity, and it found its way in the story. In the end you wonder if it really happened or was it just a fantasy? For many years I wanted my dreams to be real and they were not, and I dreamed awake and there was nothing real about it, and out of that came the story. If you dream something is real, it doesn’t make it true for others, but for you – does it? And does it matter?
The Caroline piece might seem like it was stuck in a crude way, and I’d agree, but it was done for the right reason. I had no better way to describe it. After all, when I was writing this story, I wanted it to be the manifestation of light and warmth for me because I lacked it. The way Caroline fits in lights it better, and that is what I hold on to.
The Angel of Grief, an Angle of Perception
A friend of mine approached me the other day, asking what would I say about how things work out in the world and how people’ perceptions differ toward that. It was not a very ambiguous question, however he had an example he gave me that made it more sense after. Why some good people die on the streets from extreme cold while the bastards sit at home, counting the loads of money they stole. I had not much to say to it, but I realized I had some writing done on that. In the middle of my story “The Sun after the Rain Season” there is talk about “the significant others,” originally a sociological term, but I re-worked it a bit. It was the idea that came to me in conversation with a person who guided me through my recovery, and that is exactly the way I put it into the story because it fitted one hundred percent. I won’t describe it here – go read the story. Since you don’t have it (cause none of my stuff is yet published!) ask me to give it to you. Other than that, I think that everything in life happens in one way and people look at it from the hundreds of different points of view, based on their upbringing, social background, religious/spiritual perspectives, income, race, age, sex, and love or hate for music and literature, among a bunch of other things. I know one elderly lady, chained to the chair by multiple sclerosis, and she would ask “why do good people die of terrible diseases, and the villains hardly catch a cold?!” I don’t know. I can answer the question like “Why do legions of soldiers die in the wars and the politicians keeps having them shipped to slaughter?” – it comes from our indecision to stand against the action or submit to the power. There is something we can do about it, it is possible. But why the wrong are prospering and the right ones suffer, when it all should be completely the opposite… I think that most of the things of this world is in our powers to change, it is the question of how much we want it. There are things that we can’t change, of course, – death and natural cataclysms, for example. But I think my concept of “the significant others”, that I think I came up with partially from reading one of the Ursula le Guin stories, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” explains it to a degree. They are in the bad so that we were in the good. It is cruel and not fair, but that the way life is.
However there is a chance for difference in the thinking. Past weekend I watched a documentary about a group of veterinary doctors and volunteers in Nova Scotia that treat the wounded/injured animals they pick up on the roads or that are delivered by drivers. Those are the creatures, mostly injured by the wrong paths of human activity. They could take them to the forest and let the nature deal with it, like it always does on the principle we call “survival of the fittest.” And yet these guys don’t. They realize that we, humans, are responsible for what we do, and so it is up to us to right the wrongs if we can. Last year we’ve poisoned the Mexican Gulf with the oil by the improper use of the industry that cannot stop by use the last drop of natural resources for profit. But the nature took care of that and cleaned up our mess. We need to take responsibility for other things we do. Humans, it seems, are doomed to screw things up as much, or more, of what we can improve. The world is hurt because of us. If we can built a better world that we had a chance to make, we have to at least mend the misery we’ve unleashed upon it. We can try. Always.
Fight Fear with Fire
I had an idea to write “Cure from Fear” for a while. I think most of its imagery was inspired by the Brothers Grimm tales and perhaps it was at the time I read it as a kid that the idea for the story came. It only came to realization during my time in the U.S. The main inspiration to start and finish and for the work in between was Rush’s third album, Caress of Steel. It was a surprise to find out this record was their least appreciated. For me, one of the long tracks, The Necromancer, had my story in it, if not the plot I imagined it to be, than at least the atmosphere of mystery: the dark forests and fog, the tireless wanderers on the path to fight evil. All of that contributed. I listened to that track perhaps ten times to get in the right mood and have most of the work done.
I was quite happy with the way it turned out (as I am always when I have writings completed, because so many of them don’t make it). My Dad liked it a lot as well. He said it reminded him something from Rilke.
The original story was in Russian and I think it is the best version, because in this case Russian makes it much more poetic. I had many stories written in Russian and they worked fine when I translated them into English, but this piece in particular has much more in it that my English of the time (2001-02) could offer. Perhaps I could try again.
Funny, I wrote another piece at the same time, called “she. he. it.” (title stolen from Zabriskie Point movie I watched at that time just to see Pink Floyd music as soundtrack in action) and that one was a poetic piece as well, but in English. My trying to make it look as good in Russian just didn’t work! 🙂
Postcard story #2
Here is the extended version of what was the assignment in my Distilled Prose class two weeks ago. The assignment was to write a 250 words postcard story. I found the postcard on-line after, it is from “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” post card series. The writing below is 166 words longer that what I wrote in class. Have fun!
Every day I get up at seven a.m. , stretch, take a shower, have a meal of beans from the storage which contents cry out of depletion, take my tools and go to work. These Fall days night surrenders slowly and the narrow streets are hardly lit, but by the time I am out and about for half an hour I can see the surroundings quite well. I can see who is who and what they’re doing. That’s very important. That’s why there are no more night jobs.
Less than fifty years ago people had fun with the subject of the undead. They made movies about them, made records and wrote books about them, dressed up like them for Halloween and Buy Nothing Day and ever created websites, issuing legal proof you were not a zombie. The only thing missing from this awfully stretched out masquerade were zombies. There were none to find. Unless you checked out Haiti.
Now it is different. Haiti is burnt down to the ground and the living dead take more space than the hot blooded humans. They came back from minding their business of being dead to keep us busy.
Nowadays everybody, even a seven year old kid and a housewife on a walker knows how to deal with the walking undead. We know how to spot them out, where to watch out for them, how to mangle them into non-capacity, how to get them down and how to finish them off. In the last five years Texas has ran out of bullets to shoot walking zombies with and we’ve been busy to make our own weapons. We are getting trained every day, polish our zombie-decimation skills, fixing our murder tools, finding the enemies and get rid of them. We still don’t know how is it possible, but there are more of them than us.
Our lives have turned into getting rid of them. Today I woke up thinking about that. I couldn’t shake off that thought for hours. My whole life became focused on one thought in life. I became a zombie. I have turned into something that I’ve sword to annihilate. The only difference from the walking dead is that I don’t hunt for human flesh. Other than that I am them. I don’t do anything but kill creatures and look for food.
Now that I know who I am, what am I to do? Who will finish me off? The dead walking dead? Or the living walking dead?
picture below is retrieved from here
wolfenaerium 