Year 2014

flynn: a lyrical alignment

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

I had so much fun with last week’s lyrical alignment (quiet, proper, inner fun, of course) that I’ve gone ahead and cooked up a new one!

This week, I’m taking a passage from Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl, a thriller about a wife gone missing. The excerpt below is from the perspective of the husband as he meditates on the rocky stage he was at spiritually before the disappearance. Of course, he is the prime suspect.

My saying of course above is exactly the kind of sense of expectation the excerpt below riffs on. Given that it is a thriller, I knew I could expect one of a number of plots. There were expectations.

So much of writing is playing in and out of (and through) expectations. Writing is an art whose medium, words, belongs to everyone. Each word carries an expectation, that plays off the next, and so on. What makes a piece of writing more than the words on the page is how well the writer draws the world – your world as well as the world around you – into orbit with what’s happening at the level of language.

What drew me about the novel is how great a sense Flynn has about relationships. I read quickly, at turns rooting for the couple, at times worried.

In an effort to avoid any spoilers, I’ll stop there. Flynn does a solid job.

* you ain't seen nothing already *

* you ain’t seen nothing already *

The Same Dog-eared Script

aligned from Gillian Flynn’s novel “Gone Girl”

For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining,
restless child’s boredom (although I was
not above that) but a dense, blanketing
malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing
new to be discovered ever again.
Our society was utterly, ruinously
derivative (although the word “derivative”
as a criticism is itself derivative).
We were the first human beings who
would never see anything for the first time.
We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed,
underwhelmed. “Mona Lisa,” the Pyramids,
the Empire State Building. Jungle animals
on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing,
volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single
amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I
didn’t immediately reference to a movie
or a TV show. A fucking commercial. You know
the awful singsong of the blase’: “Seeeen it.”
I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing
that makes me want to blow my brains out, is:
the secondhand experience is always better.
The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera
angle and the soundtrack manipulate
my emotions in a way reality can’t
anymore. I don’t know that we are
actually human at this point, those of us
who are like most of us, who grew up with
TV and movies and now the Internet.
If we are betrayed, we know the words to say;
when a loved one dies, we know the words to say.
If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass
or the fool, we know the words to say.
We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

***

Happy scripting!

Jose

p.s. Please check out the latest (and first!) issue of The Merrimack Review, including my poems “Icarus” & “La Esquina,” here.

borges: a lyrical alignment

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

This past week, I found myself reading the essay “Verbiage for Poems” by Jorge Luis Borges (found in On Writing, Penguin Classics), and coming across a marvelous paragraph – emphasis on the ‘marvel,’ something of strange weather patterns moving across the sky in the middle of an ordinary afternoon about this paragraph.

In my enthusiasm, I found myself reading the words aloud to myself as I would a poem, which naturally led to my writing them out in my notebook. I pushed my fascination further by rewriting the prose into lines (loose iambics).

I present the fruits of my efforts below, calling it a lyrical alignment, something of what chiropractors do to backs – but hopefully less painful 🙂

There is a tradition of this kind of thing, a branch of ‘found’ poetry (Jose Garcia Villa immediately comes to mind as an early ‘aligner’). I enjoy reworking prose in this manner both for the way it keeps my ear sharp as well as for how it allows me to sink into the diction and phrasing of a writer.

I hope to share more of these as they come up in my reading and note-taking. For now, enjoy how Borges redefines the way you look at nouns.

* a rainbowhurricanehailstorm of a writer *

* a rainbowhurricanehailstorm of a writer *

“The world of appearances…” – Jorge Luis Borges

The world of appearances is a jumble
of shifting perceptions. The vision of a rustic
sky, that persistent aroma sweeping the fields,
the bitter taste of tobacco burning one’s
throat, the long wind lashing the road,
the submissive rectitude of the cane
around which we wrap our fingers, all fit together
in our consciousness, almost all at once.
Language is an efficient ordering of the world’s
enigmatic abundance. Or, in other words,
we invent nouns to fit reality.
We touch a sphere, see a small heap
of dawn-colored light, our mouths enjoy
a tingling sensation, and we lie to ourselves
that those three disparate things are only
one thing called an orange. The moon itself
is a fiction. Outside of astronomical
conventions, which should not concern us here,
there is no similarity whatsoever
between the yellow sphere now rising clearly
over the wall of the Recoleta cemetery
and the pink slice I saw in the sky above
the Plaza de Mayo many nights ago.
All nouns are abbreviations. Instead of saying
cold, sharp, burning, unbreakable,
shining, pointy, we utter “dagger”; for
the receding of the sun and oncoming darkness,
we say “twilight.”

***

Happy twilighting!

Jose

p.s. Please check out my poem “De Soto National Memorial Park” in the latest issue of the Rappahannock Review here.