DVD commentaries
Here are my responses to the mini-commentary meme.
likeadeuce asked for commentary on a bit of Mexico City (Raymond Chandler's Marlowe novels; Philip Marlowe/Terry Lennox). SPOILERS for the novel in the fic excerpt and commentary.
I went to Mexico because I had to. I'd done an honest job for a client who thought he was paying me for a crooked one. The client was first-names friendly with the chief of police, and suddenly my driving, my gun, my attitude, and the shape of my nose were offensive to every cop in Los Angeles. It was time for a vacation, and Mexico City was cheap.
Chandler's style is easy to imitate badly, quite hard to imitate well. I tried to keep the essence of Chandler's prose--the specificity of its visual images, the deadpan voice, the irony the creeps out from behind the tough-guy stoicism--while not sliding into parody.
All very reasonable. Except for the way I kept going over it in my mind during the long drive, like a crook who knows he'll need an alibi.
Marlowe, like a lot of my favorite characters, is terrible at understanding himself. At this stage of the story, as in The Long Goodbye itself, his feelings for Terry Lennox are extraordinarily intense, but Marlowe keeps trying to deny that they mean anything.
The weather was cooler and clearer than at home, so during the day I played tourist. At night I drank at the Europa, one of those big hotels that are exactly the same everywhere in the world. The bar looked like an overexcitable choirboy's idea of a French brothel. Everything was covered in burgundy velvet, including the bartender. Mine were probably the cheapest shoes that had ever touched the marble floor.
About a week into this routine, I was taking my first sip--the hopeful sip--of another overwatered whiskey and tonic when he came in. I wasn't even facing the door, but I knew immediately. Maybe I recognized the sound of his footsteps.
False glamour--the "sophisticated" hotel that's generic and tacky--is a Chandler preoccupation, and I had fun with it. Drinking, on the other hand, is a very serious subject in The Long Goodbye, which features some of the most wrenching depictions of alcoholism I've ever read. All three of the male main characters can reasonably be interpreted as alcoholics, and two of them (Terry Lennox and the writer whose name I forget) drink to cover up a sense of shame and emptiness. We're never told why Marlowe drinks, but it's not a very big interpretive leap.
"Gimlet, please, Ramiro," he said, and sat across from me at the fancy little teakwood table.
"Señor Maioranos," I said. "It's been a while."
"It's Martin Sullivan now." He smiled. He'd shaved off his mustache, and his hair was the sandy brown it probably used to be before the war. He was wearing a beautiful off-white linen suit. "I can pass for Mexican in Los Angeles, but not here."
Lennox shaving off the mustache is pure wish fulfillment on my part, as I think mustaches are disgusting. Him changing his name again I think is reasonable--I never understood why Chandler thought that Lennox could fool actual Mexicans into believing he was Mexican.
"So what do you pass for here, Mr. Sullivan?"
He smiled, first at me and then at the handsome, soft-eyed waiter who brought his drink. I was willing to bet it was made perfectly, with gin from the good bottle kept out of sight. Even the glass looked cleaner than mine. Everybody liked Terry Lennox.
Marlowe notices male beauty, is constantly mentioning it, so I threw in that line about the waiter's looks.
"Cheers," Terry said, dropping the r like the English do. After he drank, he put his glass down carefully on the coaster and wiped away a drop of condensation that had fallen on the marquetry tabletop. The wood showed generations of ring-shaped stains left by careless drinkers. "You look tired, Marlowe."
"You don't. Must be the benefit of a clear conscience."
"You shouldn't stoop to sarcasm. But you're right. I've been sleeping well."
The summary I gave this story was "An honest man and a liar meet in a bar." Of course there's a twist to that--in this story it's ultimately Lennox who's the honest man. But I'm fascinated by Lennox's lying, or self-fashioning if you like, such as the way he picked up a lot of little Anglicisms from his time in the RAF. It's especially interesting because Chandler, American-born of English and Irish parents, spent his adolescence and young adulthood in England (he went to the same public school as P. G. Wodehouse!), then returned to the U.S. and remade himself as an iconically American writer.
"Congratulations." And then we were silent. I crept my way through that bad whiskey like Mithridates with his poison, and I remembered how eight months ago I'd sat waiting for Terry to come back and fix things between us. Sat waiting while he walked along the hall and took the elevator down and went out to the street and got in his car and drove and drove until he was in another country.
Chandler's publishers made him revise the original ending of The Long Goodbye because they thought its focus on Marlowe's grief, his yearning for Lennox to come back, was insufficiently manly. In this story I revised the revision.
"Come on," Terry said, and put his glass down with finality. There was still a finger's breadth of liquid in it. "We can't talk here."
Lennox is now capable of putting down a drink unfinished. This is a bit of a cheat, really, because alcoholism is a physical as well as an emotional problem and most people can't go from alcoholism to social drinking. But I wanted to emphasize what I felt underlay Marlowe and Lennox's drinking, rather than the drinking itself.
"I've got nothing to say."
He lifted one eyebrow, elegantly. I wondered if he'd copied a movie star to get the trick of it. "You checked into your hotel under the name Terry Lennox. It wasn't a long jump to the conclusion that you were looking for me."
"Maybe I was overcome with nostalgia."
More self-creation. Lennox gets his mannerisms from movies--or does he? Marlowe's suspicion is also a way of keeping his emotional distance. Meanwhile, Marlowe uses Lennox's name as his alias. Marlowe has become Lennox the liar, while Lennox, despite his lies, has found a way to be honest at least with himself. Where that new honesty is coming from is the center of the story.
verasteine asked for commentary on a bit of Advice for the Love-Lorn (Lewis fandom; Lewis/Hathaway)
It's all right, Lewis thinks, but doesn't say, because of course it's all right and Hathaway doesn't need his bloody permission to be whatever it is he is. Lewis doesn't say I don't mind either, or I wish you'd just given me an honest answer when I asked, instead of all this mucking about. "You can tell me whatever you like, James. Including telling me not to stick my nose in."
"It's not a state secret." Never mind that Hathaway acts like his life has had a D-notice on it since the day he was born. "I like women. I like men. I like men a bit more, actually."
The show managed to really piss me off by presenting Hathaway as possibly gay for several seasons, then giving him a string of implausible relationships with women. This is, in part, my fix-it fic, and I've made Lewis as confused as the audience.
Lewis nods, waits. He's handled his share of interrogations, and he knows that once someone starts talking, the last thing you should do is interrupt.
"But it's . . . it's not the sin thing, I'm not stupid, I worked that out for myself years ago. It's just . . . if I'm seeing a woman, no one cares. If I were with a man - a relationship, I mean, not just . . . well, everyone would have an opinion. They'd want explanations, they'd want to know why I didn't tell them my whole psychosexual history and spare them the shock. So it seemed easier not to."
And now, my answer to why all of Hathaway's canonical relationships have been with women. With most characters this wouldn't work, but there's a certain repressed type for whom "a same-sex relationship would cause too much fuss and distract me from important things" is plausible. Hathaway and Nicholas Angel are the main ones I can think of.
If there's one thing Hathaway isn't, Lewis realises for what he estimates is the twentieth time, it's simple. And being, well, he reckons bisexual is the word for it (although Hathaway has conspicuously not used it himself), being bisexual can't be half as simple as Jack Harkness makes it look on the telly. After a while, when Hathaway has slipped back into a silence that feels like it could go on for a year, Lewis prompts him: "Seemed."
"Past tense entirely intentional. I've been getting fed up lately."
"So if I'd said 'Find yourself a nice fellow,' would that have been all right? Or should it be 'nice person,' and mind my own sodding business about the rest?"
The interrogation metaphor may be potentially creepy, but it's not meant to be. Hathaway is so secretive that I think it's a natural comparison for Lewis to make.
The way Lewis is groping for vocabulary here isn't entirely ignorance; there's a reluctance to understand that has everything to do with Lewis's own suppressed feelings.
Hathaway's smile finally looks genuine, or at least half genuine. "Ten out of ten for the avoidance of heterosexist assumptions." Lewis files away the word heterosexist for future reference. "But I'm not sure I want to meet a nice anyone, not in the sense you mean. I don't like long walks on moonlit beaches, or thinking up interesting small talk, or the way people's faces change when I say I'm a police officer. Or all the little lies people tell each other. You can go to bed with someone, fall in love with them, and then find out you don't know them at all." He takes a large and somehow sudden drink of his beer, and Lewis thinks again of perspex shields and body armour. "I'm happy enough sitting here on your sofa and watching a time-travelling alien visit a highly anachronistic version of the twelfth century."
Lewis is still listening carefully, interview-room carefully, and he knows that Hathaway seldom picks a word without deliberation. "Happy enough? It's not the same thing as happy, is it?"
I have a hard time picturing Hathaway wanting or enjoying conventional romance. For one thing, he's very much an ascetic and I think he's a bit repelled by the silliness of dating. (Although he has had casual sex with men, as I implied in a previous paragraph.) What Hathaway wants, unrealistically enough, is to get straight to the deep emotional bond without any preliminaries. Which is why he's fallen in love with his boss/mentor/only friend. And it's why rather than risk that, he'd planned to go on being "happy enough."
Hathaway shrugs and reaches for the remote, which Lewis drops over the arm of the sofa onto the rug. From behind about four feet of invisible stone wall, Hathaway says, "It's happy enough."
"Bollocks. You're lonely."
"Really, I've had enough of Uncle Robbie's Agony Column for one evening, thanks."
"I know you're lonely." Whatever hidden, incautious part of Lewis's mind has been playing up this evening takes over again. "I know you're lonely, because I am." If there's logic in that, it's a sort unknown to science, but Lewis is sure that it's true. And more than that, it's important. "What would make you happy, James?"
Lewis and Hathaway are not similar in any superficial way, but they have some deep things in common, not the least of which is loneliness. Hathaway, as I've said, needs a deep bond but doesn't know how to find one; Lewis had one (or two, depending on how you count Morse) and lost it. One of the most beautiful, compelling things about the show's first three seasons was the way they responded to and tried to comfort each other.
"Don't try to have this conversation with me. Don't. Or you'll wish you hadn't."
There it is. The moment when the truth begins. The answer that has all the other answers, and all the other questions, layered inside it like a Russian doll. An infinity of tiny fragile questions that Lewis could crush if he wanted to, because it turns out that they're about him and not about Hathaway at all, and they start with why Hathaway's loneliness means as much to him as his own. Questions nesting endlessly deeper, turning the world inside out, making a hole that Lewis might fall into and never escape.
Not might. Will. Already has.
I am, in general, deeply suspicious of any slash story in which a modern adult suddenly realizes s/he has same-sex desires, never having noticed them before. In the case of Lewis, I can just about believe it, though. His marriage gave him most of what he needed, and his friendship with Morse supplied the rest, so he never had occasion to feel attraction to a man in any but a superficial, easily-ignored way. I'm presuming, in this story, that Lewis's attraction to Hathaway starts with the emotional and moves to the physical rather than the other way around--which I think is not quite the same as WNGWJLEO, if only because Lewis isn't going to keep thinking of himself as straight.
"I'm sorry," Hathaway is saying from that other world where Lewis has been sitting silent and frozen and nothing has happened at all. "I never meant to . . . I knew that . . . sorry. I'll go."
And meanwhile, poor Hathaway thinks Lewis's stunned reaction means Lewis is horrified to realize that Hathaway fancies him.
In a way this is very old-school slash, what with Lewis's "I thought I was straight" and Hathaway's attempts to keep his feelings secret. I tried to give it a new twist by having Lewis's reaction be neither gay panic nor a sudden certainty that Hathaway is his Destined True Love Forever, but a tentative willingness to see where their mutual feelings could lead.
ellen_fremedon asked about a passage from In the House of Dust (Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh/Enkidu)
One night in their youth, after Enkidu's grieving had eased, Gilgamesh asked him what the difference was between beasts and men.
"Clay," said Enkidu.
Gilgamesh considered, stroking Enkidu's hairy arm, and then asked, "What do you mean?"
"You build--we build--houses and cities with clay bricks. Animals sleep wherever they find themselves. We press words into clay and keep them. When the animals speak, the wind blows the words away."
Years later, when Enkidu was sealed in his tomb and Gilgamesh was wandering, uncombed and desolate, he thought that for "clay" Enkidu could have said "suffering." No man builds a wall unless he has enemies. No man writes a letter unless the man he wants to speak to is gone.
I wrote this over six years ago, and there's not much of what I've written since that I think is better. Sometimes things just come together, you know?
A lot of what I did in the story was implicit in the myth itself, such as Enkidu's loss of a kind of happy mindless innocence when he comes to full human consciousness. To be human is to be self-aware, to have memory and imagination and thus and to be capable of grief that lasts beyond the moment.
Some of the rest . . . well, it came from Derrida, frankly. Of course Derrida critiques the metaphysics of presence, but for my fictional purposes what I took was the notion of writing as absence and therefore as grief. If to be human is to grieve, then writing is even more human because it prolongs memory, thus prolonging grief.
Then of course there's clay, which is absolutely freighted with cultural resonance. Flesh is clay, writing is done on clay (in the ancient near east), instruments of civilization (e.g. pots) are made of clay and so are instruments of defence/warfare such as walls. This permits a gorgeous built-in contrast between clay as a symbol of impermanence (flesh) and near, but not total, permanence (walls, writing tablets).
Really, it felt like the story wrote itself.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.
likeadeuce asked for commentary on a bit of Mexico City (Raymond Chandler's Marlowe novels; Philip Marlowe/Terry Lennox). SPOILERS for the novel in the fic excerpt and commentary.
I went to Mexico because I had to. I'd done an honest job for a client who thought he was paying me for a crooked one. The client was first-names friendly with the chief of police, and suddenly my driving, my gun, my attitude, and the shape of my nose were offensive to every cop in Los Angeles. It was time for a vacation, and Mexico City was cheap.
Chandler's style is easy to imitate badly, quite hard to imitate well. I tried to keep the essence of Chandler's prose--the specificity of its visual images, the deadpan voice, the irony the creeps out from behind the tough-guy stoicism--while not sliding into parody.
All very reasonable. Except for the way I kept going over it in my mind during the long drive, like a crook who knows he'll need an alibi.
Marlowe, like a lot of my favorite characters, is terrible at understanding himself. At this stage of the story, as in The Long Goodbye itself, his feelings for Terry Lennox are extraordinarily intense, but Marlowe keeps trying to deny that they mean anything.
The weather was cooler and clearer than at home, so during the day I played tourist. At night I drank at the Europa, one of those big hotels that are exactly the same everywhere in the world. The bar looked like an overexcitable choirboy's idea of a French brothel. Everything was covered in burgundy velvet, including the bartender. Mine were probably the cheapest shoes that had ever touched the marble floor.
About a week into this routine, I was taking my first sip--the hopeful sip--of another overwatered whiskey and tonic when he came in. I wasn't even facing the door, but I knew immediately. Maybe I recognized the sound of his footsteps.
False glamour--the "sophisticated" hotel that's generic and tacky--is a Chandler preoccupation, and I had fun with it. Drinking, on the other hand, is a very serious subject in The Long Goodbye, which features some of the most wrenching depictions of alcoholism I've ever read. All three of the male main characters can reasonably be interpreted as alcoholics, and two of them (Terry Lennox and the writer whose name I forget) drink to cover up a sense of shame and emptiness. We're never told why Marlowe drinks, but it's not a very big interpretive leap.
"Gimlet, please, Ramiro," he said, and sat across from me at the fancy little teakwood table.
"Señor Maioranos," I said. "It's been a while."
"It's Martin Sullivan now." He smiled. He'd shaved off his mustache, and his hair was the sandy brown it probably used to be before the war. He was wearing a beautiful off-white linen suit. "I can pass for Mexican in Los Angeles, but not here."
Lennox shaving off the mustache is pure wish fulfillment on my part, as I think mustaches are disgusting. Him changing his name again I think is reasonable--I never understood why Chandler thought that Lennox could fool actual Mexicans into believing he was Mexican.
"So what do you pass for here, Mr. Sullivan?"
He smiled, first at me and then at the handsome, soft-eyed waiter who brought his drink. I was willing to bet it was made perfectly, with gin from the good bottle kept out of sight. Even the glass looked cleaner than mine. Everybody liked Terry Lennox.
Marlowe notices male beauty, is constantly mentioning it, so I threw in that line about the waiter's looks.
"Cheers," Terry said, dropping the r like the English do. After he drank, he put his glass down carefully on the coaster and wiped away a drop of condensation that had fallen on the marquetry tabletop. The wood showed generations of ring-shaped stains left by careless drinkers. "You look tired, Marlowe."
"You don't. Must be the benefit of a clear conscience."
"You shouldn't stoop to sarcasm. But you're right. I've been sleeping well."
The summary I gave this story was "An honest man and a liar meet in a bar." Of course there's a twist to that--in this story it's ultimately Lennox who's the honest man. But I'm fascinated by Lennox's lying, or self-fashioning if you like, such as the way he picked up a lot of little Anglicisms from his time in the RAF. It's especially interesting because Chandler, American-born of English and Irish parents, spent his adolescence and young adulthood in England (he went to the same public school as P. G. Wodehouse!), then returned to the U.S. and remade himself as an iconically American writer.
"Congratulations." And then we were silent. I crept my way through that bad whiskey like Mithridates with his poison, and I remembered how eight months ago I'd sat waiting for Terry to come back and fix things between us. Sat waiting while he walked along the hall and took the elevator down and went out to the street and got in his car and drove and drove until he was in another country.
Chandler's publishers made him revise the original ending of The Long Goodbye because they thought its focus on Marlowe's grief, his yearning for Lennox to come back, was insufficiently manly. In this story I revised the revision.
"Come on," Terry said, and put his glass down with finality. There was still a finger's breadth of liquid in it. "We can't talk here."
Lennox is now capable of putting down a drink unfinished. This is a bit of a cheat, really, because alcoholism is a physical as well as an emotional problem and most people can't go from alcoholism to social drinking. But I wanted to emphasize what I felt underlay Marlowe and Lennox's drinking, rather than the drinking itself.
"I've got nothing to say."
He lifted one eyebrow, elegantly. I wondered if he'd copied a movie star to get the trick of it. "You checked into your hotel under the name Terry Lennox. It wasn't a long jump to the conclusion that you were looking for me."
"Maybe I was overcome with nostalgia."
More self-creation. Lennox gets his mannerisms from movies--or does he? Marlowe's suspicion is also a way of keeping his emotional distance. Meanwhile, Marlowe uses Lennox's name as his alias. Marlowe has become Lennox the liar, while Lennox, despite his lies, has found a way to be honest at least with himself. Where that new honesty is coming from is the center of the story.
verasteine asked for commentary on a bit of Advice for the Love-Lorn (Lewis fandom; Lewis/Hathaway)
It's all right, Lewis thinks, but doesn't say, because of course it's all right and Hathaway doesn't need his bloody permission to be whatever it is he is. Lewis doesn't say I don't mind either, or I wish you'd just given me an honest answer when I asked, instead of all this mucking about. "You can tell me whatever you like, James. Including telling me not to stick my nose in."
"It's not a state secret." Never mind that Hathaway acts like his life has had a D-notice on it since the day he was born. "I like women. I like men. I like men a bit more, actually."
The show managed to really piss me off by presenting Hathaway as possibly gay for several seasons, then giving him a string of implausible relationships with women. This is, in part, my fix-it fic, and I've made Lewis as confused as the audience.
Lewis nods, waits. He's handled his share of interrogations, and he knows that once someone starts talking, the last thing you should do is interrupt.
"But it's . . . it's not the sin thing, I'm not stupid, I worked that out for myself years ago. It's just . . . if I'm seeing a woman, no one cares. If I were with a man - a relationship, I mean, not just . . . well, everyone would have an opinion. They'd want explanations, they'd want to know why I didn't tell them my whole psychosexual history and spare them the shock. So it seemed easier not to."
And now, my answer to why all of Hathaway's canonical relationships have been with women. With most characters this wouldn't work, but there's a certain repressed type for whom "a same-sex relationship would cause too much fuss and distract me from important things" is plausible. Hathaway and Nicholas Angel are the main ones I can think of.
If there's one thing Hathaway isn't, Lewis realises for what he estimates is the twentieth time, it's simple. And being, well, he reckons bisexual is the word for it (although Hathaway has conspicuously not used it himself), being bisexual can't be half as simple as Jack Harkness makes it look on the telly. After a while, when Hathaway has slipped back into a silence that feels like it could go on for a year, Lewis prompts him: "Seemed."
"Past tense entirely intentional. I've been getting fed up lately."
"So if I'd said 'Find yourself a nice fellow,' would that have been all right? Or should it be 'nice person,' and mind my own sodding business about the rest?"
The interrogation metaphor may be potentially creepy, but it's not meant to be. Hathaway is so secretive that I think it's a natural comparison for Lewis to make.
The way Lewis is groping for vocabulary here isn't entirely ignorance; there's a reluctance to understand that has everything to do with Lewis's own suppressed feelings.
Hathaway's smile finally looks genuine, or at least half genuine. "Ten out of ten for the avoidance of heterosexist assumptions." Lewis files away the word heterosexist for future reference. "But I'm not sure I want to meet a nice anyone, not in the sense you mean. I don't like long walks on moonlit beaches, or thinking up interesting small talk, or the way people's faces change when I say I'm a police officer. Or all the little lies people tell each other. You can go to bed with someone, fall in love with them, and then find out you don't know them at all." He takes a large and somehow sudden drink of his beer, and Lewis thinks again of perspex shields and body armour. "I'm happy enough sitting here on your sofa and watching a time-travelling alien visit a highly anachronistic version of the twelfth century."
Lewis is still listening carefully, interview-room carefully, and he knows that Hathaway seldom picks a word without deliberation. "Happy enough? It's not the same thing as happy, is it?"
I have a hard time picturing Hathaway wanting or enjoying conventional romance. For one thing, he's very much an ascetic and I think he's a bit repelled by the silliness of dating. (Although he has had casual sex with men, as I implied in a previous paragraph.) What Hathaway wants, unrealistically enough, is to get straight to the deep emotional bond without any preliminaries. Which is why he's fallen in love with his boss/mentor/only friend. And it's why rather than risk that, he'd planned to go on being "happy enough."
Hathaway shrugs and reaches for the remote, which Lewis drops over the arm of the sofa onto the rug. From behind about four feet of invisible stone wall, Hathaway says, "It's happy enough."
"Bollocks. You're lonely."
"Really, I've had enough of Uncle Robbie's Agony Column for one evening, thanks."
"I know you're lonely." Whatever hidden, incautious part of Lewis's mind has been playing up this evening takes over again. "I know you're lonely, because I am." If there's logic in that, it's a sort unknown to science, but Lewis is sure that it's true. And more than that, it's important. "What would make you happy, James?"
Lewis and Hathaway are not similar in any superficial way, but they have some deep things in common, not the least of which is loneliness. Hathaway, as I've said, needs a deep bond but doesn't know how to find one; Lewis had one (or two, depending on how you count Morse) and lost it. One of the most beautiful, compelling things about the show's first three seasons was the way they responded to and tried to comfort each other.
"Don't try to have this conversation with me. Don't. Or you'll wish you hadn't."
There it is. The moment when the truth begins. The answer that has all the other answers, and all the other questions, layered inside it like a Russian doll. An infinity of tiny fragile questions that Lewis could crush if he wanted to, because it turns out that they're about him and not about Hathaway at all, and they start with why Hathaway's loneliness means as much to him as his own. Questions nesting endlessly deeper, turning the world inside out, making a hole that Lewis might fall into and never escape.
Not might. Will. Already has.
I am, in general, deeply suspicious of any slash story in which a modern adult suddenly realizes s/he has same-sex desires, never having noticed them before. In the case of Lewis, I can just about believe it, though. His marriage gave him most of what he needed, and his friendship with Morse supplied the rest, so he never had occasion to feel attraction to a man in any but a superficial, easily-ignored way. I'm presuming, in this story, that Lewis's attraction to Hathaway starts with the emotional and moves to the physical rather than the other way around--which I think is not quite the same as WNGWJLEO, if only because Lewis isn't going to keep thinking of himself as straight.
"I'm sorry," Hathaway is saying from that other world where Lewis has been sitting silent and frozen and nothing has happened at all. "I never meant to . . . I knew that . . . sorry. I'll go."
And meanwhile, poor Hathaway thinks Lewis's stunned reaction means Lewis is horrified to realize that Hathaway fancies him.
In a way this is very old-school slash, what with Lewis's "I thought I was straight" and Hathaway's attempts to keep his feelings secret. I tried to give it a new twist by having Lewis's reaction be neither gay panic nor a sudden certainty that Hathaway is his Destined True Love Forever, but a tentative willingness to see where their mutual feelings could lead.
ellen_fremedon asked about a passage from In the House of Dust (Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh/Enkidu)
One night in their youth, after Enkidu's grieving had eased, Gilgamesh asked him what the difference was between beasts and men.
"Clay," said Enkidu.
Gilgamesh considered, stroking Enkidu's hairy arm, and then asked, "What do you mean?"
"You build--we build--houses and cities with clay bricks. Animals sleep wherever they find themselves. We press words into clay and keep them. When the animals speak, the wind blows the words away."
Years later, when Enkidu was sealed in his tomb and Gilgamesh was wandering, uncombed and desolate, he thought that for "clay" Enkidu could have said "suffering." No man builds a wall unless he has enemies. No man writes a letter unless the man he wants to speak to is gone.
I wrote this over six years ago, and there's not much of what I've written since that I think is better. Sometimes things just come together, you know?
A lot of what I did in the story was implicit in the myth itself, such as Enkidu's loss of a kind of happy mindless innocence when he comes to full human consciousness. To be human is to be self-aware, to have memory and imagination and thus and to be capable of grief that lasts beyond the moment.
Some of the rest . . . well, it came from Derrida, frankly. Of course Derrida critiques the metaphysics of presence, but for my fictional purposes what I took was the notion of writing as absence and therefore as grief. If to be human is to grieve, then writing is even more human because it prolongs memory, thus prolonging grief.
Then of course there's clay, which is absolutely freighted with cultural resonance. Flesh is clay, writing is done on clay (in the ancient near east), instruments of civilization (e.g. pots) are made of clay and so are instruments of defence/warfare such as walls. This permits a gorgeous built-in contrast between clay as a symbol of impermanence (flesh) and near, but not total, permanence (walls, writing tablets).
Really, it felt like the story wrote itself.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.