Pruitt Day 22
As I mentioned in the previous post, I went to the new Harry Potter movie tonight after all, going by myself to the latest showing at the AMC by the river.
I rather enjoy going to movies alone. You are in the dark, and you cannot speak. That being the case, movies never struck me as much of a social occasion. As far as appearances go, other people might find it odd for a person to be sitting alone in a theater, but I’ve never given much thought to what other people think of me, and I feel terrible for people who are unable to cope with solitude in a public setting.
Before the movie began, the screen alighted with the following message, “Silence Is Golden.” Though utterly necessary in a movie theater, I find that statement to be ludicrous in everyday life. As I see it, silence is less than ideal. It is emptiness. It is cold, dark, and haunting. It is terrifying. It is the absence of life. Silence is sleep, possibly even death.
Noise—now, there is something that’s golden. It is a sign of life. It is proof of things happening, of activities of a wide variety. It is the cradle of creativity, and of thought. It is the comfort of knowing that, if you can hear something, then you cannot be alone.
Our great legends tend to be extremely simple allegories of good’s struggle against evil. It has long been hypothesized that the main reason why they appeal to us so much is that stories, regardless of their form, are experiments in escapism. Life is never as simple as it appears to be in Harry Potter’s universe, the tales of the Old West, or Arthurian legend. Seldom are things or people very, very good or very, very bad. Yet, in our most cherished tales, we are allowed the opportunity to make them so, and that makes them glorious things.
I seem to have developed, in an extremely roundabout way, something of a Buddhist worldview. There are no bad experiences, but rather simply experiences—in each case offering aspects of both good and bad. There is always at least one positive thing to be drawn from every horrific occurrence. Perhaps the victim hadn’t realized how strong he or she was before being forced to survive. Or, in the course of pursuing and achieving love, harm comes to those on the periphery. There is give and take, and there is always compromise. We do the best we can when making decisions, and we attempt to abide by our own set of principles for guidance and perspective. A person’s actions might be perceived as being ill intentioned, but that is a description typically levied by the victim. It is the rare sociopath who revels in the intentional infliction of misery upon others, and were they not such uncommon specimens, I daresay that society would cease functioning or, more likely, probably never would have formed in the first place.
I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when I began to disagree with the existentialists. While it is true that we are beings possessed of free will, in no way are our lives absolutely determined by the choices we make. The necessity for making decisions is often foisted upon us, and in those instances we tend to be more reactive beings than we might otherwise be if given the choice.
The tale of Richard Pruitt will take these factors into account, and though I am sure that in thirty years I will look back and scoff at how foolish I was to think this way, I have not found any alternative for going forward than to advocate through this story the above-stated opinion, that our actions are predominantly reactive. It seems to me that pure self-determination is akin to silence. From the point of view that when making decisions from the sort of vacuum implied in a completely self-interested environment, actions are undertaken from a base that is utterly tranquil and conducive to clearly defined visions. Who could ever make that assertion, except for the dead? More often than not, real life more closely resembles noise, in that we must find our way through a muddled cacophony of the lights, sounds, and movements of the things happening around us, and we hope to pick out the best course given our environment.
I apologize if I have steered you to overly philosophical grounds. And yet, there you are, reading along, trying to make sense of it, this little piece of writing that you cannot control. You might agree or disagree with me, but that’s my point. Your reaction counts in some way, but not in every way you might like. Were you able to control every single factor introduced to your life, you might opt to have me downgrading an eastern-style attitude, but you are utterly incapable of doing that, and so you are left with nothing but your reaction to this thing. You are, in an existential sense, capable of dismissing what I have written, or of directing your browser away from this bit of composition. But, in so doing, you would be merely reacting, not entirely acting in the course of your own free will, because an outside factor prompted your action. To put it in simpler terms, there are many things in life that touch us, and most times those things are beyond our control.
And therein lies the great responsibility of being a storyteller. The beauty of the art lies in the fact that, if he is skilled, he is capable of crafting robust portraits using all tools imaginable. But beyond that, there is an overriding obligation to present something of value to the audience.
I have spent the last 22 days dreaming up all sorts of things about the world of Richard Pruitt. I have dutifully sketched outlines, characters, sentences, conversations, scenarios, and a considerable quantity of rules and explanations for what Dead Rich can and cannot see or explain. I am still quite short of finalizing several characters’ names but, as I have mentioned previously, this matter will resolve itself in due time. Some of the pieces I have written are short, sometimes only a couple of lines. Other pieces, such as my work from three days ago, are much longer, to the tune of five single-spaced pages or more. In fact, I have several pages of notes that I have not yet typed up, and upon each of these I will compose vastly longer tracts of polished detail.
The following analogy is appropriate for my work to this point:
Imagine that you are standing on the bank of a wide, smooth river. Next to you is a pile of rocks, varying in size, shape and color. Some of the rocks are already present, but some appear unexpectedly. Occasionally, and in an unpredictable manner, you throw these rocks into the river. Eventually, after more and more stones are thrown, something resembling a bridge will appear. With a little time and effort, you will have enough of a foundation to gain a solid footing, and you will eventually begin walking across the bridge, filling in the spaces as you pass them, on your way to the other side of the river.
Currently, I am in the process of throwing rocks, and the outline of the bridge has formed. This river is quite wide, however, and only the portion of the bridge nearest to me is clear as of this moment. I am unsure of how long it will take before I will be certain of my ability to cross, but I know that I will get there given time.
In a somewhat unrelated note, and in closing, I will divulge a few clues behind one particular sentence that will in all certainty make it into the final draft. This sentence came to me this evening when I was walking up Michigan, on my way home from the movie theater. I would go so far as to say that it is the single most beautiful sentence I have ever composed. It contains a snippet from the Bible, a phrase from Hamlet, a line from a poem by Robert Hunter, and, a long sequence of words of my own invention. I would be highly amused and most thrilled if, at some point in the future, one of you were to come to me and say, “I was reading Pruitt, and I found the sentence you alluded to on What I See.” I am excited to have created it, because I seem to have captured and refined a certain style of composition that prevailed in my younger days when, though I had much less to say and my style was considerably cruder, I could write with a sense of genuine poetry, nuance, and urgency. I am hoping that the resurrection of this style is a harbinger of great things to come, because, although I cannot attempt to cross the hypothetical river just yet, I am anxious to begin throwing in the tinier, considerably more philosophical rocks that will eventually serve as the mortar of the bridge.
I rather enjoy going to movies alone. You are in the dark, and you cannot speak. That being the case, movies never struck me as much of a social occasion. As far as appearances go, other people might find it odd for a person to be sitting alone in a theater, but I’ve never given much thought to what other people think of me, and I feel terrible for people who are unable to cope with solitude in a public setting.
Before the movie began, the screen alighted with the following message, “Silence Is Golden.” Though utterly necessary in a movie theater, I find that statement to be ludicrous in everyday life. As I see it, silence is less than ideal. It is emptiness. It is cold, dark, and haunting. It is terrifying. It is the absence of life. Silence is sleep, possibly even death.
Noise—now, there is something that’s golden. It is a sign of life. It is proof of things happening, of activities of a wide variety. It is the cradle of creativity, and of thought. It is the comfort of knowing that, if you can hear something, then you cannot be alone.
Our great legends tend to be extremely simple allegories of good’s struggle against evil. It has long been hypothesized that the main reason why they appeal to us so much is that stories, regardless of their form, are experiments in escapism. Life is never as simple as it appears to be in Harry Potter’s universe, the tales of the Old West, or Arthurian legend. Seldom are things or people very, very good or very, very bad. Yet, in our most cherished tales, we are allowed the opportunity to make them so, and that makes them glorious things.
I seem to have developed, in an extremely roundabout way, something of a Buddhist worldview. There are no bad experiences, but rather simply experiences—in each case offering aspects of both good and bad. There is always at least one positive thing to be drawn from every horrific occurrence. Perhaps the victim hadn’t realized how strong he or she was before being forced to survive. Or, in the course of pursuing and achieving love, harm comes to those on the periphery. There is give and take, and there is always compromise. We do the best we can when making decisions, and we attempt to abide by our own set of principles for guidance and perspective. A person’s actions might be perceived as being ill intentioned, but that is a description typically levied by the victim. It is the rare sociopath who revels in the intentional infliction of misery upon others, and were they not such uncommon specimens, I daresay that society would cease functioning or, more likely, probably never would have formed in the first place.
I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when I began to disagree with the existentialists. While it is true that we are beings possessed of free will, in no way are our lives absolutely determined by the choices we make. The necessity for making decisions is often foisted upon us, and in those instances we tend to be more reactive beings than we might otherwise be if given the choice.
The tale of Richard Pruitt will take these factors into account, and though I am sure that in thirty years I will look back and scoff at how foolish I was to think this way, I have not found any alternative for going forward than to advocate through this story the above-stated opinion, that our actions are predominantly reactive. It seems to me that pure self-determination is akin to silence. From the point of view that when making decisions from the sort of vacuum implied in a completely self-interested environment, actions are undertaken from a base that is utterly tranquil and conducive to clearly defined visions. Who could ever make that assertion, except for the dead? More often than not, real life more closely resembles noise, in that we must find our way through a muddled cacophony of the lights, sounds, and movements of the things happening around us, and we hope to pick out the best course given our environment.
I apologize if I have steered you to overly philosophical grounds. And yet, there you are, reading along, trying to make sense of it, this little piece of writing that you cannot control. You might agree or disagree with me, but that’s my point. Your reaction counts in some way, but not in every way you might like. Were you able to control every single factor introduced to your life, you might opt to have me downgrading an eastern-style attitude, but you are utterly incapable of doing that, and so you are left with nothing but your reaction to this thing. You are, in an existential sense, capable of dismissing what I have written, or of directing your browser away from this bit of composition. But, in so doing, you would be merely reacting, not entirely acting in the course of your own free will, because an outside factor prompted your action. To put it in simpler terms, there are many things in life that touch us, and most times those things are beyond our control.
And therein lies the great responsibility of being a storyteller. The beauty of the art lies in the fact that, if he is skilled, he is capable of crafting robust portraits using all tools imaginable. But beyond that, there is an overriding obligation to present something of value to the audience.
I have spent the last 22 days dreaming up all sorts of things about the world of Richard Pruitt. I have dutifully sketched outlines, characters, sentences, conversations, scenarios, and a considerable quantity of rules and explanations for what Dead Rich can and cannot see or explain. I am still quite short of finalizing several characters’ names but, as I have mentioned previously, this matter will resolve itself in due time. Some of the pieces I have written are short, sometimes only a couple of lines. Other pieces, such as my work from three days ago, are much longer, to the tune of five single-spaced pages or more. In fact, I have several pages of notes that I have not yet typed up, and upon each of these I will compose vastly longer tracts of polished detail.
The following analogy is appropriate for my work to this point:
Imagine that you are standing on the bank of a wide, smooth river. Next to you is a pile of rocks, varying in size, shape and color. Some of the rocks are already present, but some appear unexpectedly. Occasionally, and in an unpredictable manner, you throw these rocks into the river. Eventually, after more and more stones are thrown, something resembling a bridge will appear. With a little time and effort, you will have enough of a foundation to gain a solid footing, and you will eventually begin walking across the bridge, filling in the spaces as you pass them, on your way to the other side of the river.
Currently, I am in the process of throwing rocks, and the outline of the bridge has formed. This river is quite wide, however, and only the portion of the bridge nearest to me is clear as of this moment. I am unsure of how long it will take before I will be certain of my ability to cross, but I know that I will get there given time.
In a somewhat unrelated note, and in closing, I will divulge a few clues behind one particular sentence that will in all certainty make it into the final draft. This sentence came to me this evening when I was walking up Michigan, on my way home from the movie theater. I would go so far as to say that it is the single most beautiful sentence I have ever composed. It contains a snippet from the Bible, a phrase from Hamlet, a line from a poem by Robert Hunter, and, a long sequence of words of my own invention. I would be highly amused and most thrilled if, at some point in the future, one of you were to come to me and say, “I was reading Pruitt, and I found the sentence you alluded to on What I See.” I am excited to have created it, because I seem to have captured and refined a certain style of composition that prevailed in my younger days when, though I had much less to say and my style was considerably cruder, I could write with a sense of genuine poetry, nuance, and urgency. I am hoping that the resurrection of this style is a harbinger of great things to come, because, although I cannot attempt to cross the hypothetical river just yet, I am anxious to begin throwing in the tinier, considerably more philosophical rocks that will eventually serve as the mortar of the bridge.
posted by Pat at 2:30 AM
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