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the archive(s):
issue no. 6:
A Porcupine Without Quills, or, A Redwood in the Yukon/ Wayne Scheer
Will Squires thought of himself as a man committed to words, but language betrayed him like a lump of coal in a stocking cap. Although he loved the electricity generated when words rubbed against one another like two boy scouts in the woods, Will was like a singer with a tin cup for an ear. He could hear the music but marched to a different tambourine man.
You see, language to Will was a slippery slope, a sloppy sloop, a silly slap, a salty soup. He just couldn't control himself; his linguistic urges were as powerful as superman's locomotive, able to leap tall buildings but bound to be little more than a bird in the pie.
He sat in front of his computer most every day trying to write simple sentences while telling a story clearly and directly. He admired Hemingway and Raymond Carver, but Tom Robbins inevitably slipped in a cowgirl with an enormous thumb or a talking fork. Like a chocolate bar melting in the hot sun, Will lost his linguistic grip as images flew out of his head and bonded like chocolate rice pudding. Language, to Will, caused as much confusion as finding his lover in bed with his wife. Still, he remained excited by the possibilities.
He tried writing a simple story about a man and a woman waking early one morning to an unknown sound. The plan was to have them search the house and, upon discovering nothing unusual, return to the comfort of each other's arms. He was determined to keep the story simple and straightforward to emphasize the security the couple felt with each other.
He decided to start his story with a simple sentence, but Simon's simplicity just wasn't in Will's house of cards.
He wrote:
"Morning dropped from the sky like a man parachuting from an airplane and landing on a field not of dreams but of pebbles that crunched as his boots landed with a thud and then skidded, sounding like a car on a dirt road."
Writing a simple sentence was just not up Will's alley.
"Ralph and Mary woke up early in the morning, still mummywrapped in sleep, startled by a noise that may as well have been a spoken form of hieroglyphics because neither of them recognized the sounds although between them they read five languages, although not at the same time."
Will studied his sentence. Like a Comparative Literature major studying a '57 Chevy with the transmission spread out in pieces in his father's garage, he asked, what would Kafka do? That's when Will experienced an epiphany: his problem was that he was trying too hard to make sense. His brain, he realized, wasn't wired for 110 or 220 or 330. Will saw reality as if he were looking through his own trifocals with one of the lenses set backwards and upside down.
So, like a chicken out of water, he accepted his vision and gave in to images of red- breasted Robin Givens. His commitment to writing remained as steadfast as a redwood in the Yukon; coherence, he decided, was as overrated as a porcupine without quills.
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