Falling Round

From Aristotle Poetics XIV, "the deed must either be done or not done--and that, wittingly or not wittingly."

The deed was done.  Denise killed Jack.  Was it wittingly?

Our medical and legal system concluded she was psychotic.  That would mean unwitting, right?  But that doesn't satisfy the dramatic need.  For it to be a tragedy Denise can't be acting from a psychotic view of reality.  It's not a reality that a reader can identify with.  This makes the book history according to Aristotle.  Not poetry.

 The deed must be the result of a great error or frailty.

Unless the book is about her break-down.  Which it isn't.  She can write that one if she wants.  Maybe that book will reveal that Denise had visited Delphi and had heard her future foretold.  Then we would have a tragedy.  Her actions to try and escape her fate.  Over time the history of Oedipus turns into myth in service of the tragic ideal, but in the beginning the story starts as history.  Its inconceivability demands a rational story be told--to tame it.

Instead, the book is about me and what I do that year.  I'm witting.  I do deeds, and don't do them.  The deeds done aren't of sufficient magnitude.  Are the deeds I don't do--like killing Denise, for example--sufficient for tragedy?

Where is the drama?  Peripety--the unexpected reversal of circumstance?

There are no sufficiently significant deeds which the reader believes I'm about to enact, and then at the last minute I come to my senses and don't perform.  It is a story where a lot happens, but I'm often passive in the face of it.  My drama is just surviving the year--trying to get me and Libby through it as best I can.  My drama isn't the reader's drama.  So history, then.

Plot isn't story.  It is a chosen set of incidents that map the drama.  A series of cause & effect chains.  A tragedy needs a beginning, middle, and end.  A unity.  Aristotle defines the beginning as "that which does not in and of itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be."

Plot is the artistic equivalent of action.

I have a beginning.

Aristotle tells the poet to exclude the irrational.

PS.  This story is all about hubris.  Believing you can know the unknowable--control the controllable.  Psychosis is an interesting object for hubris.  To know your hubris, it isn't enough to have a intellectual understanding--you have to know it emotionally, in your gut.  You've failed.  And you know you have.  And the magnitude is big.  And, then, you see, years later, your hubris is in tact.  Stronger than ever.

Without hubris we aren't human.  We couldn't walk on the moon, for example, without hubris.  Aristotle wouldn't write Poetics without hubris.  There is no Greek tragedy without hubris.  Luckily there is plenty around.

Finished Read-thru

I finished reading the manuscript.  As far as my editorial decisions ...

• Yes, have a Greek Chorus.
  I couldn't differentiate the voices.  General cacophony sometimes.  Sometimes they all were saying the same thing.  Offering advise.  Listening to me, offering comfort.
  But there is one friend who I can decide whether she is a primary character or part of the chorus.  In Greek drama they are well defined types: soldier, nurse, slave.  To answer my question about this character--she really is a type--a foil for me to confide certain things to which I can't to others.  There is something that makes her unique.  But I'm reluctant to have many primary characters ... because I'm little afraid of further consequences to them.
  Is Grace my choragus?  
• Yes, have fugues ... me drifting in and out of fantasy more towards the end of the book.  As I begin to imagine my life going forward.  But edit them.  Be more judicious of their use.  And they aren't fugues in the psychiatric sense of the term--I don't lose touch with myself--I'm not dissociating.  I do indulge in them.  The escapes though are small.  Tiny.
• Yes, leave the writerly stuff in there.  But, like fugues, be very judicious.
• I have some ideas on how to edit the letters (sent, not sent) and the main story line of August 2006 and 2007.  Give the letters and email to friends and family (Greek chorus) primacy, and prune my narrative where it is redundant ... not advancing the plot or key to revealing the emotional arc of the story.
As I dive into the rewrite, this will be more clear.
One of the first things I'll do next, is read these letters in isolation to rest of the book and outline to plot. 

I wish I had an idea how many words or pages to shoot for.  Unfortunately, I'm still adding content.  Not much.  Just from a email here or there.

fugue

fyo͞og/ noun

1. 1.

   MUSIC

   a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
2. 2.

   PSYCHIATRY

   a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment

Soul Mates and Others

Thanks to +Amy Lemmon for taking these three poems for ducts.

                                       The wood fights
and grabs a life already lost.  The pitch
sweetens with each swing.  Then pops: a ping
pong ball smashes basement walls.

Reading Page 263

I am reading my way through.  Trying to find the editorial answers, either in my dreams at night, or in the text that already exists.  Need to make those decisions before I begin the writing part of this revision.

I've posted on the editorial question of the Greek Chorus and all the secondary and tertiary characters in my story.  Other questions:

• where do I locate myself in this re-write:  physically in Seattle?  emotionally post-divorce?  where is the present tense in the story?
• how to I go about editing the letters?  where does my structure, and any given too-long-letter to Denise, become tedious to the reader?  how much really can I indulge(?) in depicting my grief vs advancing the story.
• and the writerly stuff ... who wants to read another memoir that features the heroic odyssey of the protagonist becoming a writer

I'm on page 263.  I can handle about 20 pages at a time before the cumulative effect of triggered memories and thus, emotions, fogs my brain.  Today was the first day I check, repeatedly, to see if I'd hit my 20 page milestone.  I'm feeling dragged down by it.  Wondering what I hope to accomplish.  I'm thinking if I was the reader, I'd be saying, come on Bill, get on with it.  Stop so much this navel gazing.  Looking at the book--the book split open on this page--the reader sees she's only halfway through and groans out loud.  (I imagine the book physically.  Not an E-book.)

I like to get a second session in after a break ... could be reading about Greek drama or walking down the hill to a coffee shop and getting that third cup of coffee.  I am immersed in the story.  Feeling the familiar ache in my neck and shoulders.

Rhodopis and the Strange Occurrence of the Sandal

The Cinderella motif may well have originated in classical antiquity. The Greek geographer Strabo recorded in the 1st century BC in his Geographica (book 17, 33) the tale of the Greek slave girl Rhodopis, "Rosey-Eyes", who lived in the colony of Naucratis in Ancient Egypt. It is often considered the oldest known version of the story:

They tell the fabulous story that, when she was bathing, an eagle snatched one of her sandals from her maid and carried it to Memphis; and while the king was administering justice in the open air, the eagle, when it arrived above his head, flung the sandal into his lap; and the king, stirred both by the beautiful shape of the sandal and by the strangeness of the occurrence, sent men in all directions into the country in quest of the woman who wore the sandal; and when she was found in the city of Naucratis, she was brought up to Memphis, became the wife of the king...^[13]

Herodotus, some five centuries before Strabo, supplied information about the real-life Rhodopis in his Histories. He wrote that Rhodopis came from Thrace, and was the slave of Iadmon of Samos, and a fellow-slave of the story-teller Aesop. She was taken to Egypt in the time of Pharaoh Amasis, and freed there for a large sum by Charaxus of Mytilene, brother of Sappho the lyric poet.^[14][15]

and,

The 3rd-century-BC poet Poseidippus of Pella wrote a narrative poem entitled "Aesopia" (now lost), in which Aesop's fellow slave Rhodopis (under her original name Doricha) was frequently mentioned, according to Athenaeus 13.596.^[65] Pliny would later identify Rhodopis as Aesop's lover,^[66] a romantic motif that would be repeated in subsequent popular depictions of Aesop.

In 1690, French playwright Edmé Boursault's Les fables d'Esope (later known as Esope à la ville) premiered in Paris. A sequel, Esope à la cour^[73] (Aesop at Court), was first performed in 1701; drawing on a mention in Herodotus 2.134-5^[74] that Aesop had once been owned by the same master as Rhodopis, and the statement in Pliny 36.17^[75] that she was Aesop's concubine as well, the play introduced Rodope as Aesop's mistress, a romantic motif that would be repeated in later popular depictions of Aesop.

If it is true, why didn't Aesop write Cinderella?  Either he did, and that's why we know it.  Perhaps in the non-animal part of his oeuvre.  Or it wasn't a fable to him.

In a February 5, 2007 letter to Denise, I first mention Cinderella.  Recalling a conversation Libby and I have on a drive back up to Brown.

God of Drama

Dionysos /daɪ.əˈnaɪsəs/ (Ancient Greek: Διόνυσος, Dionysos) was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology.

He is god of epiphany.

He is a dying god.

Dionysos is represented by city religions as the protector of those who do not belong to conventional society and thus symbolizes everything which is chaotic, dangerous and unexpected, everything which escapes human reason and which can only be attributed to the unforeseeable action of the gods.

The Athenian tradition of theatrical representations first began at the Theatre of Dionysos. Theater developed into a religious celebration. The orchestra, where the chorus performed, was closest to the audience. In the center of the orchestra was an altar for Dionysos.

Names originating from Dionysos

• Denise (also spelled Denice, Daniesa, Denese, and Denisse) ...

source: mostly Wikipedia

Greek Chorus

One of the decisions I need to make is whether to keep the Greek Chorus.  So what is a GC?

• Sophocles settled on 15 actors.
• The GC shares in the action.
• Often speaks for the audience.  Or for the author?
• I like this post on quora--the accomplished director focuses on the chorus.
• The GC speaks with the personal pronoun "I"
• The speech is often metrical, rhythmic, sometimes even sung.
• It speaks in unison, wear masks
• thus, not natural, not subtle, depersonalized, universal
• The GC can voice hidden secrets, fears
• GC comment, not advance story
• can break the 4th wall

I dusted off two college texts, and read Oedipus Tyrannus to recall a GC in action.  Now his daughter/sister Antigone.  One of the pleasures of this rewrite--trusting these diversions and taking the time to enjoy them.

From wikipedia:

Much of what constitutes the myth of Oedipus takes place before the opening scene of the play.

The prophecy is thus fulfilled, although none of the main characters know it.

[At the end of the play] on an empty stage the chorus repeat the common Greek maxim, that no man should be considered fortunate until he is dead.

Through the play, according to Kitto, Sophocles declares "that it is wrong, in the face of the incomprehensible and unmoral, to deny the moral laws and accept chaos. What is right is to recognize facts and not delude ourselves. The universe is a unity; if, sometimes, we can see neither rhyme nor reason in it we should not suppose it is random. There is so much that we cannot know and cannot control that we should not think and behave as if we do know and can control."

Revision 9

Today I'm starting revision 9 of my memoir, Dear Denise.  MS Word tells me my wordcount is 159618.  The last edits were made January 20, 2012, but revision 8 was really wrapped up in February, 2011; so I'm bringing almost three years of perspective to this draft.

My divorce was legal in April, and I moved to Seattle in May.  I've been writing poetry all summer and into the fall, but I've been planning to get back to the memoir and start this revision.  Only one divorce issue lingers.  The reason I mention this is one of my criteria for beginning this rewrite was to be finished with the divorce, finished with living with that anger and stress and (then current) connection with my ex.  I didn't want to simmer this rewrite in that water.

I'm starting with the last bit of advice my memoir instructor, Pat Willard, gave me two years ago:

What folks have said seems to gel what with what you've gotten in class so my best advice is to see how much is good for what you're trying to do.  At some point, it has to be just you and the manuscript and I think you've reached that point.  You honestly need to face what this story is trying to tell. 

I wish you so much love and fortitude.  This is an important story and I know you will do it very well.  Just trust yourself and let the silence sink in.  It's going to take strength but I know you are courageous enough ... so just do it.

PS.  No, Bill, this blog doesn't count as writing.

Mark Bibbins posted 2 poems on The Awl in July 2011.