This is a short story inspired by the fact that Gabriel Garcia Marquez improvised an entirely different novel to his neighbor while writing One Hundred Years Of Solitude while claiming it was One Hundred Years Of Solitude. It comes from the fact that I have reacted in an improvisatory capacity in relation to fiction for years while still convinced that there was a structure that existed that was made for improvisation itself -- like a basketball player who liked to dunk, dunked a lot, and was still wondering when he'd ever get around to finally dunking.
And it wasn't because I have an aversion to structure or plot in principle -- I don't.
But it was often the case that whenever I opened a book, I would find myself improvising against it: not only out of competition, not only because the book was providing the implicit drumbeat and I reckoned myself a saxophonist, but because the book had committed what I saw as the error of being a fixed point whereas I could co*kily respond with choice. (Again: this is how I was thinking at the time.) It was the debate opponent on stage who was telegraphing their punch from a mile away, which gave me the sense that I could respond with all the punches in the as-yet-unwritten book.
I also find an increasing dissatisfaction in the longevity capacity of my more imaginative turns. (I'm also curious as to how I might bring people who talk about how they only read biographies back over into the realm of fiction.) But first I'd have to answer small little questions of craft, like, what good will it serve to have a sentence floating around twenty, thirty, or forty years in the future that talks about how “the moon had been unnervingly sliced down the middle by the ghost of a bu*ter knife, that -- post cut -- had ghosted itself itself into the air? And the other half of the moon? A lime tossed into the side of a drink? Row after row of yellow street lamps marching on which castle, and where?”
So when -- invited me over for a pre-fourth of July drink with the girlfriend at work and asked me what I was working on, I lied. I said it was about a cop. What kind of cop? the friend said. A gnome had been glued to the surface of the barbeque. It went up and down as shreds of chicken and hamburger cooked away and were examined with rhythmic regularity. Does it ever get cool around here? I asked. It's Austin, they replied. Even the dead wear shorts. With those little fans? I said. Exactly, they said.
I looked over to my backyard to check on the dog. The dog waved.
A good cop? -- said, picking up the thread again.
My ‘place of clear water'
The first hill in the world
-- when set to music by the Irish singer-songwriter Lisa Hannigan just k**s me. It absolutely k**s me. It lays me out on the carpet and the dog waves again from the yard. Maybe I would return to that poem later tonight and ease prose out from the stanzas, treating them the way the beginning of music bars have lines like ‘allegro' or ‘molto largo.'
where springs washed into
the shiny gra**
[--]
and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.
[Because play doesn't last -- or moves oddly. What lasts? [Or am I misreading that and overlooking foundational play?]
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,
I lied the way I imagined Gabo lied. ]