Last Post--One of my Creative Writing Works from this Week

Rebekah

As it rushes by we subsided from our conversation and look at the anonymous showings of life from strangers. Looking through the marks, beneath it, and into our own visions.  It passes quickly it feels as if it’s racing against the clock.  For three minutes we sit in the car, looking at the end of the bud, as the flicker of light almost burned out.  The soaring passed us.  The gates in front of us make us take a moment on our journey to stop and think abstractly.  It’s a nice break, that’s for sure.  It’s magical.  We go from crossing to crossing hoping that we would be stopped by something we couldn’t control.  Sure, it did push our arrival back forty-five minutes, but at this point we did not care.

            We tried to escape from what we did not want to face.  The fire was hot and the feeling of comprehension was lost, about an hour ago too.  As we talked before, we were going to enter and leave together regardless of the results.  It feels as if time is actually standing still for a moment.  This moment though, is something I will want to scar over as quickly as possible.  I kept hearing a thought in my head over and over again.  “Just let go, and let it be.”   All that did was gave me the urge to stand up and scream out John Lennon’s lyrics.  My mind tends to do that.  Bottle the unexpected and damned in the back and then cover up by ensuring that the world keeps moving.  As much as I want to change this moment neither of us had the power to do so.  It was if that fork in the road finally came and the decision was either to understand or forget.

I choose to stand in the middle weighing out the pros and cons, since I clearly am the logical thinker.  Only realizing that it hurt more, so now, I had come to the conclusion to settle, then to forget.  

            How could the last eight years be such a lie?  I guess that’s the thing about life that we do not get told when we are young.  That life is continuous and endless events that are ever so changing.  One moment you could be headfirst only to realize that just your toes are touching.  As we sit here in the mild air of a September night, we looked up to the stars.  I think we are looking for some kind of sign, I mean, isn’t that what everyone does when they feel vulnerable and want to escape?  Road signs tell us where to go everyday, why can’t the stars tell us logical explanations for the emotional and surprised equations? 

            At this point, we are realizing that the bar is there; right above us.  All we had to do was take a leap, close our eyes, and pray that we would not fall down.  The moment we reached, it was if the bar had disappeared.  It reminded me of something I read.  It immediately took me back to when I was a junior in high school.  The passage was read aloud from Daniel Quinn’s work of art, “Ishmael”.

                        “A few years ago you must have been a child at the time, so                    you may not remember it many young people of this country                      had the same impression. They made an ingenuous and                          disorganized effort to escape from captivity but ultimately                          failed, because they were unable to find the bars of the                           cage.”

            We were not going to find the bars of our cage tonight.  We were not going to find them in the near future either. The saddest part is that we believed that we ever could.  Honestly, how could we ever find them if we did not know what they looked like? They were not grey or silver with rounded edges.  They were not gold with soft tops and sparkles inside the metal when sun shined on them.  Something had told us that night that we would find it in the most ordinary of moments, when the noise would settle and the quiet would fill. 

            My sister and I sat and listened to lies that we were being told.  It’s like the lie your parents tell you when you’re young that your cat went on vacation.  Only this was no vacation, only the mere beginning of the end of the line.  When something terrible happens to you, some mourn and try to understand the horror of an act of life.  Others, slip into and overstate where they operate at a faster rate, overcome sleep deprivation, recant food, and mostly look into the simplest of objects but turn it into a whole new story.  As we continued to stare at the grey and transparent smoke that came off of each dark red coal we began to think about the time when we were little.  Jumping as high as we would off the trampoline and trying to be invincible. We were kids, and that’s what we did.  You feel that life will always catch you, or at least your sister would.  We knew at that very moment, no one would catch us from this terrible fall.  We would slowly have to let go, and then begin to stand on two feet. 

            I think at one point or another the story began to get old.  Relic.  Rose Kennedy said, “It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’  I do not agree.  The wounds remain.  In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens.  But it is never gone.”    Rose Kennedy was correct.  Two and half years later, every time we get stop for a train we still remember that mild September air.  We remember the abstract and anonymous signs the people wrote on the trains.  I will remember the cigarette, and how it was slowly burning out in the cracked window.   To think and ponder this day is as to think of your first heartbreak.  It’s still fresh, it still hurts and time, time won’t even heal the wounds of the lost.

Maps to Anywhere Part II- Saturday Night

The second part of Bernard Cooper's novel is great.  I liked the second part of his work better than the first, or at least the story I picked out to understand.  "Saturday Night",  starting on page 87 was one of my favorite stories.  The imagery just blows me away.  The entire story is a double shadow of something else that is going on.

Format wise, the piece is mostly made up of questions.  Which allows you to keep answering the questions that he presents.  The theme is a tad confusing but after reading it a couple of times it starts to make sense.  It's a timeline, just like the remainder of the story.  It's as if there is a couple looking into the future picturing what its going to be like.

           "Over a cover of cold cloud, bearing bouquets, bottles of wis, decks of cards and dominoes, a    sparse arc of punctual people migrate behind the horizon.  While aloft like a league of ghosts or gods, does their vision slip through thick ceilings?  Can they watch us mimic their kisses, embrace our own backs, burrow hands beneath out bedclothes?  Spying their children aglow on earth with a meager heat, do flying parents cry like geese?

 The comparison between the theme and other relatable images is almost transparent.  It creates the scene that something else is going on but you're too stuck on reading just the words alone he states.  It's beautiful.  The work is outstanding and creates more of a story in a shorter amount of time then most people could ever write themselves.

Maps To Anywhere Part I- Bernard Cooper

          The Biggest, Most Beautiful Balcony in the World exert starting on page 21 is one of my favorite exerts in Bernard Cooper’s novel, Maps to Anywhere.  The recollection of the past experiences is shown in vivid detail.  The strange yet now empty game played with his niece is now just a faint memory to him.  He makes the point that during her growing up years she stopped dreaming and believing and started to settle for the stereotypical life of a young girl.  Yet, as the story continues on, the balcony became the place where her highest height was reached. 

           

            “It wasn’t simply the idea of actually dwelling above this dismal view that made the balcony sad.  The thick declining light contributed, and also the shabby curtains drawn behind the sliding glass doors, a leitmotif of misery in this temporal city. “

            Picturing someone standing on a balcony looking down I wouldn’t find the words like that to describe it. Describing the rise of his niece and the fall of the city allows for a vivid image of this  The entire story shows the greatest rise and fall of a great imaginative young girl and a temporal city. 

Response to Lenses-Annie Dillard

I want to take a look at the piece of Lenses by Annie Dillard.  Annie Dillard seems to be very good and clear when writing fiction essay/non fiction.  I want to take a couple of minutes to break down this piece and look at the subtle works that she puts into this piece. 

It starts with a flashback and then shoots to her middle school years.  It's more of a progressive flashback, and it creates the timeline of this piece which ends with her being a "mortal adult".  Which she references in the piece.  Mortal is figurative language, which is shown when watching the swans through the lenses.  She feels immortal though when she looks at the algae and other tiny microorganisms when she was little.  There is a relationship between the distance and intimacy factor of watching the animals when she is right next to them.

I feel that most importantly that the microscope is a metaphor for looking in and simultaneously a literal context of the swans watching.  Looking at something close, but far away. 

Also, i feel that she starts the story with four paragraphs about microscope to give us detail and allow us to feel the comparison to when she's an adult has much more value.  She shows us not tells us how it really was in that Pittsburg basement at a young age.

On page 106,

 "But oddly, this is a story about swans.  It is not even a story; it is a description of swans.  This description of swans includes the sky over a pond, a pair of binoculars, and a moral adult who had long since moved of the Pittsburgh basement."

This is my favorite passage in the piece.  The author for once, goes strait to the point for us non english lovers.  She clearly states what you should know by now and to make it less confusing.  She refers to how cruel she feels about her pastime as a child compared to now.  It also highlights a bigger message that life isn't like how it was when she was a child and you can just wash off a slide and start over in adult life.

Fiction Packet 3: Muddy, Mud, and Mud.

            Okay. So lets look at our last Fiction Packet number 3.  For the next couple of paragraphs I want to focus on the stories of  ‘The Singing Fish” page 8, and “What Our Mother Always Told Us” page 11.  I want to compare and contrast these to passages that derive from the bigger novel of “The Singing Fish by Peter Markos”.

            First lets go through the first exert and highlight some points that are useful to compare against the second part.  At the very bottom of page 8 the sentence reads, “These words that are scribbled and scrawled up and down and all across these made out of mud wall here on the inside of the cave-”.  Another sentence fragment reads, “But these words-these tings that look like words- these marking that are carved into these mud walls-they look to much like words not to be words.”

            Now, look at these passage parts from “What Our Mother Always Told Us”.  The very first sentence sets the tone for the passage and it reads. “What our mother always told us was, Don’t, don’t go, don’t get muddy, don’t walk into this house with mud, with mud wet, with mud caked dry, or the bottoms of your muddy boots.” 

            Comparing them, the first part is appreciating the mud that is used into order to write message in older times.  Whereas now, it’s frowned upon since you are disrespecting your mother.

            They are both different but are stringed together through the theme of mud, and mud may just be a metaphor for something else.  As of right now though, I’ll just look at the surface of it, which is mud.  Muddy, Mud, Mud.

Juice- Second Posting

Today's blog is going to look very different.  It won't be in a narrative way or anything like that.  I learned a lot from working in groups and this is what we had discussed.  As you can see below, it's in a more list format so it's easier to understand the content more and learn more about what the author is really trying to say.

Proportion Surviving

Character(s)

- gender was never clear-from each 'book' it tends to change

Setting

-before the crisis—in the town—grocery store, behind it

From the Context-The details:

- Page 24-25

            -five weeks before crisis- time

            - grocery store- in the town

            - all but the third Sunday of each month, doesn’t go

            - height between her being short and others tall. Cardboard signs

            - customer service, because she wants to be the juice, but not be noticed as looking at the juice. ----metaphor to be close or interactive without really having to interact with people

            -Dialogue is present between main character and father

                        -calling her out saying she isn’t a people person but should go into something anti-                                 people like numbers

                        -doesn’t like numbers, too high and far reaching to explore.

                        - she wants to be “wall-free”

                                    -“ where she was and where I needed to be”

                                    -“ to get “juice” she would have to leave people behind, but she                                                           really is making that an excuse to be alone’  

                                    - be alone “obtain juice” but she would rather be alone to.

Page 23)

Theme=Juice, Juice=Happiness

         

“I was happy, I mean I was in my juice”

            -on 28) when her lovers were gone, she did not want to drink it

                        -“Life without juice has taken on the name and shape of my weakest character who-when we passed on the street- did not know me.

Juice. Part One.

Juice.  The first half of the book is a bit different from most fiction readings.  I got a little lost in each part of the book.  The first part made sense.  The way it started it out I thought that the main character was a girl.  Yet, as the novel continues, I was starting to be convinced that it was a boy.  So on the gender note, I have no idea.
Then, the book keeps referring to a 'crisis'.  The 'crisis' at first presented itself as a major event the took out all of the town and the remaining townspeople which allowed for the character to deal with loneliness. But, in Proportion Surviving on page 27, the character references a 'second lover' which makes the book sounds like it is talks in present time.  After reading more, the entire book has the theme of loneliness regardless if they are present in a town with out townspeople.  Throughout the book, it seems like the character only refers to time in the context of talking about their past.
For instance, I did not know if they were talking about the past/present when referring to the Juice or fruit devastation of apples. It seemed like it was referring to the past and this is how they are dealing with it now.
The character also talks about other characters.  There's on line when talking about the dad and whether the main character should of worked with numbers because they are not a people person.
I honestly do not know what this book is talking about.  It jumps around and it's a little hard to break down.  But this is how much I could get from it.