I. As The Story Goes... (Part One)

The tedium of life as experienced in Ennui Heights, the maze of low-rise tenement buildings on the South End of the Western half of the city, was no more tiresome a routine than watching the red glowing minutes of a digital clock slice the absurdity off another trivial day rising where the last one fell. Here, in the standstill of repetition, life drags on, pulling those in the Northern section of the Eastern block of that maze along, and it’s been said by those with nothing else to say, “Shit, the days all start and end the same around here.” In fact, a secondary character, a minor one, only mentioned once or twice in any real sense (this being one of those times), lived up the hall and once complained, “I would kill myself out of boredom,” while stamping the mud from his boots in the foyer where rows of identical mailboxes lined the walls. “But then what would I do? Sleep? Wait? What is there to do when you’re dead? At least down here I’ve got TV.”

A novel beginning, one could say, as this morning began a new page, similar in size and shape to the pages of yesterday, and the same in every way to the ones that will most likely fall tomorrow in what has become known as the Great Unfinished Chapter, or the great wide open Chapter Twelve. The words sat lifeless on the same old pages of Chapter Twelve’s undeveloped opening…. as this was the chapter the almighty Writer was working on when he put down his pen. Some say it was out of boredom that the creator of this fictional world became so inattentive in the overall outcome of the Novel. Perhaps it was complacency that caused him to lose interest in our unresponsive storyline. Others say he’s suffered a self-inflicted case of writer’s block from which he still hasn’t recovered.

“God is dead,” the characters of Chapter Twelve wailed; each of them, gaping and naked in their incompletion, undefined and crudely written, and in a state of suffering, the way a human might suffer a spiritual void. The ‘lack’ they felt inside was due to the unfinished nature of the very manuscript their world took place in.

“Then there’s no one judging, if no one is watching,” someone yelled back. “And we’re free to do as we will.”

“We must do what is written,” many of the background characters were taught to believe.

 Still others were programed to adhere to the New Word, those approved words chosen and revised and defined by the Board of Morals and Decency. This far reaching and hardly scrupulous panel of officials had the final say over what the Writer’s ‘Intended Moral’ was for each of the stories in his sacred body of Original Works that created the world they lived in. Even the finished portions of Chapter Twelve, the ‘official Now’, were still only rough drafts with overgrown  front lawns of meandering wordy descriptions which the militant Editing Enforcement troops, those thugs in black pants and polished boots, gripping their erasers out front like canisters of tear gas, had not yet come by to mow down. It was a bleak world, over or underwritten, depending on who you are while reading it.

Let’s say you asked me.

Well, it was a world full of old-ideas to begin with if you ask me. With all the characters so self-absorbed, or suffering from the “lack” inside, and then there’s the tedium of life, and of course The Big Distraction was on at five, so nobody wanted to listen to the Narrator… me, I said it, Dr. Gestalt. I’m no doctor any more than I am a narrator, but this is the lot I have been given. I’ve been burdened with the overview of the entire living Storyline. In some ways I have been burdened with the truth, although in the end it is only my truth, seen through the perception of the whole, and perception of the whole has a reality of its own… a Gestalt Reality, if you will… and I hope that you do.

In this literaturistic world, where life breeds first from the written word, I am right there describing each movement. I’m inside every character’s head. What you get on the page is this active voice that I hear in mine, sometimes so loudly that it takes the better half of an evening with a fifth of bourbon to get it to stop. It’s an intrusive and arrogant narrative voice… a constant monologue that chatters nonstop like a train of thoughts, picking apart the past and taking inventory, anticipating the future and pulling me out of the presence of the Chapter’s flow. If I’m absorbed in that ongoing story, the story of me, of who said what, or what I should have said when I said what I said instead, then I’m lost in its one-long-sentence snaking its way through my head, through all topics and back to the beginning to swallow its own punctuation mark at the end. If I can silence the sentence I can transcend it. From up there I’ve got the bird’s eye view of the Gestalt Reality, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

As narrator, I’m the most deeply rooted in the molecular make-up of the body of the chapter, and in the gestalt I saw it all go down. So why wouldn’t I say something? I stood right here and said all I could say about it… but everybody was like, “Oh that’s the Narrator… he’s always going on about something. He never shuts up.” And that’s when I learned that too much talking numbs the ears of those who are listening, and less and less is heard, and more becomes background noise, until nobody’s even paying attention any longer.

And that’s exactly what ended up happening.

The characters stopped paying attention, and if they were, they weren’t saying anything… and if they did, there was nobody listening that cared anyway… but yet they all knew every detail about The Big Distraction, who was on it, and what was said, and who played, and who’s on next week’s episode.

The attitude of most was, “What can I do if I was only mentioned once, ten Chapters ago, in a vague sentence about a smear of faces in a stadium game of distraction ball, and I was never mentioned again. What can I do to change the Overall Storyline then? It’s naïve to think that my insignificant couple of paragraph flashback at the beginning of the book could have any difference in the outcome of the ending. Might as well make my story fit in with the Rest of the Story, might as well fall in line… and that’s how the story went… went to hell, if you ask me.