Revisions
- sobrien04
- Sep 13, 2024
- 5 min read
Welcome back!
For those of you whom I don't know personally (and I think, at this early stage of my blog, that is precisely zero of you; but I will still address this to you, because it can serve as a preface to tonight's blog post), I hate the process of revision. It is the phase of writing which I consider to be the most tedious and the most humbling.
I am now in the process of revising my newest book, New Trident. Even though I finished 99% of the actual writing of it in June, I've tried not to look at what I wrote, and I've certainly not revised it in any real way. I've avoided opening the file on my PC; I've avoided reading experimental science fiction as a genre; and I've stopped myself whenever my mind strayed to the task that I know I need to complete: reviewing, revising, paring down, rebuilding the parts of the story that are weak, and rewriting the sections which sound disjointed or inappropriate or which I think are just less-than.
But I think - finally - I'm getting my motivation back. And I wrote something at the end of a brief session today that, while unedited, I wanted to share. I won't include it in the book, because the prose in this section got more metaphor-laden than I'm comfortable with. It comes in a section in which I'm trying to communicate all the craziness that the main character feels in a way that the viewer can picture clearly.
Tonight, I purposefully pushed myself to write in a manner that is outside of my comfort one, because isn't that when anything cool is ever written?
I'm not going to give any more context for the trippy, losing-your-mind scene you're (hopefully) about to read. It was a fun section to write.
Am I lost? Am I losing my mind?
Then, in a flash of insight, I saw him indescribably. Then, for an instant only, I flew from my body, I escaped myself, and I shot like a resplendent, flesh-and-blood projectile into him, and from there gazed into the deepest reaches of this stranger’s mind. I saw color, there; I saw light. I saw cities made of glittering flecks of sand and tornadoes of infinitesimally small and repackaged memories; a dizzying vortex of this man’s life bedecked with singular moments I could glimpse for a second only, moments like revolving and ever-changing flashes of sensation. The man’s thoughts lit him up in neon like a marquee, and he danced like a lurid harlequin in the shock of hot bright light that erupted from within him. I watched him as he presided over his mental kingdom. An outsized carnival clown. Then I saw him as all at once his dancing stopped and he slowly, exaggeratedly, turned his neck to look at me. And he, a harlequin over a theater in an abandoned town where no people walked and only the sun, like a fat bead of burning wax, set over the dust-strewn streets and the damned world and the never-born people of this mind world of his I was that I was now living in, opened his gnarled hand to hand me a piece of paper. It read,
Ere the world, ere life, there was madness,
And in madness' Heaven, there was but void;
A swirling, pulsating, fantastically fixed and immobile nothingness;
And from this: Life!
Yes: from this, Life.
The precondition to all things, an unknowable chaos;
An impenetrable stillness.
Only the end result of evolution is familiar to us,
And all that is known is one day invariably rendered
Foreign and bizarre and beyond our reach:
Rendered this way by time.
Yes, time; that unrivaled agent of change;
That chef of infinite ingredients and baffling and incomprehensible means;
That chimera-maker, state-alterer; that life-changer and -bringer.
It is time that is the enemy: It makes a furious madness of us all,
And in doing so returns man to his natural state.
What a poorly written poem, I thought to myself.
And then the tone of my transformation changed, and the stranger’s unconscious seemingly grew hostile toward me; his mind rejected my presence and cast me out. It flung the hand I had stretched out toward him back to my side, shocking me back into myself; I once again had form. I was gone from him, never to return, and I was me again.
It was all quite shocking.
Yes, I had gazed into the well, and the water was still, and my grim reflection met me there, and the bottom of the well I saw clearly. I saw it: a dingy circle of gray-green water surrounded by dark-colored, chipped bricks. Then, the water rippled, and my sight pierced the surface; the ripples turned to waves, and the seas roiled and raged. And when the water calmed again, it was no longer my face that I saw. I saw another, and I saw him totally, as I shall never see one again. I remember it still; the well was deep, its maw was hungry, and it sucked me down, down. And each foot I fell was a century, and each way I turned was a kaleidoscope, and each drop of water was a thousand prisms that refracted a thousand parts of me; atoms of myself suspended like flies in amber, atoms of identity trapped in the process of reconstitution as another, as something fundamentally not me. Because, as I saw in that moment of utter clarity, to truly see something beyond myself, I had to be the chimera; I had to be the one that changed.
The man turned a corner and was gone from my sight. He mumbled some nonsense to himself, and the sound of the scuffing of his shoes diminished until I was left alone in silence.
I went back inside, and she was where I had left her, in her state of perpetual unawareness. A broken being.
***
I lay back on my mattress for a long time before I was able to sleep. Once sleep came, I slept deeply but incompletely; my dreams were nonsense, and I forgot them as soon as I awoke. Only the memory of vague, disjointed images remained impressed in my waking consciousness. I checked in on my mental state soon after waking: My saliva felt thick and chalky in my mouth; my jaw felt curiously stiff. My eyes felt hot, and I tiredly blinked away the trace rays of gray-affected sunlight which filtered their way through the shades over my window.
I yawned and kicked my feet out from my bed and planted them unsteadily on my floor. A gentle wave of dizziness washed over me; I tilted my head to look down toward the floorboards, and they seemed to pulsate, sway gently. Bands of undulating cherry-red, brown, sepia, burgundy. I felt like I was waking to a dream, entering into a morning in which the rules of everyday life ceased to apply; a morning in which constancy was delightfully suspended. I had left a world of normalcy at the doorway to the rabbit hole, and I found myself dwelling at the surreal end of the looking glass. And to complete the surreal effect, I felt entirely unbothered by this change of events.
Thanks for reading, and, as always, I welcome reader engagement! Please write to me at will.b.eaton.00@gmail.com to discuss books, writing, or any other subject you believe would be of interest to me.
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