I’m going to try working on a poem today. It’s current title is “My Dog Licks His Balls While the PCP Addict Next Door Talks to a Tree.” Yes, it’s a working title only, but I’m happy about it. I’ve had this poem in my head for about five years, and I even wrote a stanza out at one point, but the pieces didn’t come together as a poem until the night of the Komunyakaa reading. I think now that I didn’t have enough material then to make it a poem because the events didn’t play out until last year, but it’s my experience that writing is like that: a seed is planted in an idea or an image, and the writer must wait for recall or time to make a plant grow.
For the last three days, I’ve been down with a bad flu, so I’m not quite coherent. Today is that miraculous day of feeling significantly better, but despite a pleasant sense of psychological well being, I’m still physically exhausted, my desire to spend an hour on the treadmill overridden by dizzying fatigue after ten minutes of being on my feet. If I have a good night, I should be well enough to be back at work tomorrow. Naturally, I had appointments scheduled for today—none tomorrow. Así es la vida.
At any rate, my treatment plan has included liquids, antibiotics, sleep, and wonderfully mindless reading. The book I’m almost done with now has been surprising. I got it thinking it was one of those tame regency romances in which the female lead is a virgin until about three fourths of the way through the book, when she is deflowered by the male lead whom she loves and happily marries fifty to eighty pages later. Well, well, A Gentleman’s Wager has only one virgin, a secondary character, who loses her maidenhead to her dildo wielding best friend early on and drops all squeamishness about giving hand jobs by the middle of the book. There is so much sex, in fact, that the bed/stable/hallway/drawing room/… scenes in the last third of the book are omitted or abbreviated to keep them from losing their affect.
One sign of how incredibly ill I’ve been is that this last has been my literary revelation of the moment. I think I really understood that unescalating repetition, especially of intense events or emotions, weakens affect, when I went to a showing of the movie A Mighty Heart, about the disappearance and murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl. It’s actually the story of his pregnant wife’s experience during that ordeal. He goes missing near the beginning of the film. She contacts the right people to search and later investigate the disappearance and has three or four screaming fits throughout the movie to get it started or keep it moving. When she finds out he’s been beheaded on film, she breaks down into an agony of sobs that is painful to sit through. She refuses to watch the tape until the very end of the movie. When she does, she breaks into similar wails of grief. While I can’t even begin to imagine how horrible that moment must have been for the widow, I did notice that for myself, as an audience member, the second intense emotional outburst was far less moving, because I’d already experienced the smaller ones connected to the investigation and because the first one over the news of his death, was so big. The director seems to have anticipated such a response because he kept the second outburst short and used it to lead into her labor and delivery. But my own sense is that the scenes would have been more effective, from a craft standpoint, if there had been fewer little outbursts, if the first outburst had been kept small, and if the second had been allowed to grow bigger.
I thought of that a few days ago while reading The Haunting of Hill House. The book is not only different from any of the movie versions I know of but much creepier as well. Four people spend some time in a house known to be haunted. Most paranormal manifestations happen at night, and while they do not happen every night, they do escalate each time they occur. After about a week, two more people come to the house. The first paranormal manifestation happens again. Affect isn’t weakened for several reasons: (1) characters acknowledge that this is a repetition; (2) characters react differently to the phenomena, so the reader is able to gauge how much they’ve changed; (3) the addition of the new characters, who don’t experience the phenomena, provides added information about whence the paranormal force draws its power. The manifestation happens again one or two nights later, but it doesn’t produce a sensation of repetitiveness because it is an escalation of itself: it is produced by one of the inhabitants, who has now absorbed the spirit of the house.
All of this was clear to me, but it didn’t quite click until I noticed that the sex scenes near the end of my trashy novel of the moment were shorter the further I read. The first time a scene was truncated, I thought, “What, no straddling of the hips after a round of oral stimulation?” Those words had no sooner crossed my mind than I realized that there was no point in putting it on the page since I knew it was cumming.
Puntitas reads _What Was She Thinking: Notes on a Scandal_ by Z. Heller and _A Gentleman’s Wager_ by M. Ellis.
