Untitled Composition 7

[Jack of Hearts]

Silent John


"Ok, it's going to start with Oedipus, none of that pre-fabricated high falutin' essay bull****- page 138; 'The genuine tragic hero sacrifices himself and everything he has for the universal.. he is revealed..."

In a time that's so remote as to be called history's dream, the king of Thebes paced the city streets as a plague decayed to its innards- smoke burned in the distance and a waning, oppressive redburst sunset draped over the sky, both ominous and hinting at the descent of darkness. Oedipus grasped his hands to his hair when he found his thoughts laden with the inexplicable amount of dread that had come to envelope cognition. Muscles tightened and he leaned against a grayed wall and his features became something sharp and fierce. The porous stone that bore his heroic figure upward in that sense began to understand him- he could express to the wall the amount of weight that constituted the angst of his being.

"Oh, and Abraham raised the knife..."

The rate at which Murphy's slender fingers turned pages was directly proportional to how quickly his chattering teeth assaulted his defeated fingernails, a symphony of nervous tics and a production of comedy. The computer screen was beginning to redden his eyes and tighten the muscles of his neck. In the work, as a guide, his slightly crooked nose slowly traced the lines of faded ink as fast as sunken eyes could read them. The TV blared intrusively from across the dark living room and reflected in menacing angles across the hardwood floor.

"What do I need... we could use that one about the universal- no, just spin bull****, with half of the essays he has to read, he wouldn't be able to tell the difference.... No, don't bull**** him, its him. Wait, bull**** him, he's a teacher. Besides, they kind of like it, one less paper to take seriously. But is it serious? I need to resist grandiose conclusions to my essays, they're too cliche and I do them a lot. Damn I'm cliche. There's a lot of nudity on TV these days. I wonder if Sabine will call. Or put out. That's- just find a random quote now. And make it good- it would be extremely validating to my ego if it were good. But I don't like that. Siddartha didn't subscribe to ego and he knew stuff. Not like me. I ate too much and I'm going to be overweight by the time I'm 30. Nobody likes a fat ***. It's unethical to have a fat ***. That's not true. Hedonism... a pleasure giving fat ***... Ok, here, this... this is important... page 134..."

Slightly unsure of himself, Murphy's numbly gnawed fingers felt out a line; "He is silent, so ethics condemned him. It says: 'You must acknowledge the universal, and you do that by speaking, and you dare not take pity on the universal.'"

"But Abraham can't explain himself to Sarah, at least not without sounding insane," Professor Johnson loomed into Murphy's imagination, a tall figure with an extended arm which he outstretched for the purpose of hitting his pupils over the head, lest they be out of reach of his yard stick- "The yard stick of knowledge, I assure you," Professor Johnson affirmed with wry warmth and a busy wrist. Metallic sunshine found itself pouring in through the grimy windows, accompanied by a temperate breeze that washed the classroom corners of stagnant body odor. And more memories, mostly of listening, but of the rare occasion of partaking came to mind; "Whoa, easy there Eric. Are these guys saying what you're trying to say, James?"

"No." '**** no!' he thought as he snapped back into reality and swallowed the deeply pathetic nature of trying and coming up short and the futility of every thinking thing everywhere ("No one else breathes my crazy."). As he sat in front of the dim glow of technology, Murphy grasped his brown, spryly locks and leaned against a wall and grew tense and sharpened his features. "What is it to be a tragic hero? I mean, I know what a tragic hero is, he's the guy that appeals to the universal. The hell does that mean again, where's the book? The universal, the demonstrate-able... I can't...I can't ****ing write this. I can't. How the **** does he want this to be answered, how is this an essay? I have to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to conquer. ****." Murphy turned to page 138.

"I was wondering if you were going to call."

He had to admire Sabine's patience and composure as demonstrated in her voice, "Well, you already know I'm not very happy with you, James. You don't seem to respect me and lack fidelity, to say the least."

"Well I'm really in a mess." Murphy rubbed his index finger back and forth over the surface of the computer desk. "I've practically lifted the entire literary technique behind Kierkegaard's 'Speech in Praise of Abraham.' I don't have any idea what the **** I'm doing. I need you now and I've always needed you and you know that."
"Goodbye, James Murphy."

"Sabine, I love you."

Silence.

"I knew you were going to say..." Murphy heard a heavy swallow, "I'm going to help you, you know, even though I think you tell lies." As an after thought..."And I love you too, you know."

"Which proves my theory that Swiss women love me."

"Shut up. Now pick up 'Fear and Trembling.'"

Ethics condemned Abraham for not demonstrating the reasons for what he was doing because the very nature of ethics is this very demonstration itself. In essence, there is no rationality, this has been suspended. On page 103 Kierkegaard writes, "The tragic hero renounces himself in order to express the universal; the knight of faith renounces the universal in order to be the particular." By not demonstrating his reasons, Abraham had indeed renounced the universal and established himself as the knight of faith- and in the above quote we see that the tragic hero is not a knight of faith because he can and does express the universal, his reasons to be understood- and in doing so prompts Kierkegaard to write on page 94,"Great indeed it is when the poet presents his tragic hero for popular admiration and dares to say; 'Weep for him, for he deserves it'." Surely there would be no sense of 'deserve' if there were no demonstrated reasons to be deserving. The knight of faith becomes a step beyond the tragic hero, who exists upon an ethical level- the tragic hero resigns himself to rationality and continues to reason further on a demonstrated basis, while the knight of faith recognizes the resignation in himself but irrationally maintains his beliefs.

When the deed was finished, blood ushered to the ground and he lay doubled over within the matter of himself. Oedipus was blind and all of Greece could mourn him in his entirety. Abraham sheathed the knife.

"Ok, Beenie, thanks." Softly spoken into the phone, his eyes half shut.
"Wait," she interjected- he could almost see the hesitance in the way her flaxen hair would flow when her body language spoke interjection. "Before you go. I want to know what you make of all this, James. I mean... I've given you so much, no?"

"You don't have to be so nice to me, you know."

"I know. I like it." Firm demand resounded, "Now answer the question."

"Fine." Murphy could feel the tension radiating from the core of her. Sabine's breath suspended. What she wanted- at exactly that moment, all of the earth could pivot any given direction. "He was onto something but he was wrong."

Sabine pressed eagerly, her lips drew to the receiver," Finally, a straight answer out of you! I've done it. Go on..."

"That's all I got, Sabine. I need to go to bed."

The line went quiet for a moment. Murphy detected feminine finality with a Swiss accent. "... Are you sure?"

"Yes. Goodnight."

He pulled away the receiver and let an empty dial tone resonate into the early morning hours. Murphy imagined what Sabine was doing. Sabine was crying in the darkness, feeling used, cheap, abandoned, neglected, unfulfilled- and trapped. He knew she would come back, but the reasons remained as illuminated as the umbra of a shadow. Alone, Murphy didn't know if there was a God to love either of them or if there was a method to the entire madness of existing... but he had the faintest inkling, a timid suspicion residing within his awareness' blind spot, of something fantastic- that his mode of being or thinking or living or seeing, try as he might to demonstrate them, remained incomprehensible to the rest of the world.

[hillwalker]

I'm assuming you must have enjoyed writing this immensely - a tongue-in-cheek poke at Philosophy students and their version of a suggestive late-night phone call maybe.

Unfortunatlely the name-dropping and page references left this reader floundering in the shallows (or were they depths?) but at least it's different.

Not sure what 'spryly locks' are but otherwise intriguing and original.

H

[Jack of Hearts]

Thanks Hill. For better or worse, this 'writer' wrote this piece... and while it isn't very good, it seems to attempt things that are somewhat interesting. This one was from 2008 (maybe you've picked up on it by now, but the 'untitled compositions'- of which you've kindly read all but one or two- go in chronological order).






J

[AuntShecky]

Due to circumstances way, way beyond the control of "this
reader," she is way, way behind on catching up on the short story forum.

I read this quite a number of days ago, Jack, but I haven't had a chance to weigh in until now. So here goes.

First, kudos to your courage and ambition for attempting to create a bit of "stream of consciousness" writing. I appreciate the difficulty of this project, and while I don't believe for a second you've bitten off more than you can chew, I think there are, nonetheless, a few problems.

In the most effective kinds of s-o-c writing (the novels of Virginia Woolf and the various sections of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury immediately coming to mind), the writer assembles seemingly disjointed observations and descriptions, puts them in a kind of box, shakes them up, and dumps them all the reader's table, like a jigsaw puzzle for the reader to put together. The trick is to make sure all the pieces can be found in the box; when there are more than a couple of pieces missing, that's trouble.

The second paragraph is difficult to place--Is this a quote from the professor, a passage from "page 138," or the opening paragraph of James's paper?

As you said this is one of your earlier works. Still, some-- not all-- of the word choices and structures aren't really up to your usual snuff:

But is it serious? I need to resist grandiose conclusions to my essays, they're too cliche and I do them a lot. Damn I'm cliche.

Usually, the word "cliché" (no "d") is a noun. With a "d" it's an adjective: "clichéd." Thus: "They're too clichéd" and "Damn[,] I'm a cliché."

And what, pray tell, is this doing here?:

There's a lot of nudity on TV these days.

The throwaway line seems to be coming out of left field, and it's dropped like a rookie bobbling the ball.

Awkward structures:
Metallic sunshine found itself pouring in through the grimy windows, accompanied by a temperate breeze that washed the classroom corners of stagnant body odor.
Why not just "metallic sunshine poured in through the grimy windows"? and "that washed the stagnant body odor away from the classroom's corners."

And more memories, mostly of listening, but of the rare occasion of partaking came to mind;
"Listening" to what? "Partaking" of what?

I'm assuming that the paper he's working on attempts to "compare and contrast" Oedipus and Abraham;however, there is nothing to connect the two, nor a segue. The piece jumps from the tragic hero to the near-tragic Biblical figure with no transition. It confounds the reader!

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, in light of the previous commentator's idea that the piece is a spoof of philosophy students; still the writing is really awkward in places and downright dense:

Ethics condemned Abraham for not demonstrating the reasons for what he was doing because the very nature of ethics is this very demonstration itself. In essence, there is no rationality,(and so on,.)

Short of a textbook for education majors (and the would-be teachers' regurgitation of same), I can't imagine lines like these ever seeing the light of day.

Then the piece concludes with the hoped-for phone call from the girlfriend, the Swedish gal whose name is a loaded classical reference: "The Sabine women." Maybe she should've been named Jocasta or Sarah (or-- after a quick "Google" to refresh me fading memory-- Hagar.)

Again, I don't see the connection. Evidently James's has done her wrong, with her calling him out on his failure with fidelity is a tempting clue, but what exactly has the tempestuous love affair got to do with the paper he's writing? Is this why he can't keep his mind on his work?

If the protagonist/narrator's name is James, who or what is "Silent John" heading the page.

It's admirable to suggest rather than to be too blatant; subtlety in fiction is always better than too much "telling." However, it's only fair to provide the reader with enough clues so that he or she can have some inkling of an idea of what's going on.

Of course, after saying all this, it could be that the trouble is on my end!

Even so, a couple more rewrites and you just might have something here.

[Jack of Hearts]

Sorry for subjecting you to this piece, Aunty. You'll get no defense here. But just as clarification-

It is an earlier work, written when the author was about 19 or 20.

The link between Abraham and Oedipus is through Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling", referenced also in this piece- the existential philosopher uses both of these personas to demonstrate his levels of existence. This piece cannot even be wholly understood without having somewhat detailed knowledge of that philosophical work (for instance, as Kierkegaard references himself as 'Silent John' to avoid a paradox), which by extension, makes it a rather bad short story. But that's not even the half of it.

And the ending is a cop out. The protagonist uses a cheap method of finishing something 'unfinishable'. Like a philosophy paper. Like a short story. In a lot of ways, it's what a certain 19 year old student needed at the time.

A write-around; an escape.

Nothing here worth salvaging in that sense, and the problem isn't on your end at all.

Thanks for reading.







J

EDIT:


Ethics condemned Abraham for not demonstrating the reasons for what he was doing because the very nature of ethics is this very demonstration itself. In essence, there is no rationality, this has been suspended. On page 103 Kierkegaard writes, "The tragic hero renounces himself in order to express the universal; the knight of faith renounces the universal in order to be the particular." By not demonstrating his reasons, Abraham had indeed renounced the universal and established himself as the knight of faith- and in the above quote we see that the tragic hero is not a knight of faith because he can and does express the universal, his reasons to be understood- and in doing so prompts Kierkegaard to write on page 94,"Great indeed it is when the poet presents his tragic hero for popular admiration and dares to say; 'Weep for him, for he deserves it'." Surely there would be no sense of 'deserve' if there were no demonstrated reasons to be deserving. The knight of faith becomes a step beyond the tragic hero, who exists upon an ethical level- the tragic hero resigns himself to rationality and continues to reason further on a demonstrated basis, while the knight of faith recognizes the resignation in himself but irrationally maintains his beliefs.

Got full credit for submitting this bit.

[AuntShecky]

Nah. The problem is on my end. I think I haven't read that particular Kierkegaard work since I was 19
myself ----

(and Soren himself wasn't all that much older at the time!)

[Jack of Hearts]

Well this reader disagrees and thinks your initial assessment is most correct. Some thi this reader posts are awful but he shares them in the hopes that they're somewhat interesting too.

Just because something is verbose, pretentiously erudite and vague doesn't make it good or the fault of the reader, as this piece demonstrates. This makes the author all the more appreciative that you took the time to read it.






J

[Steven Hunley]

OK Jack let me admit to you right now that most of this was over my head...philosophy is usually over my head...but it was fun as all get-out drowning in it. Seriously fun.

[Jack of Hearts]

Thanks for the support, Steven.








J