What will we do once we are used to this weather? Of course it will change. This morning if I stood in the shadows I could see motes of fireweed fluff floating in the sun like fairy dust. The light was so clear on turning leaves it was like that moment after a first drink on a really happy occasion. The world sparkles.
Working on new writing projects. New poems and the new book. Ideas swimming. One poem is about Laika the Space Dog. The new novel set in the late sixties when Thomas Merton was thinking about settling in Alaska before his ill-fated trip to Thailand, where he either died in a strange accident or was killed by the CIA.
The first thing that needs to be done in either case is build a world, in just a few words. Raymond Chandler did it this way in “Farewell My Lovely:”
CHAPTER ONE It was one of the Mixed Blocks over on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro. I had just come out of a three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a relief barber named Dimitrios Aledis might be working. It was a small matter. His wife said she was willing to spend a little money to have him come home.
The world is believable probably because it has a line drawn through it.
Lets just think about this a minute. It’s not just black and white, but surely that adds tension right away. There is a line between the lost and the found. The relief barber and his wife who wants him home enough to spend some money on finding him. Money and race are at issue here, there is tension that we can feel and are a part of in the first fifty words or so. Lines have been drawn.
Beginnings are always difficult. we want to show the readers where they have landed and what’s at stake, before their minds have a chance to wander. I felt that this morning. The world seemed rich with possibility, the sun was out and while of course I enjoy that, shadows cut across everything as well. Fall has such a sensation of the summer ending but also the beginning of things, World Series coming. Holidays, like Halloween and Thanksgiving this is what I feel from old memories. Football games. Football practice, For me this weather has a desperate hint of romance too. That feeling of taking a shower after football practice or a game: Bruised up, sore, but exhilarated, that feeling I knew when I was young of being in my body and how strong I was and how good a shower could feel. Then combing my wet hair plastered to my skull and walking out of the gym, all steamy and towel snappy into the cold of fall evening. Apples spiked in the yellowing grass, horse shit, car exhaust, cold hoping to see a pretty girl waiting for me…All of these old memories go into the choice of words when building a world, for building a world is building an emotional structure of memory that you hope some readers can feel too. Now, as an aside to my sister… when Hemingway put together a similar house of words using the same football, and fall time, walking out the gym, imagery, there had been no title nine guaranteeing girls access to athletics but now most women know this sensation of post shower feeling of leaving the gym after a tough workout: field hockey, basketball, swimming. I’m not certain but I’m imagining girls after field hockey, or basketball, have tapped into a little of their inner warrior soul Ernest H. was getting at.
And what was he getting at? Fall had lines you were aware of crossing. The sun reveals things with it’s light but it also creates shadows. These shadows are cold and they sting of big change, they are bracing and not as languid as summer shadows. Fall, like this is hunting season, and Halloween. Harvest, and Butchering. Light and Dark come into focus. Both winners and losers. The quick and the dead. It’s a natural season for crime writers, and hence appropriate for our readings this week.
You will have noticed we have staked out the dark end of the “Fallen Angel” stories with McILelvaney and Bruen. My dear sister, who is very well read, asked me if she thinks the long winters effects their moods, and of course I do. But then Dana Stabenow’s characters do not indulge in as much philosophical introspection as those two and she lives further north. (thought I notice she travels a bit more in the southwest than she used to) so writers write what they want and from the perspective they want. But I honestly feel that Place Shapes Life. I do. It is something like a philosophical principal for me. In everything I write I start with the place, the geography and the weather, knowing that all things from the economy to the costumes to the characters will come directly from that. I even believe that about New York City where I spent six years going to school. Manhattan is a rock between two rivers jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. it was a natural and perfect port where sturdy buildings could be built. Everything that has ever happened there starts with that.
At least in my mind.
So too this blog. Every day starts with a comment on the weather because my mind is held in the hands of the atmosphere and those palms are formed by the mountains, sun, and the ocean.
Tomorrow we will not be looking so much in the shadows, but more into the light.
I wear a sweater
to step outside and pick you
a dandelion.
jus
Here is a recording of me reading from Ken Bruen’s The Devil:
