This Week’s Sentence 2

“I love your passion and drive, even if it is directed towards make-believe sports and war missions.”

This Week’s Sentence 1

In an attempt to keep up with some web-based writing, I’ve decided to choose a particularly powerful sentence every week, occasionally attempting to explain its appeal.

This is the first, from James Joyce’s “The Dead” (Dubliners):
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

The alliteration, repetition, and similar (in syntax and sound) phrasing contribute to the sentence’s poetic quality. The “their” lacks a clear antecedent in the sentence and in the story; in fact, I don’t believe it has an antecedent, but rather “their” refers to “the living and the dead.” This is the last sentence in the story, and it contains the entire story, as great sentences should.

The story is about the deadness in repetition. It’s hard to argue the deadness of this sentence, as it is alive with vibrant prose, but maybe the deadness can be argued by way of a suspect, perhaps inane, aspect in the sentence. I am not around snow often, but I’m sort of incredulous at the thought of this: “he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe.” I’ve never heard snow, nor (from what I understand about snow and cosmology) does snow fall through the universe; well it does, but in an unspecific way. Be it “falling faintly” or “faintly falling,” the sentence is only delaying the word “dead,” which doesn’t matter because it will come, eventually. And the “living” are included with the “dead,” and, indeed in the story, are “The Dead.”

Relation and Relations

My fiance is sending text messages to my phone while I’m in class, and we’re having something of a conversation. She is on campus for her cousin’s dance recital, which is in the Fine Arts Auditorium, and she has vehemently suggested that I attend after class. But my class goes from 1810h-2140h, and the recital starts at 1930h—I didn’t think I’d be able to make any of it. Luckily, there are around 47 acts, or so, to this recital; I can make some of it (which turns out to be most of it) after class, and with more luck still, her cousin doesn’t perform any of her routines (I can’t be sure that this is the right word for what these kids did, or even if it’s the accepted word for what these kids did) until after my class gets out (but that isn’t important here).

The classroom for this particular class is on the second floor of a building that relates to the FAA via an expanse of grass, approximately fifty yards, called (with glib grimness) The Green. I’m on the second floor; my fiance is on the first floor. What is more is that The Green lays on a 10-15 degree grade downward, and once inside the FAA, an aisle-strider would notice another comparable grade (you know, stadium-seating). I’m on the second floor; my fiance is on a much-farther-down first floor. What is more is that we’re staring in opposite directions, being entertained (to different extents) by what is in front of our eyes, which are staring (again) in opposite directions.

[You've got to understand that a recent, domineering strand of thought is that I'll be joined together with this woman in six weeks: one flesh. A fundamental hindrance for me with regards to relationships is a tangible understanding of experience (See: Autistic/Solipsistic)—I can't make total sense of the existence of others' experience. (And this other person, who has other experiences, who experiences experiences differently than I do, is joining me in flesh, which is how we experience physical things) (!).]

Bring yourself back to how my fiance and I are physically related. A straight, immaterial line around 115 yards could probably connect us. But it’d hit our backs first, as we’re back-to-back across this distance, and we’re at very different levels of height, facing different objects of interest. And I haven’t been in a dark FAA for a dance recital; nor have I ever witnessed a dance recital; i.e, I haven’t an idea as to what she’s experiencing. (Though she may have some vague, cerebral vision of what is happening in my classroom, I don’t really know, as I didn’t ask her. In fact, I haven’t brought any of this up to her, and she will most likely choose not to read this.) We’re both having singular experiences. (And I know, that last sentence incited a “Duh!” from you, but just take “singular” loosely, not as literal as normal—apply it to this situation).

But anyways, after the class finishes, I head straight (I say “straight,” but there is an erroneous, extraneous detour that is rather embarrassing) to the dance recital. An early-evening rain soaked the grass through which I tread. But I make it to the FAA, and obey her text of, “walk in the door, right to the right of the concession stand and walk all the way down til you see [my grandma] on your right.” I find them, and sit directly behind my fiance in the row behind their group, which includes my fiance, her mom, her aunt, her grandma, and a cousin.

Her family is here—that is, a lot of people I know are here. An uncanny feeling came fast upon me (it could be attributed to my having worked a 12-hour shift before such a long class). Because of the performers’ talent-level and the performances’ presentation, the recital has an air of television, and the group I joined acts like they were watching television. The situation wasn’t unlike removing us from my future grandmother-in-law’s living room and placing us in this pretty-full auditorium. It is fun, and I am sleepy. It is uncanny.

My sleepiness and bad eyesight, in addition to the incessant pointing of crowd-members to specify the kid they’d come to see to parties who couldn’t make out the children’s faces, provoked this fictionalized scene:

A father or adult or some man [it was important (rather, necessitated by realism) that it was a man] is at a dance recital, in which his daughter or a related child is performing, but he can’t figure out which one is the child he knows. At some point during the performance, he decides on one of the young children who will do, who looks similar enough. If he focuses on the wrong child during the extent of the performance, while thoughts of adoration and enjoyment of his relation encompass his mind, is anything lost? Effectually, he’s been romanced by a mirage. But that’s ok, right?

I thought about this for about half of one of the acts, and it seemed sufficiently significant or inventive for a piece of fiction I’d like to write. Then I gave up, going back to this strangely significant feeling of my own, real situation. I was with the girl I love, and I was happy. But I had to situate myself. I had to figure out why this moment I was in felt so meaningful in itself.

Not only was I let into a heretofore unexperienced experience, but I was able to jump into a place in which my fiance was already. She was there, living; I was elsewhere, living. And then I came into her place, and lived with her. But when I got there, she explained, “You didn’t miss anything. Chloe hasn’t performed yet, and they’ve all pretty much been the same.” That was it. I was able to experience this certain experience with her, but also, I was given access. By her saying that what I was experiencing was similar enough to what had preceded my attendance, I could superimpose what I knew to what I didn’t. This made the recital she viewed without me real, in a tangible way.

Obviously, most people don’t seem to need this sort of entrance, but I did. And the layers of significance erupted after inspection.

Questions and Responses – The First Two

 At the prompting of myself, a great friend sent me some questions of his origination. The hope was that I’d write: I did. And I’m titling these thoughts, originally enough, “Questions and Responses,” but you know that already.

Q: What is the potential for re-purposing or redesigning phrases that used to have a basis in reality, but that reality has faded away? For example, in this e-mail, I can CC or BCC someone. The CC stands for Carbon Copy, but carbon copy machines are long gone. What will this do to language?

R: The potential has been actualized, right? When phrases become re-purposed, they’re stripped of the initial meaning–as the reality in which the phrase was borne has also been stripped from the speaker. A replacement of meaning isn’t necessarily a danger; it just upsets the literal-minded curmudgeon, like myself. My favorite semi-example of this comes from the everyday speech of every cellphone user when one explains how he’ll “text you” later. That’s a slightly diguised noun, acting as a verb. But who cares? As long as points are being made, and thoughts communicated.

However, I do think there is a potential danger with a correlative problem. Though I’ve never read 1984, I know of Newspeak–defined here by Wikipedia: “the deliberately impoverished language promoted by state.” Media saturation has purged our speech of nuanced language, and with the extraction comes the loss of an ability to articulate big ideas. There is also a transference of meaning (of which your question spoke) or an overall reductive revision of our language: the vocabulary is shrinking, but ideas are not, leaving less words to bear more meaning. In an attempt to explain, I’ll cite the old joke/observation of the word “cool”: this word, in a not insignificant amount of speakers’ vocabularies, has been infused with every bit of positive meaning from complete indifference to the infinity of goodness (only vocal inflections–or worse, exclamation points– can be relied on for a somewhat nuanced meaning). With all of us audience to the same language–the language spoken by our televisions and radios and every other medium of communication–we forfeit words as they become antiquated by non-use. This is what makes 19th-Century novels or Faulkner difficult to read. There is a loss of words; I just hope we aren’t in turn losing ideas.

Q: Describe a super power that no one has ever had.

R: Super. Powerful. Singular. Incomparable.

This is My Place, Where I Belong and Wish to Stay

“It’s uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there.” – Their Eyes Were Watching God

“It was the longest trek Milkman had ever made in his life….Everybody kept changing right in front of him….If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” – Song of Solomon

“How can one discover truth I thought and that thought led me nowhere. No one would tell me the truth.” – Wide Sargasso Sea

A story can take a reader to a place. But if Janie’s telling of her story taught us anything, it is that the ear and eye must be attentive—and like Kumba showed, they must also be open. But what must the story do to initiate the reader into a place? That story must be honest about the place, presenting it truthfully. With an attentive, willing-to-change individual and an honest story, a new place comes, an elusive mind-space—a place we’ve learned to call “the bush.” Within may honest folk wrestle with the truth. Within may Kumba, with her beautifully wide eyes and mind, not pass judgment but rather seek understanding. Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God and the nameless narrator of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man exhibit story as a medium of truth, a harbor for the bush. With them, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury demonstrates a powerful way to construct truth by perspective, the only real way. And the experiences of Milkman in Song of Solomon and the man in Wide Sargasso Sea stride in rhythm with Faulkner’s story to show the individual how he must approach the place in question.

Janie’s telling of her story in Their Eyes Were Watching God serves as a model construction for the elements of how movement into the place works. If Janie wasn’t honest with herself, she could not be honest in her telling. And if her telling wasn’t honest, the story wouldn’t have the effect it does to the reader. The most important part of Janie’s telling is the frame that Hurston gives it: an open-eared, open-hearted friend. The hate and blindness of the other townsfolk spotlight the already radiant kindness of Pheoby. She even points out the difference between herself and the others: “An envious heart makes a treacherous ear. They done ‘heard’ ’bout you just what they hope done happened” (Hurston 5). This truth governs storytelling. If a listener isn’t hearing what the speaker is saying right now because he has already made up his mind, or some other selfish reason, the story is doing nothing; it is like an unread book, dead and lifeless until a reader reads, until the text is attended. Pheoby serves as both a reason for Janie to tell her story and a hopeful reflection of or guide for the reader. It is as if Hurston is telling us, “Before this woman shares her story, you must love her, forget the rags she is wearing, and listen with every ounce of attention you have to every single word she utters.” Living stories rely on active listeners, those willing to attend the story, to let it live again—now, perpetually—in themselves.

James Weldon Johnson presents a real place in his The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. It’s a space for the circled-around Negro Question to be thought about in truth. Johnson develops the space in story, and the story cannot be honest without all of its most dangerous and complicated parts, which are illumined by images and scenes from the nameless narrator’s tale: “He gives his story, and this story, with its gushing throat, its ‘eyes bulging from their sockets,’ its ‘mystery to the whites,’ and ‘the ivory whiteness of [his] skin,’ becomes his best answer—the only answer he knows—to the question of the Negro, even in all of its inconceivable complexity” (Sowers). Navigating both the white and black sides of the question provides a thread of honesty that strings the scenes in the novel together. Also, Johnson gives voice to opposers of equal right, lynchers, intellectual blacks, unintellectual blacks, hispanics, and the rich and poor. The Negro Question is approached from all sides and serves as a base for all of the action of the story to find itself.

Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury shares another side of the responsibility of the storytelling. In this text, for the story to be a bed for truth, it rests on perspective. The story occurs inside four different narratives that can only circle the truth, for Faulkner seems to agree with the notion that the truth cannot be spoken or held in words: “It began with the picture of the little girl’s muddy drawers, climbing that tree to look in the parlor window with her brothers that didn’t have the courage to climb the tree waiting to see what she saw. And I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section One. I tried with another brother and that wasn’t enough. That was Section Two. I tried the third brother, because Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else’s eyes, I thought. And that failed and I tried myself—the fourth section—to tell what happened, and I still failed” (Faulkner 234-235). There is much more to this quotation than the evident fact that language cannot hold life or, as Faulkner seems to assert, that tellings and retellings (limited to a number) cannot do their desired work. He said that even after the second telling, the image was still too much outside of the those tellings, that he had to tell more and again. His choosing of different perspectives is key—“to see her through somebody else’s eyes.” Faulkner is joining the other artists with his take on modern art. He’s trying to get a truth to his readers by allowing them to read the story from all sides. Painters around this time were trying to show different perspectives on one surface. It is a stretching of the medium. Imagine seeing a picture of the earth from space: all of the continents cannot be shown; there are imperative parts left out. Faulkner tries to circumvent this.

Both critics and Faulkner seem to agree that the real story in the novel is about Caddy, but she only speaks through others’ narratives. And there, her words and actions are framed and reflected by the perspective of the narrator. Ostensibly, the reader must receive the character and relation of the characters surrounding Caddy to receive Caddy. Faulkner’s choosing to speak from her brothers’ points-of-view is monumental because of their characters. The first is an idiot who confounds the past and present. The second is an eccentric, intelligent, neurotic obsessive, who has developed a harmfully incestuous desire for Caddy. The third is a misogynistic, selfish brat. And the fourth is a present-tense third-person narrator who speaks years after Caddy has left and the family refuses to speak her name. Because of the brothers’ memories and the present-tense narration, the text develops a full timeline of Caddy. But time and action are not the primary factors in the development of Caddy; that is left to how the character is seen, and that rests on these disparate perspectives. Faulkner’s quest to give the image most perfectly doesn’t stop with the four sectioned perspectives. Within the first two, because of the characters’ idiosyncracies, the text zooms into and travels through the minds of Benjy and Quentin. The shifts signify themselves with textual alterations (in the form of italics or punctuational differences). Both Benjy and Quentin interact with the past—and this past is built and depends on Caddy—in different ways based on their characters, allowing for associations between people, images, and events (Benjy), and also conversations that might be fictitious or wishfully stretched (Quentin).

The hoops through which Faulkner’s text forces the reader to jump becomes truth. Entry into the Compson world must come before entry into Caddy’s story. Faulkner initiates the reader into the world by starting with an errant, unconventional narrator (Benjy cannot even speak). Placing the reader there, in the middle of the bush, demands attention and awareness or else the story won’t develop. The story is there—it is always there—but it won’t spring forth without an open-eared, open-hearted reader. Faulkner understands this. To overcome his thought that mere words cannot hold truth but only maybe talk around it, he forces a conversation; the text forces a conversation between itself and its reader. And out of the conversation comes truth.

Edna Ferber said, “A closed mind is a dying mind.” This truth strings our initiatory tales together. The man in Wide Sargasso Sea serves as the antithesis of how one should approach newness and difference and truth. He is like the townsfolk who have already “heard” Janie’s story. Their minds are shut to a new story, which is detrimental to themselves firstly but then the surrounding peoples also. The Compson’s are not unlike this, with the mother’s unwillingness to accept a view of the world that isn’t her own. Benjy is the embodiment of the ill effects and cyclical dangers of an incest of ideas. When a solitary viewpoint constantly breeds itself by the constraints of “common sense” and power or authority, the final product will be close-minded and ill-fit for anything resembling progress. To keep with the same ideas, ignoring true seeing will produce an invalid—in the case of Benjy, a man-child who can do nothing but moan for a loss that he can’t even specify.

The man comes from the position of authority because he is from the land of the colonizing force. Before placing a foot on the land, he already understands these people to be under himself. Rhys forces the man’s close-mindedness on the reader with a reflective/reflexive accusation on Antoinette by the man: “She often questioned me about England and listened attentively to my answers, but I was certain that nothing I said made much difference. Her mind was already made up. Some romantic novel….Reality might disconcert her, bewilder her, hurt her, but it would not be reality….Her fixed ideas would never change” (Rhys 94). This all can be attributed to the man, but he cannot even see it. What little self-awareness it would take for him to see! The man cannot change if his ideas do not, and fear of the different, the other, wear him down. He says, “I fear that this place is my enemy and on your side” (Rhys 129). To regain a sense of power or authority in this place, he resorts to naming things what he likes (To get our bearings on a disconcerting place, it may be instinctive that we would do this. The bull-king from “Bregantino Bregantin” comes to mind. It is an easy, inward way to assert failing power.) The pushed image of him doing this is changing his wife’s name from the beautiful Antoinette to the hideous Bertha. “Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into something else, calling me by another name” (Rhys 147). Assuming power over just one person would make him comfortable in this feared place. The man takes Antoinette back to England, where she sets fire to the house and jumps to her death from a window. With its punishing end for the man—he is maimed and blinded in the fire—the arc of Wide Sargasso Sea can be seen as a moral tale from one angle: if one doesn’t try to see or use his eyes correctly, they will be taken from him.

The man rejects the place and fails, but Milkman’s story ends with a beautiful surrender. He is told stories about his history from his father and aunt, but they never do their work until he goes there, like Janie says. The stories he is told are riddled with half-truths, mixed-truths, untruths and truth because they are from singular perspectives. He must find the real truth of his history; he must go. Hearing the story in the place makes a difference for Milkman: “Milkman felt a glow listening to a story come from this man that he’d heard many times before but only half listened to. Or maybe it was being there in the place where it happened that made it seem so real” (Morrison 231). Morrison hits on both truths here. Milkman must attend the story, and he must also be in the space to experience it. His car breaks down. He finds that a car won’t get him to where he needs to go. A shedding happens when Milkman enters the place.

Entering into the place isn’t enough to get the story. Milkman goes and is met with troubles, a fight in Solomon’s General Store and a failed car. His shell of guarded, city habits must be busted. He doesn’t look at the men in the store; thinking that he already knows who they are by a generality or stereotype, he doesn’t attend these men. That gives him the fight. But he makes up and, to hunt with the men, enters a real bush, of blackness and mystery and something he’s never experienced. “If he was to grow accustomed to the dark, he would have to look at what it was possible to see” (Morrison 273). Milkman runs through the wood, a physical symbol of the thinking one must do. In the connection between the men and their hunting dogs, Milkman feels the connection of his people, ones who will claim him, and maybe all people. “It was all language. An extension of the click people made in their cheeks back home when they wanted a dog to follow them. No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down” (Morrison 278). And there connection to the place is strongly sensed by Milkman as well: “He found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down down down into the rock and soil” (Morrison 281). Milkman is intuiting a oneness across all things. There is a connection of all men in a deep history, and Milkman is sensing this by searching for his own unique history. The farther back one goes, he’d find a connection with every person he’s ever met, those he hates and those he loves. We are all one in a history, but Milkman finds pride in his recent history: the story of the slave who flew back to Africa after fathering all those kids. Because he’s told by Susan Byrd, “It’s a sad thing, Mr. Macon, when you’re left without any people to claim you,” another moment of unveiling and joy comes when Milkman finally hears that the kids are singing about his people (Morrison 291).

It seems easy: have a good, honest story and an attentive reader or listener. But why would anyone attend a story, volunteering a change in themselves? And just because we happened to read incredible books doesn’t mean that every book contains a true story. People are content today. The stories that are in books are left there because they take work and patience to unearth. Wrestling can be avoided because there are other things that dominate our time. It’s easy to say that what we need is attention and willingness to listen, but where does that come from? Milkman found it in a self-empowering story, but it’s hard to say whether or not pride was the reason for his excitement. I’m generally one to think that pride can do nothing but wrong. But Milkman had a familial pride that we preach and validate in America. Maybe that isn’t so bad? I think anyone can latch onto a story that empowers them in a history of which they are no doubt a part. Opening eyes is a tough thing. But maybe it isn’t the work of us, rather the work of the story.

As ? Lay Dying

What follows is an answer to the question, “What does the title As I Lay Dying mean for Faulkner’s novel?” The question of titles is fun and sometimes fruitful, so I ask myself. Knowing the novel isn’t imperative to join in the discussion, because ultimately, this essay is only about life and death. And we all have experiential knowledge of both, maybe.

Before the textual beginning of the narrative, Addie has already been dying for ten days (she may argue that she’s always been dying) in her bed. In those ten days before her death and the eight days after, what is the difference? The family is in her service while she’s in bed: Dewey Dell with the fan, Cash with the coffin. And when she’s on the journey to Jefferson, the family is still ostensibly focused on serving Addie’s wish of burial.

Furthermore, what is the difference between how the Bundren’s are “living” and what will become after they pass? There can be no death without life, and I am not sure that Darl or Addie would claim that the family is living. Of course, this calls into question the meaning of the word “life”–and the text, particularly Addie, is concerned with the worth of words. If nothing is being done, if there is no progress, isn’t the family just lying in wait, in a static condition that a physical death may not effect. All of the kids serve their family in various ways; they are insulated in a way similar to Mokketubbe. And Anse does what he can, peaking with maiming his oldest son, to constrain his family to his own desires.

If there is no progress in what you call life, is there a point of living? I think this question is a contributor to Darl’s madness. If life means only a changing of scenes that all produce pain, what’s the point? And if everyone you come into contact with can’t see through the insignificance of their actions, the triviality of their plans and words (like “love”) and the implacable human situation, how does one reconcile his own “life”?

Rewilding UNF

Our mascot is the osprey, presumably because the bird of prey status may pervade the university’s athletic endeavors. Whatever the reason, it only seems natural. Animal mascots are everywhere: schools, sports teams, companies, etc. I am ignorant to any ties the school or land may have to the actual animal osprey as I am only aware of the geese on campus. The campus also has a couple of ponds that hold various fish and turtles. Most of the trees I can think of have been implanted with regard to aesthetic desire. We have sidewalks that go through the natural flora (which surely must hold fauna), but there is always yellow tape surrounding man-made burrows for pipes to lay or drying cement with steel and plastic flags marking the business of someone else, of progress, of construction. I think it’s only repulsive (and only slightly still) when I see a trapped lizard in the cement or a frog sharing inch-deep water with a soda can. The campus has sufficient areas for disposing of unwanted plastics and such, but we’d rather get it out of our hands as soon as we’re done with it. And so, it ends up next to our feet, kicked around, at the base of a tree, lodged in an osprey’s throat. The argument that arises is that we aren’t wild. At least not in the way we consume, not with all this plastic, all this synthetic material that discolors, misshapes, harms, and ruins the whole thing (the word environment leaves us–the talkers–out, and this [expletive] is certainly hurting my body). People choose to be ignorant, and they forever will. Regardless of this, I do not hate them and I will not stop speaking what I think can help. If science has ever shown me anything, it has illustrated that the power of even the smallest thing can be unimaginably immense. Or maybe history taught me that. Yeah, I think it was history, and whatever it was that happened in response to Pearl Harbor.

Versus Text

Text is inclusive. It cannot be without a reader. This separates books from movies and forms of music to which we unceasingly listen. Movies and music are two of my favorite things, by the way.

But books and text altogether contain truer art, in the way I think of the thing right now. Also, paintings and other static visual art forms (architecture, photography, etc.) share with text the beauty of the participant.

I live by pressing “play.” Well…In reality, I don’t even press “play” anymore; I only must turn the players “on.” I turn my truck on, and the stereo starts playing music. I turn my television on, and a movie or show plays onscreen. And my attention wanes. It wavers. I look at other cars or the road while the music is ignored. I look at my phone or I write on the computer while this movie gets played. In its presentation, I (the listener; the viewer) am given the power to ignore, to absent the art.

Books disallow this. A reader must be active; if he isn’t, the text doesn’t exist. Sure, you can listlessly leaf through a book and find yourself at the end, even with a sense of accomplishment. But that text didn’t speak to you if you didn’t engage.

Reading makes you engage. It makes you attentive. (And you don’t have to look too far down the postings to see what the word “attend” means to me.)

You cannot open a book and halfway pay attention or let it lay open while you receive some here and there. Books don’t play. With audiobooks, this is now somewhat possible. But text is text, and it isn’t made to miss.

I is for Interface

This is a paper I wrote for an American Fiction class. In an easy way, I can display some current thoughts on fictions. The books referenced are The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, White Noise by Don Delillo & Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger.

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You don’t know about you, without you have read a book by the name of…. You are a fiction that has all but lost its original sense—or trace—of self. Your fiction is your key to survival; the hero, the good guy, always wins. Dumbing yourself down to the third-person and denying awareness of self allows you to operate in this world of third-persons; you are everyone else, reduced to a few qualities. You act like a person. However, becoming aware of the fictive quality of this egotistical expanse you call life might kill you because you can’t reconcile the reality of death. So where do you go to find out who you are? You take stock in the narratives supplied by books and people you trust. If a narrative starts to fall apart, you look for a new one—anywhere but in. Everything you know has some sort of story, and stories can be reread; you think they never end. But what if you start taking what I, another blank space with black letters, am saying seriously? Isn’t that just succumbing to this narrative?

Living third-person is a constant act, a constant setting up of props. About Denise’s green visor, Murray says, “It’s her interface with the world” (White Noise 37). This is the literal representation of the things you do to live in this world—the fallacies that render that pronoun “I” you use to refer to yourself—Jack Gladney’s dark glasses and robe giving him the proper prestige for a professor. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn plays with this idea of acting as well. Mrs. Judith Loftus accuses Huck of doing a bad job enacting a young girl; she says, “You do a girl tolerable poor” (70). Also, Huck acts as a member of the culture with the infamous “No’m. Killed a nigger” (230). This is the same boy who just decided to do “wrong” and help Jim; he isn’t being himself. In the narrative, he must act within culture—to fool them. But just a little later Huck falls right back into the fold under the spell of Tom Sawyer, who is living his own fiction supplied by what is “in the books.” The mischief Sawyer invokes becomes his own little interface with which plays his part in his fictional world.

Living fictively demands that the story be kept alive; if it isn’t, you aren’t. The man in The Road constantly peddles this narrative of “the good guys” to the boy. They keep this narrative going while this destitute landscape surrounds them. The fiction keeps them alive. “Stories are supposed to be happy” (268). McCarthy forces the reader to see the arbitrary naming of things as good. It’s a meaningless title really, but the man depends on telling himself and his son the narrative to get through an unacceptable, real situation. Jack Gladney illustrates the same need to resuscitate a fiction, even attempting to appropriate a new fiction that might fit better as reality approaches him. Upon being exposed to Nyodene D, he’s told, “You are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that” (141). He then assumes he’s dying, and that becomes his new fiction. That becomes the thing that brings him prestige now, his near-deathness. “We kept inventing hope,” he narrates (147). And he does exactly that through the narrative; he must to stay alive. Once your life is a fiction, it must remain that way. You sentence yourself to living falsely, and as reality—in death—approaches, you will grasp for anything that can be reassembled into a fiction that means you’ll live. The good guys always win.

Understanding that you’re fake faults the entire world. You see everyone else in their fakery, and you will hate it; ask Franny. She can’t stand the way people are living their little fake worlds, making everything about them. And the worse thing is that she sees that same faculty inside herself, blaming her ego. Zooey laments this: “’God damn it,’ he said, ‘there are nice things in the world—and I mean nice things. We’re all such morons to get so sidetracked. Always, always, always referring every goddam thing that happens right back to our lousy little egos’” (152).

Understanding this fictive nature of man won’t help discerning yourself. That’s the last, unfortunate truth. Not even Zooey was exempt. Directly following the above passage, the next page accuses his hesitations as specious, “the way the other children on the program did” (153). Zooey cannot even make sense of himself—neither could Seymour. “For all I know, I may be a little jealous” (159). Zooey couldn’t tell what he was feeling. Maybe it takes practice, or maybe it is unknowable. Either way, it takes something more than understanding the secret. You will tell yourself a lie to get through life. You’re killing yourself, and you can’t help it. If you think you’re outside of this quality, you’re doing it again—thinking you’re somehow better than the others. There is no winning here. You are a lie. “There is no God and we are his prophets.”

Before You

Before you, I didn’t know me. In fact, you and I make us. And half of us is me. I couldn’t have known us, nor myself, before you. Before you, there was no math. Not the way we learned or understand it.

Before you, you tell yourself, there were no fights. You think: they were happy, they’d be better off without you. But what you don’t know is that they stayed together for you—and that they’ll be together forever. Because of you.

Before you, Robert told me not to be scared. He meant for you. Before you, I never knew what to expect. I know now, because of you, that expectations are just an invisible line I make for you to crawl over. You’re beautiful, and I won’t be scared for your coming brother.

Before you, there was no happiness. Yeah, your parents lived in a different house, but that house doesn’t have a life. They don’t, without you.

Before you, there was no language. There was no Theresa. Your name didn’t exist. Not the way your mother says it. Not the images she sees in her mind while the sounds of your name play out of her mouth—the music you two make.