I have been meaning to post a segment from my current poetic-in-progress for a while now, and here is one. It is a moment of minor epiphany for its teller, Miss Brewster, who is secretary to an investigative agent named Darjeeling Falcon. I think that is sufficient explanation - if you want more, you will find it in most of my recent posts, wherein I have been yammering on tediously about this story instead of writing it.
Somebody asked in a comment on said tedious posts how I apply my 'Windows in the World' ideal to this story. This segment is not intended to be an answer to that question. I hope this sort of thing happens inadvertently anyway, in which case maybe this will indirectly provide something of an answer. But I am not so confident in thinking that I have reached my ideal to the point where I can say "Look, here, and here, it is ..." and I am optimistic enough to hope that it is not isolated to mere pinpoints, but spread across the entire work. However, when I have a bit of time, I mean to sit down and examine the matter more thoroughly; there is little point in having ideals, after all, if they can only stick in theory.
tolle scriba
The clock struck half-two. I stretched my aching legs as far as the desk would allow and stared stupidly at the pile of finished reports. The notes were practically ready-made reports to begin with, I realized, and with another stab of irritation I wondered how inept Falcon thought I was.
“This will never do, Ingrid,” I said aloud to the littered room. “What you need is some fresh air.”
It was the sort of moment that Falcon would have walked in on and listened to with placid amusement, only revealing his presence when I had finished making a thorough fool of myself. A careful peep behind me revealed a closed door. The hallway was empty when I went outside, making certain I had a key about me before I let the door slide shut. Falcon’s cleverly rigged automatic latch had proved too much for my absentmindedness in times past.
“Secretary,” I tried the word out on my tongue. “Secretary. I don’t know why I insist on the office management title. I am a secretary, minus the fashionable skirts and—oh!” I plunged across the street with a recklessness that was unmerited. There was neither car nor carriage in sight.
The little park in the middle of Steeple was part of the church’s efforts to make the city beautiful. It was a little wild just now; efforts to keep the grasses trimmed and the trees tidy slackened with the advent of summer’s heat. The wildness made it even more incongruous with the city around it, as if the spirit of Steeple Forest had slipped in through the ground beneath the houses and begun to manifest itself in the city’s heart. But even with this additional wildness, it was clearer and brighter than the forest, and the threat of outlaws was pleasingly absent.
As a park, it lacked in any distinct shape or purpose; there was one path skirting it, but none cutting through between the trees, as if one was meant to go everywhere and nowhere at all. If one walked in a straight line from the front of the investigations office across the park, eventually one came to the other side, where across the street there lay the church responsible for the park, a gleaming white vestige of days gone by. True to my own custom, I did not walk the bordering path, but rambled until I felt it was enough, at which point I parked myself against the rough back of a tree. Here I dozed (or so I thought) for a quarter of an hour before starting back.
“Tell a story!” The words sounded quite close to me, and I sat up with a start. I had fallen asleep sooner than I supposed, and fancied myself at home and in bed. For a moment, the greens and browns of my surroundings swirled in my helpless vision, and then I remembered where I was. “Tell a story!” I looked around, bewildered, for the source. The voice which seemed so close at first now grew distant. “Tell a story! Tell a story! Tell a story! No, no! I want a story!”
It was only then that I recognized the tiresome chant of a spoilt child. Peering around the tree, I caught sight of a perambulator disappearing around a corner amidst the skirts of some exasperated nursemaid. The sight of the hardship of another woman’s work brought me up short, and I resumed my seat against the tree in a much less irritated frame of mind. Falcon might be exasperating, but he was not so bad as a demanding, irrational child. He was pretentious and silly, and gave himself airs, but he was reasonable where it mattered and only selfish where it did not.
No, I did not regret that I was not born into a family of nursemaids or governesses (household professions were kept exclusively to families who, apparently, had always had them). The oddness of my situation was a sufficient sort of oddness. For some reason, I could hear Falcon’s voice, with the odd inflection of his youth: You would never have starved…
“But I must do something beyond simply not starving,” I informed the nearest squirrel, who looked at me with the patronizing eye of one who finds its object equal parts harmless and mad. “The nursemaid tolerates the child’s petulance for the present because (if she does her job well) she knows it will go away eventually. That is the satisfaction of her work: her creative talent, just as one paints a picture and finds satisfaction. But I…” I frowned. The squirrel waited patiently for the continuation. He almost looked sympathetic.
“No, it is not my business to make Falcon a better person. I might, I suppose, attempt to berate him into a more docile, flattering form of a friend, but that would require tact and manipulation on my part, and I seem incapable of both with him. And… no, that simply would not be right. Anyway, that is the sort of things wives are always supposed to be doing to their husbands, and if it is hideous enough in the marital state then—” I broke that thought off hastily. For some odd reason, it seemed to border on sacrilege. “Anyway, that seems to be the source of my discontent; I cannot find any way to be creative. When Papa was alive, he seemed to realize this and I suppose he was the one who made me keep at it—but now everybody else seems to have forgotten about me. Yet I must make something, and it won’t be Falcon.”
Unbidden, memory of the child’s words pierced my consciousness like a lightning-bolt of revelation after a moment of thunder: tell a story. I had not written in a long time. It had simply petered out—from lack of inspiration or motivation, I could not say. Falcon never asked—there was no one else to ask—and I could not recall one moment where I had resolutely given it up. I saw now that it was gone, surrendered by degrees. And yet before the sensation of shame or loss could strike, the necessity of getting it back fell on me like a thunderbolt, pealing in my ears like a thousand bells.
Bells!—but not only like bells. The clock, quite close, rang half-four. I sprang to my feet with an apology to the squirrel, who (far from acting startled) seemed give a cordial nod of acceptance even as I fled. My feet crossed the park with purpose masking my state of mind. I beheld no one subject, but a thousand images jumbled together with fleeting clarity: the brass figure of a falcon crashing stupidly onto the combed pate of a distracted man, roses tumbling in an abundance of perfume over a white wicker fence, a newspaper heading from three years ago proclaiming “THE FALCON CATCHES PREY WITH BIRDSEYE ALACRITY,” and then at last the fierce glimmer of interest in a squirrel’s eyes as he stood quietly under a barrage of speech with the breeze playing in his rusted silver tail.
This is fantastic. I want more.
Now I feel I should explain myself. In perusing these little eddies of the Blogosphere, there has been much discussion (some of it originating from this particular source) on how we should write, what we as writers need to say. And I often find myself rather blithely agreeing, even chiming in, but as I was reading your post, and agreeing, and thinking about chiming in, something brought me up short, and I thought, "All these words about what I should do, but am I actually doing it?" And so I ended up posing to you a question which was meant more for myself.
You may not have intended to answer said question, but I do see the glimmer of Purpose beyond the plot. I agree that it becomes possible, maybe even easy, to over-intellectualize one's writing by resolutely and unwaveringly marching toward The Point until the work becomes pedantic and insipid and not worth reading at all [cough]Ayn Rand[/cough]. On the other hand, some firm purpose is necessary, because after all, we do need to be writing in such a manner as befits our calling. At this point it time, I don't claim to have a good answer. I suppose that's why we keep writing.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
I'm afraid this seems very insipid after Jonathan's comment, but I wanted to say that I was delighted that you posted another smidgeon of The Brew. Is this the beginning? It seems to be an introduction to the story as a whole. I am particularly fond of Falcon (although he did not show up in person here) and I would say that he reminds me of Lord Peter, except that I've only seen glimpses of Lord Peter and I wouldn't want to sound foolish.
There! A highly unphilosophical comment. But Megan said my last blog post was brilliant, and you know I can't be brilliant all the time.
I want to use the word "insipid" in my comment, as that appears to be the leitmotif of this comment traffic, but instead, I will offer up a small bit of very dusty editing: last paragrhaph; the sentence that contains, "...(far from acting startled) seemed give a cordial nod...," seems to need the word "to" between "seemed give." Hopefully that wasn't too...insipid, because your work was anything but. Interesting segment, Anna.