The Shibboleth of Symbolism

Question 1:  If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a noise?  How about a big no duh?  The absence of ears to hear does not exclude the existence of sound waves.

Question 2:  If a man is talking and no woman is around to hear him, is he still wrong?  I always thought that one funny.  No comment.

Question 3:  If something is symbolic and no one thinks about what it means, does it still mean anything?

Consider the candy cane - the hook-shaped, pepperminty, hand-held confection of yumminess found often around December (timely of me, no?).  Rumor has it, and I don't know if this is an urban or a rural legend, that that candy cane is not red and white by pure accident, nor is it arbitrarily shaped.  Rather, there is a design behind its design.  The red and white represent the blood and purity of Christ, respectively.  The shape denotes the shepherd's crook; an obvious reference to the shepherd and the sheep.  Get it?  Heard this before?  Ponder it much when you grab a candy cane from the pencil holder at the bank?  They give out freebies this time of year, don't you know?  Crunch 'em if you got em'.

But about the symbolism, do you ponder it when you're unwrapping the noisy cellophane and twisting the cane in your taste-hole to make that pointy peppermint spike of death?  Maybe, not so much, sorta kinda?  The thought crosses your mind occasionally?  But, what do you always do when you eat a candy cane?  Enjoying the freakin' candy cane, that's what!

The peril of symbolism, in writing, is the risk that many (most?) people won't get it.  And of those who do, it amounts to either a 'big whoop' or a 'hey, that's really neato!' on the register of reading motivation.  In other words, a writer who writes to show off his symbolism is something like the writer who wants to show off his punctuation.  How many readers walk away from a story thinking, "Wow, great semi-colons."?  No one has won the Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel, Caldecott, or any other writing award based solely on either their symbolism, or their dynamic use of commas.

Now look - I like me some symbolism.  It's cool.  I think about the flag of the United States.  I think about the cross.  I think about why I used the word shibboleth in the title.  I also think about how literal-minded most of my students are.  Sad, really, that we don't consider the depths of meaning available to us.  But the symbolism isn't the thing.  The thing's the thing.

See, one of the problems is that the average, run-o-the-mill English major (think, person who wants to write) is taught that the use of symbolism in writing is tantamount to genius.  Maybe it is, or maybe said writer didn't have a better story to tell and decided to fill the prose with nouns meant to represent other things.  In this way, the story becomes something of a dense puzzle-box and people can sit around wondering, "What does it mean, man?"  And in the meantime, the fledgling writer focuses on being symbolic (amidst a myriad other literary [pronounced:  lihtoo-raahree, emphasis on the snobbery] devices they've been taught are also tantamount to genius by their English major professors who were, in turn, taught by their English major professors) and if that means the well-told story goes by the wayside, so be it.

Herein is something every writer should consider.  Some, but not very many, people read to admire symbolism.  Preponderantly, and on the other hand, most readers read because they're searching for a nicely written piece of writing.

Another Humorous Essay?

Another semester is rapidly closing.  With it, another humorous essay I write with one of my classes.  It's below, in all of it's wonderful prosiacness.  For regular readers, some of this will look familiar.  It's spliced together with bits & pieces of previous 'Cancer Updates'.  BTW - treatment #11 is done.  I have one more to go and then the bit wait & see.  Anyway, enjoy, or not.  Remember boys & girls, there's funny 'ha-ha' and there's funny, 'hmmmm....'

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Colon Cancer: It's Not That Bad

Every other Tuesday for the past six months I've been subjected to forty-six hours of chemotherapy treatment. It’s not a treat the way cookies and brownies are a treat. It’s a treat more along the order of having the toilet overflow. But doctors call it a treatment, and who am I to argue?  Chemicals with names like Oxaliplatin, Leucovorin, and 5-Flourouracil (better known as 5FU… get it?) make up the cocktail I'm given. I've had better cocktails too. Maybe the medical staff should hire a nomenclature expert. But, it is what it is. During said treatments I'm sent home with a Lovecraftian tube sticking out of my chest. After many an abject contortion, I've learned to sleep with this and in the days that follow have soldiered on with an energy drain reminiscent of a flu-whisky hangover combination. In the days of my misspent youth, I was familiar with the former, and everyone knows about the latter.

I'm not sharing this information for people to get all pouty like somebody just stepped on their kitten. Mmm-k? Instead, I'm trying to help people understand that having colon cancer isn't that bad. I mean, it sucks and everything, but I’ve also come to realize a number of benefits have come my way in the last half-year.

For example, I'm in the Cancer Center Youth Group. I get together in the brightly lit activity-room and color bowels and intestines in my official Cancer Center Youth Group color book. Then I get to play games like pin the polyp on the sigmoid. Last week I made a popsicle-cell anemia and three macaroni lymph node magnets for the refrigerator. The teachers smile and make me feel special and give me candy. Then I sit around and talk with the other Youth Group people about how I feel.

Ok, I made all that up, except for the part about sitting around and talking about my feelings with others; maybe that’s why I don’t go. But at 47, I’m usually one of the youngest at the Cancer Center, except for the nurses, and who doesn’t like young nurses?

Another bonus has been the loss of feeling in my fingertips. This is because one of the medicines contained platinum, which is a heavy metal. I never cared too much for heavy metal. But what happens when the human body accumulates too much of certain heavy metals is that it puts on the brakes and tells the central nervous system, "Enough of this. I’m outa here!"

I said contained earlier because on treatment number nine I had what they call one of them there anaphylactic reactions to the platinol (doctor talk for platinum). This included a twenty-minute hot-flash (more on menopause later), the inability to speak, general disorientation, and a really sucky afternoon when thinking coherently was the least of my worries. Next thing I knew I was surrounded by nurses (did I mention they're young and pretty?). One of them tore open my shirt and another fanned me. Then, the head-honcho nurse gave me a giant shot of Benadryl. Long story short no more platinol for me. But getting back to the numbed fingers, I can now take things out of the oven without a potholder and can scrape ice from the windshield with my bare hands. How cool is that? Don’t ask me. Remember, my fingertips are numb.

Then there's this: before I had cancer I could count on one hand the number of compliments I'd received on my physical appearance. That's ok. Manly men don't need that kind of validation. I always did figure my face was more masculine than it was handsome. But since the cancer diagnosis, I can't go anywhere without someone telling me how good I look. Friends, family, church members, and coworkers constantly ask about how I'm doing. Invariably, they follow this up with, "Well, you look good." Or, "You look great." And I'm all like, heck-yeah. Part of me wishes I were single. The point here is to forget botox and cosmetic surgery. If someone wants to improve their looks, they should consider cancer. The compliments just keep on coming.

Then there's the weight loss. This spring I was admitted to the hospital at a portly 184 pounds. Ten days later I left weighing 162 pounds. That's twenty-two pounds in ten days. Jenny Craig? Get out of my face! Biggest Loser? Go suck some wind. Diet pills, flush 'em. America's weight problems could be cured if only more people had cancer. And, during these past six months I've been eating like a freaking horse and I don't mean because I have buck teeth. It's great when the doctor says eat anything, whenever and however much. Today, after a half-year of playing Jack Sprat, I'm tipping the scales at a mere 182 pounds.

Finally, in terms of often overlooked bennies, I've saved the best for last. I discovered this one by a desperate accident. There’s a backstory. At the end of June, one of my wife's friends had the great idea (as only wife friends can) that my wife and I, her and her husband, and two other married couples should take a road trip to a Bloomington dinner theater and see a musical called, "Menopause the Musical." The official website declares the show to be, "The Hilarious Celebration of Women and the Change." Sidebar: why won't dinner theaters do anything like Shakespeare or Sophoclese? I mean, Oedipus Rex had singing. I've heard Cormac McArthy wrote a play. That might be good.

But anyways, I don't know a single man who wants to see a musical about menopause presented by amateurs. Guys, I don't mean to blow the cover, but it's true. And secondly, dinner theater dinner, at least in this tri-county region, is usually a click or two under the mediocre bar. And, more man-secret truth here, the plan for a, "couple's night" is usually nothing more than a thinly veiled, "ladies night" with men along so they can pay.
The men would have sat and nodded and spoken amongst themselves, listening for funny lines so they could later tell other men, "It had some funny parts." Or, "It was ok." Or, "Yeah, it wasn't too bad." They would have smiled saying such things, remembering the rubbery chicken with white sauce and the cold rolls from a bag and the lukewarm peas with pearl onions, and the beasts in their hearts would have growled and grown a little weaker. Oh, the things we do for love.

But, I remembered, barely in the nick of time. I DO HAVE CANCER. My type-3 was going to act up that night. Alas, I was unable to take the drive and would remain at home, alone. At the news, one of the brave husbands volunteered to stay with me. When the ladies saw how two of the men could not attend (one heroically and stoically battling cancer, and the other selflessly giving up the show on a Christian mission to console his brother), they decided a true ladies night would be best. I saved three other men from, "Menopause the Musical."

Like an additional disbursement of grace, I have been given something I call the Cancer Card. And who knows how in the future I may be able to channel the tides of history and further help my fellow men? Perhaps also, if daughter #1 would wash the truck, not forgetting to vacuum the mats, that too would help. Then, down the road, a larger screen to help me see the shows might uplift my downtrodden spirit. Next birthday, maybe a crossbow can take my mind off things. Of course, the Cancer Card, like all special cards, should be judiciously used. There's nothing worse than an overplayed special card. But, for those thinking of getting cancer, don't overlook this silver lining.

And by now, the intrepid reader may think me simple-minded and unaware the seriousness that besets me. May I allay those concerns? In December I will be finished with my first twelve treatments of chemotherapy. In January there will be scans and blood tests and who knows what. At the end of these, the doctor will tell me one of three things.

First, the cancer may be done. This has been my prayer all along. If this is the case I'll have the first of a year's worth of three-month checkups for more test and scans, and who knows what. The longer it doesn't return, the greater the odds it will not. The second thing the doctor might tell me is that the cancer is still there, no worse than it was. This will mean six more months of chemotherapy; rinse and repeat as necessary. The third thing the doctor may find is that the cancer has spread. This is not good for the home team.

But until then, no one knows. These are the thoughts that concern me most at night, after the lights are out and I stare at the ceiling trying to go to sleep. It’s true, cancer is not the zany, whacky disease many think it to be. But…

My approach has partly to do with the people I meet at the Cancer Center. I don't know how the elderly do this. Remember, I’m in the youth group, with relative health and reserves that many of the elderly no longer possess. Yet many, not all, of them smile and talk and carry their banners forward the best they know how. When the pretty nurses call my name for my next turn on the chemotherapy chair of funness, and I say to no one in particular, "Once more into the breach," these older people smile and some of them laugh. A rare few get the Shakespeare reference.

It's the younger patients whom seem the most aggrieved. They have darkness around their eyes and stare vacantly into tablets and cell phones. They carry damp Kleenex in their pockets, dab their eyes and noses, and seldom speak.

These are the two paths. I'm merely following the examples of the elders.

Flash Fiction Challenge - Part 3

From last time - the challenge posited over at terribleminds is to first write 200 words of the beginning of a story.  The second part is to pick someone else' story and add 200 words to it.  This is to be done for five weeks.  Here is the third story I picked:

A Million Cats:

Part 1 by Rebecca Douglas:
http://www.ninjalibrarian.com/2013/11/wendig-challenge-first-200-words.html

Part 2 by Connie Cockrell:
http://conniesrandomthoughts.wordpress.com/2013/11/30/chuck-wendigs-5-week-challenge-part-2-a-million-cats/

Part 3 (my addition):

Six types of burned tape later, and Keelan not remembering those doomed for not remembering history, I unstrap myself and handhold to the tool closet, next to the cargo’s vapor-lock.  That’s where the real nightmare began.  There’s a certain fragrance wafting past the three layers of polymer-aluminum seals.  Plastic baggie of red electrical twist-caps in hand, I make it back to the cockpit.

Keelan looks up, preparing yet another type of tape for the splicing.  I hand him the caps and ask, “Smell anything?”

He smiles.  “Just burnt tape.  What’s up?”

The question lingers as I buckle in and run a quick ambient contaminant scan.  Sure enough, we’ve got an increasing level of uric acid, sodium chloride, male cat steroids, and several unidentified detoxified substances.  I point to the screen.

“What’s FUS?” he wants to know.  Keelan never reads the fine print; always quick to say he’s the idea man.  Sometimes I want to strangle him.

“Feline Urinary Scent.”  I leave it at that.  The projection trend shows we’ll need air-masks by the time we arrive at Exillion, assuming drive fires in the next several minutes.  We’ll need new air filters and a fumigation of the entire ship.  Credits, schmedits!

Flash Fiction Challenge - Part 2

Ok - the last post was the first 200 words of start of a story I wrote.  NOW THEN - what's next are the first 200 words of a story someone else wrote, followed by my addition.  There are going to be five of these in total.  Enjoy:

*****

Part 1 (original, not mine - but available here):

Lee’s seen a lot of terrible things in her day, but this is the worst.  She can’t exactly put a finger on why it’s the worst; she’s seen more gory, more brutal, more degrading.  But this one makes her knees weak and her gorge rise and the skin on her face crawl.  This one just about sends her vomiting in a corner like the rookie who just dashed outside. 

It’s the nails.  Long nails, their round, waffle-patterned heads out of balance with the length of their bodies.  A number of them are drowning in the pool of spilled blood like teeth knocked loose in a fight.  More tumble out of upended boxes near the corpse. And fifty-six of them are buried in the corpse itself.  Some deeper than others. Some are reduced to dark circles on his skin, weird birthmarks; others turn him into the world’s biggest voodoo doll.  No part of him has been spared.  Lee shudders.  There are signs of struggle, but mostly in the immediate area around the body.  Like someone sat on him and just started hammering.  Patiently, carefully, nail after nail. 

“Officer.”

Lee’s almost glad to see that Charlie’s as pale as she is.

PART 2 (my addition):

The nail gun didn't make sense, 400 PSI concrete nailer to be exact.  Charlie found it in the plastic case, bloody tip, no prints, next to a belt-sander and an upended circular saw.  "Everybody," Charlie tells Lee, "knows nail guns are belt-fed, canister-fed, spring-loaded.  Automated is the word."  Lee looks puzzled.  "Or maybe girls don't know these things."  He tries not to look at the body as he tells her this.

"Whatever," she says.  And the boxes of nails?  Single-shot hatred.  Somebody really didn't like the guy.

The only good news was the deposit receipt from Karls' Rentals on Alpine.  Looked like Karl was out $135, minus the damage deposit.  Alpine's a borderline street.  On one side the houses are nicer and the lawns are mowed.  On the other side, graffiti crawls up alley walls like new ivy.

The shop has a bell on the door and bars on the windows.  A nuanced odor of oil, electrical tape, and old man lingers about the place.  A retiree with a white mustache sits behind the counter on a gunmetal colored stool.  He looks up from a suduko booklet and asks, "Help ya?"

Lee shows him the receipt and asks about the nail gun.

Delmer's Fiddle

This here is a start of a short-story experiment I'm doing as part of a challenge over at Terrribleminds (Terribleminds contains some cussin' so don't go there if that bothers you).

Little Delmar played his fiddle and the clean lonely sound of it filled the house.

Momma called him scrawny with his skinny arms like the frame of a homemade kite and his shoulders that tilted in impossible ways.  That’s what caught him and held him back that night.

After momma tucked him under the quilt, he snuck outside through the kitchen door to go to the pond and try to catch something.  What he sought on these excursions varied; sometimes frogs, sometimes fireflies.  Once, he snuck out to see the box of still blind kittens on the other side of the carport, near the brick pile.

But that last time, momma’d locked the door and Little Delmar, forever so named, stuck his head and twisted his spine just so to go through the doggie door.  He’d done it before.  But momma heard him.

She grabbed the claw hammer from under her mattress and ran down the hall, her nightgown flapping like a great and terrible angel.  Delmar tried backing out and got his neck caught on the heavy plastic flap.  In the dark, momma threw the hammer and knocked a nice chunk of the boys’ skull out of place.

Writing With Others - Probably Part 1

In 1978, ancient history I know, Robert Asprin began a series of books known as the Thieves’ World Series.  No, they were not about Washington D.C.  Rather, each book was a collection of short stories by different writers sharing a fantasy setting wherein the writers could utilize the characters the other writers created.  If memory serves, the only caveat to using another writer’s character was that the ‘borrowing’ writer couldn’t kill a character he or she hadn’t created.

Along similar lines is the duo of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (think end of the world, Lucifer’s Hammer, and elephant-faced space aliens, Footfall).  Neil Gaiman also comes to mind as someone who has worked with many other writers on lots and lots of projects.

In my less spectacularly-successful world, I drive students to the group writing project.  I save this towards the end of the semester when the chaff has drifted from the classroom.  Nothing is worse than the ‘superhero’ saving the group project while the knobs receive the shared grade.  Students know this.  They have a history of group-work slurry that has left a bad taste in their mouths.  This is mostly because they are thrown into the group project arena and no one offers to share, exactly, how do conduct a group project, let alone how to write a document with one or more human beings.  Nor have they been given the liberty to hold one another accountable.

A small, good thing about writing with others is this accountability.  There are deadlines and non-classroom bound writers tend to feel at least a teency bit guilty at letting their partner down; would that I could say the same for the students.  Plus, people who want to write also appreciate a good deadline.  It’s a goal, like writing 50,000 words in the month of November is a goal.  Deadlines are goodness.

Nor is this an academic exercise.  Meaning, it’s not just something for the classroom.  The world collaborates and that’s how stuff gets done.  Even Ted Kaczynski relied on the Postal Service to deliver his diatribes and nail-bombs, while it also seems like it’s the always the quiet neighbor who keeps to him-self that is involved in the mall-shooting.  Nor do I confine the lessons to typical classroom activities.  You see, I haven’t always been a writing instructor.  I have other irons in the fire, have pursued sales leads, managed software projects, hired & fired, conducted reviews, and played Dungeons & Dragons (a collaborative effort if ever there was).

That said, writing with other humans goes against the grain, does it not?  Consider the lonely writer; isolated at the screen, researching, and generally making up stuff.  Writing magic happens alone.  That’s one of the complaints.  Where is the feedback?  Where is the sounding board?  How can a writer find someone willing to read his or her material before it’s ready?

This is one of the bigger bonuses of writing with someone else.  There is immediate feedback. The audience is in place, and egos aside, they review one another’s efforts well before the material hits the grade-book or the submission-letter fan.

Yet, difficulties remain.  Many group-project documents I receive have a patchwork quilt feeling about them.  After thirteen plus weeks of reading each student’s writing, I can tell where one writer’s efforts end and another’s begins.  I’m talking about the writer’s voice, tone, vocabularies, sentence structures, and not about the self-editing that doesn’t always occur (and please, run spell-checker because it’s free).  We all know writing with others is more than a simple copy & paste.

One goal of writing with others is to prepare a document (short story, novel, cookbook, stupid Composition 1 paper, etc…) that is seamless.  The work of many should appear unified in both scope, purpose, and daresay, style?  That’s debatable, but there is probably a reason Faulkner never wrote a story with Hemingway.

True collaboration means both writers have something in mind prior to beginning and that they are willing to work towards those goals.  Enter the classroom thesis, the main idea, the point being proven, the mountaintop of the effort and that annoying thing I ask about before they continue.  For example, if student A wants to write about how text books cost too much and student B wants to write about how text books don’t have enough pictures and the words are too big, there’s a problem.  It’s time for them to refocus and someone is going to have to compromise.

And if neither student wants to compromise, this is a good clue that, perhaps, the effort won’t go so well.  The advice here is to make sure you and the person you are collaborating with are on the same page.  If not, why bother?  You’ll only aggravate one another and that’s not goodness.  Here’s a really funny link to illustrate.

In collaborative fiction, the scope and purpose is not so neat.  I mean, story writers don’t begin with an iron-clad thesis.  They have a plot and they have characters, maybe.  Sometimes they just have an idea or a situation.  I mean, there are almost always characters but sometimes the plot is not in place at the start.  That’s ok.  I’ve just about made up my mind that characters drive the plot and not the other way around.  Otherwise, the story is stilted and forced, and the only thing that should be stilted and forced is a national healthcare service – right?!

But, with only the bare bones of the idea in place, the writing team has to plan what they are trying to accomplish.  And planning is half the fun.  Think brainstorming, like what if there was this guy who fell into a portal to another world when he reached too far into his clothes drier?  Yeah, and what if a centaur found him and decided to take him to the centaur-stables to he could scoop poo for the rest of his days?  A situation like that needs to be fleshed out a bit and two brains are often more creative than one.

And, while this was never meant to be an exhaustive analysis of the collaborative writing adventure, even I know that when I start writing about centaur poo, it’s time to take a break.  Even so, there may be a part two to this.

Willful Suspension

Think 1817…Samuel Taylor Coleridge… Kublah Khan… romantic poets addicted to opium.Ok, don’t have to go that far.  But, one idea Mr. Coleridge had, that has stuck with us (when I say ‘us’ I refer only to myself and the guy in the mirror, isn't that right, my precious?) is the ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’

Here’s the full quote from that Coleridgerian best-seller, Biographica literaria or biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions: (Available at Amazon!!!)

"In this idea originated the plan of the 'Lyrical Ballads'; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."

Looking at the quote with as little context as possible, because I live in a post-modern world, Coleridge is saying he wrote some poems involving pretend subjects and, that in order to appreciate the poems, the reader has to get over the fact that such pretend subjects don’t exist.IOW – the reader has to willingly suspend their disbelief in order to get down with the ballads.
 

In order to appreciate the news and what the government says, a person has to willingly suspend their intelligence and lie-detectors; but I digress.

 

Like say, I write a book about three-legged goblins.Those stuck in literal gear and who cannot shift into pretend will not enjoy said book because three-legged goblins aren’t real.There might even be a segment of society that will read only about the two-legged variety because they are not willing to imagine the three-legged kind.

BUT - writers bank on the fact that a good deal of the genre-reading population will pretend there are three-legged goblins and will buy that book just so they can read about them.  I know a woman who doesn’t like goblins or superheroes or giant robots battling alien sea creatures because they aren’t real.  At the same time she consumes sensitive-bare-chested-stranger-man romance novels at about the same rate she fills the gas-tank on her Prius.  Would that she saw the irony.

Albert Einstein, who was seriously not addicted to opium, said this:

 

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.  For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”  That…that right there.  Thank you, Einstein, for the clarity.

 

If it’s good enough for Coleridge and Einstein, it’s good enough for the guy in the mirror.  Creativity is limited only by imagination.  Nor, let us open our scopes, is this limited to the artistes.  Consider that surgery and insurance sales and computer programming and, heck, just about any job out there, uses a good dose of imagination in order to make things better.