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Daily Prompt: The Sword of Damocles

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 12 asks, “A literary-minded witch gives you a choice: with a flick of the wand, you can become either an obscure novelist whose work will be admired and studied by a select few for decades, or a popular paperback author whose books give pleasure to millions. Which do you choose?”

(Why is it a witch? Why not a literary agent? And who “flicks” a wand, anyway? On to my response.)
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I know nothing about the life of the actor Hugo Weaving, and I even had to look up his name before typing it. He is so famous that he is obscured by his success. He played Agent Smith in the three “Matrix” films, Elrond in the three “Lord of the Rings” films, V. in “V for Vendetta,” and provided the voice for Megatron in the “Transformers” franchise and Noah in the “Happy Feet” movies. I trust that the film industry has made him an extraordinarily wealthy man, given that these dozen films have earned approximately $8 billion dollars for that industry. Yet he could walk down my street unnoticed.

Hugo Weaving doesn’t know. (Photo from aceshowbiz.com.)

He disappears into roles that require makeup, prosthetic devices, masks, but always gives portrayals that are compelling, fully realized, quotable—not only quotable because the lines are memorable, quotable because of his delivery of them. Other actors may take on make-up-heavy parts, but, well, Gary Oldman is always Gary Oldman, the best Gary Oldman that there is, but always recognizable as himself.

As I wrote above, I know nothing about Weaving’s life and truly hope it is a joy-filled one, but it seems to me that he has the ideal successful life in the arts: He can shine when he wants to and not when demanded, because his face is not his art, even though he is an actor. I once met Stephen King, the rare author who looks like his various portraits on his book jackets, and watched a crowd assemble once someone recognized him and then follow him down Main Street in New Paltz. He was shopping, not doing the things that make him famous, not typing a book while walking, just window shopping. Individuals in the crowd were vying for his attention, perhaps auditioning to be cast by his brain for a part in his next book.

(If any of his books published in the last 15 years features a bespectacled, young, not-attention-grabbing bookseller, it’s me, just so you know. Hugo Weaving can play me in the movie version.)

In the legend of the Sword of Damocles, Dionysus, a king, offers one of his courtiers, Damocles, that which Damocles covets: total power and extreme wealth. The king suggests they switch places and Damocles accepts. There is one caveat: Dionysus places over the throne a sword that is held in place with a single hair from a horse’s tail. Damocles learns his lesson: Watch what one wishes for. A life of supreme power and wealth comes with the inner neurotic knowledge that the world is vying to take it from you. Damocles happily switches back to his old life.

Does a writer want fame and wealth now or long-term but minor admiration later? Myself, I want both most days and do not see these as mutually exclusive. Pulp writers are deserving of study, since they, usually, describe better than many what is happening in his or her culture’s collective imagination. There is a reason so many people buy their books.

The writers who are obscure in their lifetimes usually possess something many creative artists do not: a supreme confidence that what they are doing is important to someone, even if that someone is only his or her own self. Readers are nice and all, but are they necessary? Out of the millions of people on this planet, someone might be touched to read these words and learn that they are not alone in feeling or thinking or imagining this or that. It is like believing in true love, and people fall in love every day, right? A single true love reader might be all a writer really needs, whenever love comes to town, humously or post.

Every writer is writing to an audience whose size truly can not be known, and it may not matter. If I write a letter to you, I do not know what you are going to do with it. You might toss it away unopened or you might show it to friends. Kafka told his friends to burn all his writings upon his death. Obviously, since we know his name and his works, they (happy for us) betrayed his last wish. If I post a public response to a blog prompt, I do not know if it will be liked (I want it to be considered witty and what-not, but the only say I have in the matter is to write it) or even if it will be read.

I want the true love readers and I want to make a living at writing. These are not mutually exclusive. It’s money that matters.

I want my sentences to be of some use, and feedback and encouragement in the form of $ would be great. I’d take Hugo Weaving’s fame over Stephen King’s, but I am careful what I wish for.

Daily Prompt: King for a Day

Posted on August 11, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 11, 2014, asks, “You wake up one day and realize you’re ten years older than you were the previous night. Beyond the initial shock, how does this development change your life plans?”

(Heh, for too much of my life, when I got up I felt like I was ten years older than the night before. This is an attempt at flash fiction; i.e. write a story in an hour or less.)
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It was never the day’s fault. There is no physical law that states unequivocally that the next day must be the next day. Someone, someone very annoying, decided that August 11 ALWAYS follows August 10, and to make matters worse, we all continue to agree. It was like being an employee, he thought. (He was shaving already, making good time.) Some dude says he owns the factory and his major stipulation for paying you for work is that you agree with him that he is the owner of the factory. What happens if today I decide-slash-discover that I am the owner of the factory, he thought. What if I am the chairman of the board instead of second lead for the first-level documentation department? (The best thinking happens in the shower.)

Physics is proving that our motion from the past to something we call the future through a sometimes heartless expanse we call the present is a local phenomenon. They have seen particles exist in two places at the same time, even seen a particle’s effect before the particle came into existence. The next day can be yesterday once again or July 4, 1776, over and over. (Just with better plumbing this time, he thought after leaving the bathroom.)

So it was never the day’s fault that he hated it upon awaking and rediscovering what he had to rediscover about himself. Poor, guiltless day.

He didn’t hate the day, he hated what he rediscovered: that time moved forward. A local phenomenon, but no more local than everywhere on the planet. And somehow he was running late.

No time for breakfast, but there was none to be had, he found. He had visited the grocery store the night before. (“But did I?” he joked with himself, continuing his philosophical inner life. He pictured someone interrupting, “You’re pleased with your deep thoughts, huh?” No one did.) He filed away the thought that he was going to need to go shopping tonight. (“Brilliant, I can hold two unrelated thoughts in my brain at the same time, one about quantum philosophy and “sci-fi in my life” and the other about shopping lists. Just like physics. Where did I put my groceries?”)

His regular newsstand was closed, so he crossed back to another stand. “Slumming today, eh?” the clerk asked him.

“Excuse?”

“Well, you used to come around this street before … .” Looking for his daily, he saw it: August 11, 2024. And he was on the front page. A board vote about his chairmanship of the the factory had been scheduled for the afternoon. Things did not look good for his continuing in the position, it turned out.

Daily Prompt: First Instincts Versus Second Opinions

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 10 asks, “What are some (or one) of the things about which you usually don’t trust your own judgment, and need someone’s else’s confirmation?”
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My first instinct, which is that my first instinct can not be trusted, is usually wrong. This often puts me in any number of conundra.

The paragraph immediately above gives a clear example: My typing fingers wanted to write “conundrum,” then wanted the plural form. But what is the plural of conundrum? My all-too clever brain thought: “conundra. That’s funny. It’ll get a smile from someone.” The someone who smiled was me, which was enough to make it so, and I typed “conundra” for “conundrums.” But I go look it up and learn—thanks, World of Information!—that since conundrum does not come from a Latin root, but sounds like it might have, the proper plural is “conundrums.” Further, the word “conundra” has existed for a long, long while as a humorous, mock-educated plural form for plural problems. “Mock-educated.” That’s me, so it remains “conundra.”

But if that agonized convolution of almost-thought is a real tracing of how I decide most things, and it is, it is a wonder that I find enough food each day to survive.

Thus I need help deciding things more often than not, but have made a life’s habit of refusing help or of going in the opposite direction.

The one best example of going against my first instinct of ignoring my first instinct came when I first met my girlfriend, my partner, my love. (All one person.) The very moment I saw her, a thought crossed my mind (always a dangerous thing) just on other side of being articulate; words were not there, but the thought, if it can be captured, was: “She is going to be important to me.” Not possessing foresight, I did not know what that might mean (the joy is that I am still learning)—I needed five bucks that night, and maybe she was going to lend it to me. Or maybe she was going to join me for this ride we have been on for these last couple-plus years.

Knowing myself all-too not very well, I knew that I should not reach out to her, not try to get to know her, ask her out on a date or 300. My pre-instinct said, “You want to know her.” My first instinct replied (of course, my first instinct feels like a reply already): “No you don’t. Fear rejection. Fear acceptance. We don’t have any food in the fridge.”

I did something I have no history doing and asked friends. “I think I like our new friend.” (My questions end with periods instead of question marks.)

“Yeah?”

“I think I’m going to ask her out.” (Now, this was the challenge: One of the first sentences we had heard from her was that she was beginning a year-long moratorium on dating, starting that week. Easy excuse for me to throw in a towel that I did not even know the color of.)

“You haven’t yet? I thought you had.” That semi-clinched it: My friends knew me less well than I thought they did. That was enough second opinion for me.

My first instinct, to always doubt my first instinct, led me to do the opposite of what I was telling myself to do and ask her on a date. I ignored my instinct to ignore my instinct and trust that someone special was in front of me. At the time: I was unemployed; had not yet had necessary eye surgery, so my glasses were unbelievably thick and unattractive; had not yet been diagnosed, so I was not collecting my Social Security. Thus my life situation was that special kind which does not include income. So my asking her out on a date at all was audacious, and I am not an audacious human.

For once I was, and it made all the difference. I am grateful for her inspiring this audacious behavior from me, and happy she was just as audacious in return.