Random Things
Random things. It's far too hot to think coherently: that's my excuse anyway. First, mystery and suspense. Rather mystery OR suspense. That's the basic choice of narrative hook for writing successful fiction, or at least a successful novel, according to the 'Teach Yourself' guide by Nigel Watts. 'The question that suspense raises is: what happens next? That of mystery is: how did we get into this mess? Mystery is perhaps the more sophisticated of the two, inviting the reader to solve a tricky puzzle. Suspense is more barefaced: this is how life operates - unexpected things happen and we have to take action.' Good clear advice and a good clear division. But is life's narrative journey really so clear cut?
If we stop to think about it - and much of contemporary life is structured so that we don't have time to stop and think about very much - where we ultimately come from is pretty much a total mystery. Trace life back far enough and no one really knows where it began, the how and the why of it. Much of the time we're not even sure of the reasons why we act and think as we do. Psychoanalysis practises by trying to solve the mystery of our own neuroses. And equally we want to see into the future; we are in suspense about where our lives will go and who and what will come into them. Well we know about death and taxes of course. But what will come between and after - there are still a lot of conflicting and echoing predictions about all that. So arguably we are living in these two states, of mystery and suspense, all the time, whether we know it or not.
This evening we watched a documentary on the Hubble telescope and the fantastic deep space panoramas it has captured and transmitted. It made me realise that those two questions, mystery and suspense, are the stuff of astrophysics and its related sciences too. How was the universe made - and what will happen as it continually expands under the force of what is only known by 'dark energy' - an energy about which we know next to nothing: like realising, one commentator said, for the first time that most of your world is covered by ocean but having no idea what it is and what it does. Again lots of theories and those watching through the focusing lens of Hubble or the like are finding out more of both backstory and narrative forward trajectory. But there's still the capacity to observe and be astonished.
The program showed footage of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 colliding into Jupiter as it did in 1994 (with many quasi-apocalyptic warnings from amateur Cassandras, I seem to remember), and the delight of the assembled astrophysicists as they observed said comet break into bright pieces seemingly linked together by a trail of light - the string of pearls, as this phenomena came to be called. 'We knew that collisions were an integral part of the formation of the universe,' one scientist commented. Indeed. Plenty of metaphorical mileage in that. And magical, focused narrative can be the result of plot and character collisions - the string of pearls, to use what is also a creative writing trope.
But perhaps there's a place beyond all this plot driven stuff also. Because I had a dream about it last night, I started reading crime writer James Ellroy's memoir My Dark Places this evening. It starts off like one of his disturbing hardboiled crime narratives. But it tells of the murder of his own mother in 1958 and its repercussions on his life. It is neither mystery or suspense though it has plenty of elements of both. But throughout, despite the dry, clipped, style, some moments of the most raw poignancy. When Ellroy's mother's body is discovered, her string of pearls had snapped and scattered.'Wire [the detective] noticed some pearls on the road and circled each and every one in chalk'. I found this a distressing detail and one that has stayed with me throughout the evening. As if sometimes in attempting to record and acknowledge the minutiae of death's evidence we are beyond mystery and suspense and approaching pure witness, pure grief.
If we stop to think about it - and much of contemporary life is structured so that we don't have time to stop and think about very much - where we ultimately come from is pretty much a total mystery. Trace life back far enough and no one really knows where it began, the how and the why of it. Much of the time we're not even sure of the reasons why we act and think as we do. Psychoanalysis practises by trying to solve the mystery of our own neuroses. And equally we want to see into the future; we are in suspense about where our lives will go and who and what will come into them. Well we know about death and taxes of course. But what will come between and after - there are still a lot of conflicting and echoing predictions about all that. So arguably we are living in these two states, of mystery and suspense, all the time, whether we know it or not.
This evening we watched a documentary on the Hubble telescope and the fantastic deep space panoramas it has captured and transmitted. It made me realise that those two questions, mystery and suspense, are the stuff of astrophysics and its related sciences too. How was the universe made - and what will happen as it continually expands under the force of what is only known by 'dark energy' - an energy about which we know next to nothing: like realising, one commentator said, for the first time that most of your world is covered by ocean but having no idea what it is and what it does. Again lots of theories and those watching through the focusing lens of Hubble or the like are finding out more of both backstory and narrative forward trajectory. But there's still the capacity to observe and be astonished.
The program showed footage of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 colliding into Jupiter as it did in 1994 (with many quasi-apocalyptic warnings from amateur Cassandras, I seem to remember), and the delight of the assembled astrophysicists as they observed said comet break into bright pieces seemingly linked together by a trail of light - the string of pearls, as this phenomena came to be called. 'We knew that collisions were an integral part of the formation of the universe,' one scientist commented. Indeed. Plenty of metaphorical mileage in that. And magical, focused narrative can be the result of plot and character collisions - the string of pearls, to use what is also a creative writing trope.
But perhaps there's a place beyond all this plot driven stuff also. Because I had a dream about it last night, I started reading crime writer James Ellroy's memoir My Dark Places this evening. It starts off like one of his disturbing hardboiled crime narratives. But it tells of the murder of his own mother in 1958 and its repercussions on his life. It is neither mystery or suspense though it has plenty of elements of both. But throughout, despite the dry, clipped, style, some moments of the most raw poignancy. When Ellroy's mother's body is discovered, her string of pearls had snapped and scattered.'Wire [the detective] noticed some pearls on the road and circled each and every one in chalk'. I found this a distressing detail and one that has stayed with me throughout the evening. As if sometimes in attempting to record and acknowledge the minutiae of death's evidence we are beyond mystery and suspense and approaching pure witness, pure grief.
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