Write One True Sentence

 We watched a documentary about Ernest Hemingway the other night. I would not recommend it unless you are a real depression junky. Learning about his immensely dysfunctional family, with his father, brother and sister all suicides, did clarify why suicide probably struck him as a normal, possibly expected exit strategy for one’s life. 

I much prefer the fictionalized Hemingway we meet through Cory Stoll's depiction in the 2011 film Midnight in Paris. Stoll's Hemingway was a tough but eloquent advocate of clean precise "manly" prose. But hidden in the real Hemingway's macabre world view, lurks a possible hint of Hem's “self-erraticating” perspective which arose from an unlikely revelation in the documentary - Hemingway’s philosophy of writing.

Apparently when Hemingway found himself, as all writers inevitably must, confronting the monstrous challenge of a blank page his remedy was this: “Write one true sentence, and the rest will follow.” Write one true sentence? My god, no wonder the man killed himself. Think about this sublime, but chronically depressed, advocate of "Write clearly," "Use short sentences," "Make your first paragraph short," trying to follow his own advice. Even imagine our less talented, but better balanced selves, facing that empty page, and hearing the echo of Hem’s advice - “Write one true sentence!” Perhaps the best, truest, response would be: “I cannot do that.”

“And why not?” The Hem in our head might inquire.  Well, Hem, because to assert that we can write one true sentence strongly implies that the sentence possesses a kind of eternal verity. That, by being the one true sentence, it would always be true.

Life itself argues against such a sentence. The one true sentence that flows from our pen today will be almost certainly be betrayed if not tomorrow, then next week, next year, or next decade. That assertion does not mean to question the veracity of the sentence as we compose it, but rather seeks to realize that maintaining the constant truth of any one true sentence lies beyond our meager ability.

Heraclitus said “The only constant in life is change.” And before we say “Ah, ha! There is one true sentence!” consider the research being done in cryogenics, aimed at freezing sick folks to stop all change until a cure can be found. That attempt to arrest change seems as yet unsuccessful. 

Heraclitus is far more often proved right than wrong. Change does seem to be the dominant constant in our lives, and because we live our lives in states of constant change, the very condition of truth is also subject to constant change, making our ability to write one true sentence impossible.

Whew, that felt good.

Obviously if we edit Hemingway’s challenge to read “Write a sentence that is true in your world at this time.” We open the door to “the earth is the center of the universe,” “the earth is flat,” “I believe all people are good,” "No one will ever run a mile is less than 4 minutes,” “Humans will never walk on the moon.” Insert your own example of a true sentence that has fallen by the wayside. 

I think that attempting to meet that edited challenge would get most authors past the dreaded “blank page freeze.” But that is not what Hemingway asked of us. He said “Write one true sentence.”

And what happens when an obsessive, perfectionist, depressed author like Hemingway realizes that there is no way to do that? Most of us would, hopefully, think “Oh, you mean like true right now? OK.” And we would move on to sentences two, three, four, etc, perhaps of varying veracity, but engaging fiction. Unfortunately, given Hemingway’s family history, and personal demons, his response to such a literary impasse was to reach for a shotgun.

So what does that mean for us as creative human beings who feel the urge to create something but are faced with the equivalent of a blank page? Here are some suggestions:

List your favorite words. With them, write a beautiful sentence, or one that makes you laugh, or cry.

Describe the world outside your window.

Fill a page with a loopy scribble, color in the loops.

Write down the names of all your teachers and the grades or subjects they taught.

Write down the names of every pet you ever had.

None of these exercises will necessarily lead you to the great American novel. But they might lead you somewhere interesting. Perhaps the best you can hope for on any one day is a limerick or two. But that is OK. At least it will keep the shotgun in the closet. And, why, pray tell, is there a shotgun in your closet anyway? For crying out loud.  .  .  .

I Write Because I Have No Other Instrument

 Like many youngsters I took music lessons more to please my parents than to fulfill some melodic inclination within. My buddy Dan from the previous post, and I would dutifully bicycle over to Mrs Stupp’s house, a landmark we failed to seek out on the previous trip with the “way back machine.” I vaguely recall a tarantella duet from one of her sponsored “student concerts.” The memory is faint, and probably best forgotten, along with my three-chord, two song fling with the guitar in high school.

As I lie here watching a video on Irish airs, and find myself profoundly saddened by the fact that I cannot make music. I have a decent voice and have used it in musicals, choirs and choruses throughout my life. Wonderful memories of singing alone and in groups - but exclusively music written by others. I cannot pick up any instrument and follow a score, let alone improvise or compose. It is, as I said, a source of sadness and not a little envy.

So when I write, perhaps because of my background in theater where the written word must be spoken or sung, I am constantly aware of the aural quality of the words. I do not mean just how the words would actually sound if read, but also how the words relate to one and other tonally on the page.

That is not always a good thing as sometimes the melody of the narrative takes control, resulting in a composition where the intended meaning can be lost or distorted by those melodic demands. The result can be better, more pleasing writing, that nonetheless distorts the communicative motivation that originally led pen to paper, fingers to keyboard.

My wife often laments the fact that my copious consumption of the written word is skewed 80 % fiction 20% non. I imagine my love of fiction stems from a variety of motives. First, non-fiction is obviously restrained by an obligatory relationship to the truth, a requirement obviously cast aside when the source of the narrative has political or commercial aspirations. But those who would create narratives that are legitimate attempts to convey accurate portrayals of the world as it actually exists - nonfiction writers - are the literary equivalent of hobbles on a racehorse. Second, events that occur in “a galaxy long ago and far away” are forever closed to them, as are the adventures of protagonists living on a desert planet, or attending classes at a school for witches and wizards.

Mind you, I am not denigrating the truly wonderful and seemingly magical worlds I encounter in Nature, National Geographic, and Science News. But they are narratives closely constrained by truth, a barrier I find limiting in those narratives I read, and often unfortunately, unacceptable in those I write.

To steal a warning from the old sci-fi series, “Lost in Space,” “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” My inclination to favor an engaging narrative over one that clings tightly to the dictates of the actual, truthful, unembellished, reality can result in what less compassionate, less understanding individuals might call lies. For example, while living in Vienna, Austria, from 1959 to 1961 One day while rambling around the inner city, I chanced upon a rehearsal of The Vienna Choir Boys. Uninvited, I slipped into the back of the church. They were singing a song I knew, so I sang along - admittedly inaudibly. They stopped to get advice from their director, and I slipped out. Now, can you really blame me if, in a later sixth-grade retelling of the event, the description leaned to, “Yes, I had a chance to sing with The Vienna Choirboys?”

Harmless? Of course, but it was one of those little steps that could lead one to treat the line between fact and fiction cavalierly. Perhaps that is why I prefer fiction to reportage. It admits right up front “Hey! I am making this up! Cool, huh?” Or perhaps it is because I read so much fiction that I am inclined to easily spot it in the rhetoric that surrounds us in the “real world,” and allow it, sometimes unintentionally harmfully, in my own writing. 

In my own defense, when my literary excesses cause pain to others, it is, in the larger field of human activity a little thing. Uncomfortable for a dyad, but unknown and unimportant to society as a whole. A minor foible on any but an interpersonal scale. Nonetheless, admittedly painful at that level.

Those lesser emotion ripples become infinitely more important when these flawed narratives are voiced by one who seeks the most powerful political position in the world: “I respect women!” “I’m a highly functioning genius!” “I’m a multibillionaire!” “I built my fortune all by myself!” “I hit the ball out of the park!”

Yeah. And I bet you sang with The Vienna Choirboys.

Memories from the “WABAC” Machine

( I’m going to begin this post with an old pedagogy joke: “Will everyone who is not here please raise your hand!” Actually I would like everyone who hasn’t read the email about Tuckpointing the Wall to check your mail, spam and trash included, and take a look. Thanks!) Now on with Memories from the WABAC Machine.)

Between 1959 and 1963 one could dip into a TV cartoon on Saturday mornings called Peabody’s Improbable History. In the program Mr. Peabody, a brilliant bespectacled beagle and his human, rather befuddled, sort-of-ward, Sherman would enter the “WABAC” - pronounced “way back” -  machine and zip off to, and muddle about in, major events in history.

I sort of did that a couple of months ago when my oldest friend and partner-in-crime, Dan, and I took off to Springfield, Ohio to revisit our strangely shared history. We started with the duplex where we were born 7 days apart in November of 1948. I will include that image as it seems rather like what a structure would look like 74 years after the November of our birth. But from there things got a bit weird.

Among the more normal stops along the ramble we revisited the other homes where we grew up. Mine looked rather well kept up, but the knock on the door was greeted only by raucous barking from multiple canines and a sign on the door which read: “No need to knock. We can hear that you are here.” Perhaps that was what alleviated any need to answer the door. We moved on.

Dan’s home had fared less well, deserted, weather beaten, and up for sale. His attempts to engage his sisters in an architectural rescue seem to be falling on deaf ears. However in our mind’s eyes we were able to recreate backyard baseball games where we imposed upon his younger sister to play the “way, way, way outfield,” part way back into the neighbor’s yard. The stump of the pine tree down which we would escape for late night soirées to the candy, soda and baseball cards store was discernible. Sadly, our junior high school directly across the street was but a memory faded behind a strip of bland buildings devoid of signage and of indeterminate function.

Better preserved were the homes of our high school sweethearts, whose current occupants apparently neither observed or reported our slow and subtle drive-bys. But that brings me to varied reasons to allow the past to remain the past.

Springfield, Ohio lies 10 miles down State Route 68 from Yellow Spring, Ohio, home of Antioch College, which like Dan’s house appears to have fallen on hard times. Once a cornerstone of “alternate - aka hippy - education” with several campuses, Wikipedia reports a current total enrollment of 133 students. Adieu the 60s.

But that isn’t the point. Our time along the Route 68 corridor had little or nothing to do with Antioch. Far more important were Young’s Jersey Dairy - a small (maybe 15 foot square) little Mom and Pop dairy bar with incredible milkshakes; and John Bryan State Park - home of a bucolic waterfall guaranteed to impress your date from high school.

So we set off down route 68 to recapture those scenes of our youth. We soon arrived, appropriately for the original writing of this post, at the Halloween version of both.  The two entities had formerly been separated by pastures and cornfields. They now seemed to share Disneyland-like huge asphalt parking lots featuring dual-stroller friendly paths - all densely inhabited. 

We bailed on both and instead headed down 68 a bit further to Yellow Springs proper, which seemed to have found a new identity as overflow parking for the dairy and State park. When you could find a parking place it was behind trendy little boutiques and bars. We repaired to one of the latter and were informed by a chatty patron that Yellow Springs was “the most visited village in the nation!”

She had no data for her assertion, nor could I find any online, however, the general congestion seemed to offer some support. We wandered around for awhile, eventually stopping into a cloyingly quaint garden restaurant for dinner. It eventually further distinguished itself by serving Dan the smallest filet either of us had ever seen.

We finally admitted defeat and left reality behind and returned to the kinder embrace of memory. Dan had secured a couple of “senior” tickets to a Wittenberg University - previously Wittenberg College - football game at the cost of $6.00 a head. Not a typo, perhaps a nod to the kinder and more gentle pricing of our youth, which was not reflected in the concession stand where a hotdog and a Coke outstripped the cost of admission.

(The yellow house across the playing field is the one at the top of the post where Dan and I lived the first few years of our lives.) 

The concession stand exerted a particular pull for me as both my older brother and I had hawked popcorn and the original coca-colas to the fans. Some of whom were seated - as we had been, back in the day - in the “box seats,” which at the time were concrete pads that held four folding chairs. My memories of those those days may be a bit sanguine, as the whole concession endeavor was run by a burly guy strangely named “Peaches” who was the uncle of my girlfriend whose house we had earlier cruised. Naturally I enquired at the concession window if the family still owned the operation. Blank stares.

Wittenberg won and we trudged back across the rolling lawn where Dan had squired his high school sweetheart whom he eventually married. We found the car and returned the our rented porch, made beverages that would have been illicit in the times we sought to recall, and gazed quietly out across the fields that fit more comfortably with our memories than the insistent realities that populated the world beyond. 

I do not regret having made this little sojourn in the Wayback machine, but do not think I will advocate for a repeat. Other places in our shared history may call to us, but there are, I learned again, some memories that are owned by the past, and should be left there in peace.