Zucceta
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Post by Zucceta on Apr 22, 2015 17:55:10 GMT
Smokes and Shapes/The Stars were Gods/Symmetry in Starfish and Snowflakes (Yet to choose title)
She pulls the seatbelt across herself and shuts the door. The car was warm, tobacco-scented; the chair creaked beneath her movement as wrinkled leather ought. The radio crackles with thin static, but above it plays a rock music station, quietly enough to allow for the sound of the road moving beneath his wheels, but audible. She recognises the song and tries to recall the lyrics as the night world begins to move around them, a world of black but for the headlights falling across scarred tarmac, but for the dim desert passing to either side of the car, but for the myriad of stars like bright punctures in a sea of darkness.
“Where you headed?” He drawls after a moment of silence, rich and southern, her idea of the American frontier personified. Her mind begins to wander, trying to perceive a rich history of the Old West in his accent, glinting gunmetal, desert heat. She pushes the thought away.
“The same way you are,” she pauses to pull a cigarette from her bag. “The next town is thirty miles away. I’ll find a hotel or something there. You want one?”
The man shakes his head. “Trying to quit.”
“Mind if I light up?”
“Go ahead.”
She balances the cigarette between her lips. He glances at her, frowning, before turning back to the road. “Where were you walking so late?” he asks, voice inquisitive.
She rolls her mouth to the side. “I guess I’m just trying to get… somewhere. What about you?”
“What?”
“Why’re you driving so late?”
“I guess, just to get somewhere. Don’t you realise it’s pretty dangerous to get into a car with a stranger in the middle o’ the night?”
She chuckles. “I can handle myself. Didn’t you realise it’s pretty dangerous to pick up a stranger in the middle of the night?”
“Touche, miss.”
The radio plays a couple of songs. She watches the desert roll past the side of the car. “The sky is beautiful here. It reminds me of home. ‘Everywhere shares the same stars’. Who said that?”
He shrugs. “You’re from… England, right? You’re not American, at least.”
She nods. “I lived in a little village, and the night sky was bright with stars, like here. When I was a child I used to play make-believe with them.”
He grins. “How’s that? You made shapes with them?”
“To start with.” She takes a drag on her cigarette, exhaling smoke and shapes. “Eventually I began to piece together a narrative. All the stars were gods, heroes, warriors. I gave them names, real or made-up, Hera, Thor, Daisy. They waged war with one another at my beckoning. I gave them reason; lust, honour, pride, cruelty, ambition. I suppose I was the author of their destiny.”
The man smirks. “For me, ‘make-believe’ was hitting my younger brother with a stick. You sound way more imaginative.”
She continues with a smile. “It’s funny how memory works. Every time a battle was lost, a hero or god killed, armies vanquished, I recall the stars blackening in the sky, vanished from the cosmos. I did this for months on end, you understand, whenever the night sky was free of cloud these gods would rage against each other and I would watch.
“One day, when I walked outside, the sky was entirely black but for a single star that shone directly above me.” She pauses and looks at the man, biting her lip, before continuing. “I remember being approached by a man moments later. His skin was dark, the colour of space, but the edges of his form seemed to glow with a bright electrical light that you’d catch from the corner of your eye, and his eyes seemed to burn with pure energy, focused star-light. He wasn’t clothed, but… somehow he wasn’t naked either. He was wounded, a trickle of what must have been blood coming from a graze above one of his eyes, and he pressed a hand to his side as he limped closer to me.”
The radio crackles and fuzzes momentarily before returning to music.
“He claimed that he came from the sky, that he was one of the last survivors of a galactic war that had ravaged the Milky Way. He said that the source of the conflict had been traced back to me. He dropped to his knees and pleaded with me to stop, that whatever I’d done would be reversed if I just stopped.”
The driver glances at her. “Did that really happen?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I told him I’d stop, and I did; I must have, for he vanished, and all the stars came back to the sky.”
He grins. “A little girl with the power to end and restore worlds. That’s a little hard to swallow, missy.”
She coughs, before taking another inhalation of her cigarette. “I guess, but the earth is strange. That’s what all story-tellers do, though, isn’t it?”
He considers. “I suppose… Worlds and lives created on a page, on the screen, radio?”
She nods. “Yeah. But most importantly, the creators carry these worlds on their shoulders, are burdened with them forever. In that way, I suppose they are gods, too.”
Silence, but for the radio. A song plays, then another. The world seems extend only to where the end of the headlight’s reach, and for the numerous stars that dance in the heavens.
“You’re a writer?” He asks.
“Almost. I’m currently studying English.” She smiles. “I’ve got a few ideas, but I’m nervous to start.”
“Do it. Your imagination is sublime.”
She laughs. “Sure, whatever. Thanks, though.”
“I studied history myself… way back in the day. I specialised in ancient history.”
“Oh yeah?”
He nods. “Yeah. Many ancient civilisations worshipped the stars. Let me show you.”
The car begins to slow down, pulling over to the side of the road. She grins. “A history lesson, eh? Well, I’ve got all night, I suppose.”
The two exit into the chill desert. Something barks in the distance. She shivers.
The man smiles, grin barely visible by the light of the car. “I won’t take long.”
“Don’t worry. You’ve saved me a lot of time tonight. Just being a little pathetic.”
“The ancient Assyrian civilisation worshiped a pantheon of gods, usually lead by a guy named Ashur, believed to be the sun deified. When the imperial Assyrians conquered other civilizations, they did not make their citizens believe in their pantheon; instead, they told ‘em that their gods had abandoned them. Pretty cruel, huh?
“They worshiped Ishtar, the god of love, war and sexuality, seen in the night sky as the planet Venus, there, close to Regulus in the Leo constellation,” he points to a particularly bright light in the sky, next to a smaller star, as she squints and tries to make it out. “There was Sin, or Nanna, a god of wisdom, who was worshipped as a moon deity. And… so on, so forth,” he finishes, scratching the back of his head.
She stares into the sky, twisting around. It was more than just black with little spots of white; it was blues and reds, combining into purple, and greys, an aspect of silver shining from the great moon. “I can see why they were worshipped so,” she says, voice laced with awe.
“Are you religious?” he asks.
“No. I went to a Church of England school as a kid, and that shit put me off forever. Buddhism’s cool, though. You?”
“Short answer or long answer?”
“Whichever suits you best.”
He laughs. “I used to be an atheist, militantly so. I was sick of mom and paps going on and on about Christ, as they’re prone to do in this part of the country. I thought it was all bullshit… pardon my language, miss. I got out of that house as soon as I could get a job, and went to college a bit later on when I had some money behind me... anyway, during one of my first days at college, I accidently went to the wrong class. I was sat in the middle of the lecture theatre, wedged in between math students, and too embarrassed to leave and find my actual class,” he grins. “I was so quiet back then.
“The lecture was on something known as the logarithmic spiral. It’s a type of spiral that repeats in nature. The ‘arms’ of the Milky Way, for instance… the way a hawk circles its prey, shells of snails. After talking about this pattern in detail, the lecturer went on and described other patterns that repeat constantly in nature, like symmetry in starfish and snowflakes.
“All of these patterns in nature made me re-evaluate what I believe. Could all of these patterns just appear as a quirk of physics and chemistry? And if so, what ‘created’ these physical laws that our universe abides by? It all leads back to the Big Bang, but what was before that? A repeating cycle of universes expanding and contracting, exploding and crunching, another pattern repeating itself throughout time? Or something that ‘coded’ our universe and pressed the ‘start’ button,” he pauses briefly, allowing the loudest silence to wash over them in the Arizona desert, before continuing with a snicker, “or perhaps something who considers itself an ‘author’ like yourself, who is simply playing make-believe with the universe as we know it, carrying a world in its mind so real that its narrative continues to this day.”
The girl smiles. “So short answer yes?”
“Short answer maybe, though I’d probably lean more towards ‘yes’ if I was approached by a ‘star god’ as a kid like you.”
He laughs. “There’s no way to really know for sure. C’mon. Let’s get driving. We’ve got somewhere to get to.”
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Zucceta
Administrator
PL: 379,083
Oozaru(x10) MSSj(x15) S.Ooz(x22) SSj2(25x)
Zeni: 2290
Tag: @admin
OOC Name: therevolution
Posts: 2,309
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Post by Zucceta on Apr 23, 2015 21:27:02 GMT
With The Stars Were Gods, the focus of my writing was the idea of ‘stories-within-story’, extended into the ideas of a frame narrative, and of meta-fiction. The ‘story within a story’ aspect, often used to give symbolic or emotional value to the text or story, was primarily influenced by Haruki Murakami’s On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning. In 100% Perfect Girl, the protagonist imagines an encounter with his perfect girl in which he tells her his (potentially true) tale of how they first met, and subsequently drifted apart and forgot each other, all the while relaying this to someone else. Stories-within-stories and meta-fiction are also common features of Neil Gaiman’s work, particularly his comic book and graphic novel works: The Sandman, Signal to Noise, Violent Cases and Mr Punch, many of which influenced my text’s tone towards story-telling (as a powerful act). Leslie Klinger writes of Gaiman: ‘[he examines] deeply human motives within the stories of multiple pantheons of gods’. [2012, Preface] In my work, I used this idea in the girl’s childhood ‘mythologies’ that contained ‘warring’ gods, and in the strange being who supposedly approached her. I decided that my story would also use the device of stories within a story. For The Stars were Gods, I used a technique known as embedded or frame narratives. A frame narrative is a device wherein a primary narrative is introduced to lead into secondary narratives within the story. Mieke Bal writes of frame narratives: [N]arrative texts in which at the second or third level a complete story is told. The classic example is the story cycle of the Arabian Nights […] The primary narrative presents the story of Scheherazade […] Every night she tells a story; in that story new stories are embedded. (2009, p57) This is a similar structure to Murakami’s piece, with the narrative told in three layers; firstly the text’s “present” scenario with the protagonist talking to a friend about running into the girl, then the recalled memory, and within the memory an envisioned encounter or alteration to the memory in which he tells the girl a story relating to their past. The Stars were Gods follows a similar layering of narratives. Like Murakami’s piece, in The Stars were Gods the primary narrative takes place over a very short space of time, two individuals conversing in a car on a night-drive until they reach the nearby town. However, unlike Murakami’s piece, the stories within the primary narrative continue through the dialogue, never breaking away into a separate story, instead told with interruptions, such as when the radio crackles with static, and verbal traits, such as the driver’s south US accent. I decided to have the two characters, by a twist of fate, be similar intellectually as to allow them to bounce their stories and information off of each other, layering the significance of the stars and also the idea of creation. Due to the focus on the dialogue and interaction between the two characters to weave and layer the narrative, I had to debate how much individual voice to give the two characters. I changed the man’s dialect, such as word choice and inflection, to suit his geographical background, but otherwise I decided to keep the dialogue clean, without the hallmarks of real speech, to allow for more clear description of the secondary narratives within the text. This also helped to establish the ethereal tone of the text I was aiming for, aiding the slightly surreal night drive through the desert, with conversational dialogue that doesn’t quite fit the setting or the early characterisation. I wanted the tone of the text to come across as subtly absurdist, the events within both the frame narrative and the secondary narratives being barely believable but interesting and intellectually stimulating nonetheless. I wanted The Stars were Gods to focus thematically on the idea of fiction and authorial creation. I did this by using meta-fiction, a device closely linked to frame narratives. In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner writes: [Metafiction] gives the reader an experience that assumes the usual experience of fiction as its point of departure […] What interests us in [these] novels is that they are not novels but, instead, artistic comments on art. (1991, p32-33) If ‘conventional’ fiction is used to explore the world, then meta-fiction is used to explore fiction, and the emotional response it causes in its intended audience; a type of fiction where the ‘vivid and continuous dream’ is broken to allow for analysis of story-telling (Gardner, 1991, p86-87). 100% Perfect Girl is meta-fiction as it enables the reader to think about the nature of stories, due to the protagonist’s tale. A well-known example of meta-fiction is in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when the prince asks the players to perform a play, the Murder of Gonzago, which, with slight changes to material, is re-named the Mousetrap. The play serves as a device to mimic the murder of Hamlet’s father by his uncle to provoke an emotional reaction in him and allow the Prince no doubt that his uncle committed the deed. My story more explicitly talks about stories, focusing on their creation rather than just their emotional effect. The girl states that, as all story-tellers create stories, and worlds to inhabit these stories, they are equivalent to gods over these worlds. This plays into the next narrative, where the driver discusses his views on religion, and what a real God would think of himself and his creations. I attempted to infer something about patterns in fiction and in mythology, such as the recurring worship of the stars as gods by both ancient civilizations and the girl, by his talking about patterns that recur in nature. My piece could have more heavily featured the primary narrative, which could have lent the secondary narratives more emotional weight; however, the lack of focus on the primary narrative allowed for the ethereal tone I was pursuing. I believe I achieved the tone and desired effect of my piece successfully.
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