(Fragmented) Spaces Commentary
Title: (Fragmented) Spaces
Fandom: Inception
Rating: PG-13. Nothing particularly dangerous, except potential mindscrew.
Characters: Arthur, Eames, Cobb
Summary: Done for an inception_kink prompt. Questions of missing dates, fragments of memory, and the spaces between that Arthur slips through, now and then. Implied A/E or A/C, depending on how you read.
Note: This is me experimenting with form, so be warned: things will get rough in there. Almost everything is deliberate, so odd sentence structures are to be expected.
-
I normally don't make a rule of screwing around with structure for fics. I tend to be a little predictable, but well, I've always saved these things for moments of artistic inspiration. That was probably why I took the prompt - because the quote that makes up the prompt, essentially all of 7., quite fascinated me. There was something about it that made me want to read on, and then I got linked to Arkaye Kierulf's Spaces, essentially the inspiration for the prompt.
How, I have to ask, do you integrate a quote like that into an Inception fic?
That was when I got inspired to use the structure of Spaces itself. With brevity, is the answer. Sentences like this lose their power, their pull, when they become part of a long fic that explains. So much of (Fragmented) Spaces was an exercise in brevity, in sharpening focus on situations, and actions, instead of interactions and dialogue (not so much, anyway). It was a very heavily conceptual fic, with a great deal of focus on more than just the concept of spaces. Identity, I decided, and memory. The Arthur we saw in Inception seemed to be a rather steady character. How do I go about destabilising his sense of identity, and implementing this idea of multiple memories?
(Very carefully, it would seem ;) )
The first step, I think, was to remove anything that was stable, that could potentially ground this story. So I did it on several levels; you'll find that there is almost no objective timeline in this story - everything is relative. There is no place setting, and you never really know what Arthur's totem says; in fact, Arthur himself expresses doubt in his totem. Dialogue quotation marks vanished - there's only one set of them used in this story, if I'm not wrong, and that's indirectly, quoting Eames' 'you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.' Everything can be expressed in here as a thought.
I linked to the film!Arthur through the concept of constancy, this tension that we see in Arthur throughout; the need to confront the surreal, the memory fragments.
Time, of course, was further messed up, because the fragments don't flow in relative chronological order, but are all over the place. The core of this, of course, or so my head!story goes, or at least so it went during the writing process, was an interaction between Arthur and Eames, with spaces in it (missing things) and it was fragmented, and the fic written around and between it. That actually turned this into an unreliable narrator, to some extent, since we know Arthur has issues with memory - yet the only glimpse we get is the world through Arthur's eyes.
You’re late, he says.
Eames smirks; unperturbed, and reaches into his grey tweed jacket to pull out a bundle of dogeared papers, crinkled at the tips and says,
Rather sorry to have kept you waiting, Arthur.
No, he wants to say, flipping through the crumpled papers that resist his attempts to arrange them, to impose some order on their Eamesian chaos, I’ve always been waiting (all my life.)
Say something, Eames says, because this is the kind of silence between acquaintances that is unsettling because you don’t really know what the other person is thinking.
Something, Arthur says.
Eames rolls his eyes, and they are grey, as grey as the rain.
Arthur, he asked.
Yes, he says. He glances over at Eames.
Are you alright?
Pause.
Yes, he thinks he says. Or maybe, no.
Or maybe, he says nothing at all.
Dream, he thinks.
The die is still, suspended;
The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, he remembers, and the physical impossibility of perfect stillness, even in the throbbing heart of this false-reality -
and then the dice hits the table, rolls (and then he can breathe.)
Arthur, Eames says.
Arthur looks at him, and waits.
Do you still think this is a dream, Eames asks, slipping in softly behind him like a cat, with a cat’s disregard for the rules of personal space.
Arthur shrugs, and drops the die into his pocket; it is a comforting weight, and Eames’ eyes follow his movements.
No, he says. Just checking. Do you need to?
Do you ever lose yourself, he asks Eames one day.
Eames looks up from his scrutiny of a set of notes on a mark he’s planning to forge. Sorry?
Do you ever lose yourself, he repeats.
No, Eames frowns, and puts the notes down, leaning forward just slightly in the scuffed armchair. What do you mean?
When you forge, he says, and is surprised to see his hands are shaking, just a little. (This is why he isn’t the forger, this is why Eames is the forger, and he is the point man who deals in certainties, not identities that blur and melt into each other like a Dali painting.)
Eames sees it too; rain-grey eyes narrow, like the closing of a camera aperture to bring the object into greater focus. Arthur, he says. Arthur.
That’s the rub, Eames says, slowly. That’s the tricky bit, you see.
It’s a bit like playing chess against yourself; it’s a bit like being two people at once, two sides of the coin.
Each and every one of them are in here, he taps his head, but they’re not real.
I am real, and you have to keep remembering that you and only you are real.
How, you ask.
He slides the poker chip across the table. You reach for it, he doesn’t stop you. Your fingers pause, right before the smooth surface.
Your totem? You ask.
He doesn’t stop you. You hold it in your hand, measuring, considering. You flip it, once or twice, and snatch it out of the air. You can’t see anything about it, nothing unique, nothing particular, and it’s your job to notice such things.
It’s not so much a totem, as a general reminder, Eames says, smirking. I made a wager, you see. I made a wager with myself that this is reality.
These were the snippets that gradually got fragmented and separated. Yes, the space in the dialogue was intentional ;)
I'll admit since I structured and worked this like a poem, there's a great deal of playing around with technical form for this one - anaphora, I believe, or parallel phrasing. And a great deal of mirroring here and there. You'll notice that there's a great sparsity of detail. I think there are only three colors ever mentioned, and fleetingly. Grey, green, and red.
Since this was inspired by a poem (several, in fact, since I have quite a few T.S. Eliot references in this poem), there's a lot of analysis possible, so I'm not going to go as far into the editing process as I did with the other two fics. In fact, in all honesty, this went through less editing, even after I ran it through my beta. Most of it is exactly as it was - only I added some sections late, like the one on the Ariadne kiss, and the one on layers of memory constituting a person (to strengthen the identity theme).
The opening and the ending, you may notice, reflect each other ;) The opening is a T.S.Eliot quote, from the opening of East Coker. The ending is the closing quote from East Coker. What I loved was the repetiton of two sets of powerful lines, both of which do use parallel structures themselves:
The die clatters, bounces, stops -
The world begins, the world ends.
The world begins, the world ends - it had a nice rhythm to it, one I liked. I felt it was powerful, because at the start, it created such a large sense of uncertainty, not to mention I probably freaked a few people out with the references to a totem test, which was the uncertainty I wanted to create, and these lines frame the entire fic.
These are not constants:
the slow motion of the Earth beneath his feet,
the presence of Eames,
the way dream-jackets cling to his skin like plastic wrap,
(Cobb,)
the numbers he thinks the die is supposed to produce.
These are constants:
a scarlet plastic die, a little battered, and scratched on the side with three pips,
the presence of Eames,
the way waking up is like falling, then slowly rising through water, sloughing sheets of it off his skin,
(Cobb,)
his need for constancy, something solid, and something unchanging; his need for something much like a totem.
Second instance of parallel structures ;) Notice the repetition of 'these are (not) constants', and that the presence of Eames and Cobb appears in the exact same positions in both. Yes, it's done for a reason.
astarael_7th thinks I am a major trading port, if only because I accept all kinds of ships. My beta quite agrees - she thought, earlier, I was doing a Cobb/Mal/Arthur/Eames OT4. Truth to be told, it's because I left each section open, vague and ambiguous. The Arthur/Cobb section ended up being a bit more sensual than I thought it would be:
how he will measure the hard lines of Cobb’s shoulder-blades, how he has seen those sharp angles with much less fabric between his gaze and skin.
Clearly, if I instinctively wanted to say, 'how he will measure the hard planes of Cobb's back', then Mandi's traits have been rubbing off on me. Not always a good thing ;)
The problem, I think, is that I subscribe to the Greek idea of love, and I take it a few steps further. I think platonic love and romantic love can bleed into each other, into a hyper-awareness of each other's bodies, into an ambiguous kind of love, and that is the kind that I most often tend to write about, which probably explains the amount of UST in this one.
It might not have been Eames.
It might have been Cobb.
Another powerful two lines. I think this is one of the big ambiguous areas, and one of the bits which satisfied my trading port tendencies ;) Actually, besides saying 'I ship anything', I should say, 'I ship Arthur/anything.' The prompt said gen, however, and in all honesty, I felt anything more than undertones of slash would have killed this fic's attempt to refuse attempts to ground it, and distracted from the concept at the heart of the fic.
In short, I think - a lot of things about this fic are unexplained. I admit the weakness is that the reader is forced to piece things together, and that the strength is that the reader is forced to piece things together. It's a process you actively involve yourself in; you fill the gaps, and you tell the story, depending on how you see the backstory. Maybe Arthur's dreaming, and in limbo, since we never really know the results of his totem check. Maybe not. Maybe this is residue from Arthur learning to forge. Maybe not.
The other problem, of course, is the conceit, if you like. The core idea that you must swallow and accept - that Arthur has these memory problems. I hope I've made it easy to do so.
It also really depends on how you want to view what the essence of this fic really is about. A comment on the nature of reality? Or memory? Or perhaps both? Is the problem with Arthur and his perceptions, or is the problem with reality - or both? Can reality be divorced from perception?
Here's an interesting idea I was playing with: which is this. Let's talk about that old house you'd always walk past, when coming home from school, say twenty years back. Bright blue bricks - an oddity in suburbia. Wait a minute- the bricks were really red. You just somehow remembered them as blue, and in the story of your life, they'll always be blue. That is to say, you react, and are shaped by the memory of a house with blue bricks - and yet it never really existed. And what does that mean, years after the house is demolished? The house - the reality of the house - cannot be touched. It only exists as data. Sense data, which is experienced, and then stored in your mind. Does the reality of the house change when the data in your memory is corrupted? What do we draw from a world that is so inconsistent?
So in this fic - is it Arthur remembering? Can you take his word for it? And why, oh why, are there time spaces? What is time? Is he looking forward into the future, or is he looking forward from a position assumed by locating himself in a memory of the past?
Truth to be told, I have my own explanation, my own answers for the spaces. I won't say it. I say, each of you, fill it with what you think is the truth. This is the reality of the story we create, and accept ;)
-
Soundtrack for this:
1. Piano Man - Billy Joel
2. Every Little Thing - Dishwalla
Fandom: Inception
Rating: PG-13. Nothing particularly dangerous, except potential mindscrew.
Characters: Arthur, Eames, Cobb
Summary: Done for an inception_kink prompt. Questions of missing dates, fragments of memory, and the spaces between that Arthur slips through, now and then. Implied A/E or A/C, depending on how you read.
Note: This is me experimenting with form, so be warned: things will get rough in there. Almost everything is deliberate, so odd sentence structures are to be expected.
-
I normally don't make a rule of screwing around with structure for fics. I tend to be a little predictable, but well, I've always saved these things for moments of artistic inspiration. That was probably why I took the prompt - because the quote that makes up the prompt, essentially all of 7., quite fascinated me. There was something about it that made me want to read on, and then I got linked to Arkaye Kierulf's Spaces, essentially the inspiration for the prompt.
How, I have to ask, do you integrate a quote like that into an Inception fic?
That was when I got inspired to use the structure of Spaces itself. With brevity, is the answer. Sentences like this lose their power, their pull, when they become part of a long fic that explains. So much of (Fragmented) Spaces was an exercise in brevity, in sharpening focus on situations, and actions, instead of interactions and dialogue (not so much, anyway). It was a very heavily conceptual fic, with a great deal of focus on more than just the concept of spaces. Identity, I decided, and memory. The Arthur we saw in Inception seemed to be a rather steady character. How do I go about destabilising his sense of identity, and implementing this idea of multiple memories?
(Very carefully, it would seem ;) )
The first step, I think, was to remove anything that was stable, that could potentially ground this story. So I did it on several levels; you'll find that there is almost no objective timeline in this story - everything is relative. There is no place setting, and you never really know what Arthur's totem says; in fact, Arthur himself expresses doubt in his totem. Dialogue quotation marks vanished - there's only one set of them used in this story, if I'm not wrong, and that's indirectly, quoting Eames' 'you mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.' Everything can be expressed in here as a thought.
I linked to the film!Arthur through the concept of constancy, this tension that we see in Arthur throughout; the need to confront the surreal, the memory fragments.
Time, of course, was further messed up, because the fragments don't flow in relative chronological order, but are all over the place. The core of this, of course, or so my head!story goes, or at least so it went during the writing process, was an interaction between Arthur and Eames, with spaces in it (missing things) and it was fragmented, and the fic written around and between it. That actually turned this into an unreliable narrator, to some extent, since we know Arthur has issues with memory - yet the only glimpse we get is the world through Arthur's eyes.
You’re late, he says.
Eames smirks; unperturbed, and reaches into his grey tweed jacket to pull out a bundle of dogeared papers, crinkled at the tips and says,
Rather sorry to have kept you waiting, Arthur.
No, he wants to say, flipping through the crumpled papers that resist his attempts to arrange them, to impose some order on their Eamesian chaos, I’ve always been waiting (all my life.)
Say something, Eames says, because this is the kind of silence between acquaintances that is unsettling because you don’t really know what the other person is thinking.
Something, Arthur says.
Eames rolls his eyes, and they are grey, as grey as the rain.
Arthur, he asked.
Yes, he says. He glances over at Eames.
Are you alright?
Pause.
Yes, he thinks he says. Or maybe, no.
Or maybe, he says nothing at all.
Dream, he thinks.
The die is still, suspended;
The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, he remembers, and the physical impossibility of perfect stillness, even in the throbbing heart of this false-reality -
and then the dice hits the table, rolls (and then he can breathe.)
Arthur, Eames says.
Arthur looks at him, and waits.
Do you still think this is a dream, Eames asks, slipping in softly behind him like a cat, with a cat’s disregard for the rules of personal space.
Arthur shrugs, and drops the die into his pocket; it is a comforting weight, and Eames’ eyes follow his movements.
No, he says. Just checking. Do you need to?
Do you ever lose yourself, he asks Eames one day.
Eames looks up from his scrutiny of a set of notes on a mark he’s planning to forge. Sorry?
Do you ever lose yourself, he repeats.
No, Eames frowns, and puts the notes down, leaning forward just slightly in the scuffed armchair. What do you mean?
When you forge, he says, and is surprised to see his hands are shaking, just a little. (This is why he isn’t the forger, this is why Eames is the forger, and he is the point man who deals in certainties, not identities that blur and melt into each other like a Dali painting.)
Eames sees it too; rain-grey eyes narrow, like the closing of a camera aperture to bring the object into greater focus. Arthur, he says. Arthur.
That’s the rub, Eames says, slowly. That’s the tricky bit, you see.
It’s a bit like playing chess against yourself; it’s a bit like being two people at once, two sides of the coin.
Each and every one of them are in here, he taps his head, but they’re not real.
I am real, and you have to keep remembering that you and only you are real.
How, you ask.
He slides the poker chip across the table. You reach for it, he doesn’t stop you. Your fingers pause, right before the smooth surface.
Your totem? You ask.
He doesn’t stop you. You hold it in your hand, measuring, considering. You flip it, once or twice, and snatch it out of the air. You can’t see anything about it, nothing unique, nothing particular, and it’s your job to notice such things.
It’s not so much a totem, as a general reminder, Eames says, smirking. I made a wager, you see. I made a wager with myself that this is reality.
These were the snippets that gradually got fragmented and separated. Yes, the space in the dialogue was intentional ;)
I'll admit since I structured and worked this like a poem, there's a great deal of playing around with technical form for this one - anaphora, I believe, or parallel phrasing. And a great deal of mirroring here and there. You'll notice that there's a great sparsity of detail. I think there are only three colors ever mentioned, and fleetingly. Grey, green, and red.
Since this was inspired by a poem (several, in fact, since I have quite a few T.S. Eliot references in this poem), there's a lot of analysis possible, so I'm not going to go as far into the editing process as I did with the other two fics. In fact, in all honesty, this went through less editing, even after I ran it through my beta. Most of it is exactly as it was - only I added some sections late, like the one on the Ariadne kiss, and the one on layers of memory constituting a person (to strengthen the identity theme).
The opening and the ending, you may notice, reflect each other ;) The opening is a T.S.Eliot quote, from the opening of East Coker. The ending is the closing quote from East Coker. What I loved was the repetiton of two sets of powerful lines, both of which do use parallel structures themselves:
The die clatters, bounces, stops -
The world begins, the world ends.
The world begins, the world ends - it had a nice rhythm to it, one I liked. I felt it was powerful, because at the start, it created such a large sense of uncertainty, not to mention I probably freaked a few people out with the references to a totem test, which was the uncertainty I wanted to create, and these lines frame the entire fic.
These are not constants:
the slow motion of the Earth beneath his feet,
the presence of Eames,
the way dream-jackets cling to his skin like plastic wrap,
(Cobb,)
the numbers he thinks the die is supposed to produce.
These are constants:
a scarlet plastic die, a little battered, and scratched on the side with three pips,
the presence of Eames,
the way waking up is like falling, then slowly rising through water, sloughing sheets of it off his skin,
(Cobb,)
his need for constancy, something solid, and something unchanging; his need for something much like a totem.
Second instance of parallel structures ;) Notice the repetition of 'these are (not) constants', and that the presence of Eames and Cobb appears in the exact same positions in both. Yes, it's done for a reason.
astarael_7th thinks I am a major trading port, if only because I accept all kinds of ships. My beta quite agrees - she thought, earlier, I was doing a Cobb/Mal/Arthur/Eames OT4. Truth to be told, it's because I left each section open, vague and ambiguous. The Arthur/Cobb section ended up being a bit more sensual than I thought it would be:
how he will measure the hard lines of Cobb’s shoulder-blades, how he has seen those sharp angles with much less fabric between his gaze and skin.
Clearly, if I instinctively wanted to say, 'how he will measure the hard planes of Cobb's back', then Mandi's traits have been rubbing off on me. Not always a good thing ;)
The problem, I think, is that I subscribe to the Greek idea of love, and I take it a few steps further. I think platonic love and romantic love can bleed into each other, into a hyper-awareness of each other's bodies, into an ambiguous kind of love, and that is the kind that I most often tend to write about, which probably explains the amount of UST in this one.
It might not have been Eames.
It might have been Cobb.
Another powerful two lines. I think this is one of the big ambiguous areas, and one of the bits which satisfied my trading port tendencies ;) Actually, besides saying 'I ship anything', I should say, 'I ship Arthur/anything.' The prompt said gen, however, and in all honesty, I felt anything more than undertones of slash would have killed this fic's attempt to refuse attempts to ground it, and distracted from the concept at the heart of the fic.
In short, I think - a lot of things about this fic are unexplained. I admit the weakness is that the reader is forced to piece things together, and that the strength is that the reader is forced to piece things together. It's a process you actively involve yourself in; you fill the gaps, and you tell the story, depending on how you see the backstory. Maybe Arthur's dreaming, and in limbo, since we never really know the results of his totem check. Maybe not. Maybe this is residue from Arthur learning to forge. Maybe not.
The other problem, of course, is the conceit, if you like. The core idea that you must swallow and accept - that Arthur has these memory problems. I hope I've made it easy to do so.
It also really depends on how you want to view what the essence of this fic really is about. A comment on the nature of reality? Or memory? Or perhaps both? Is the problem with Arthur and his perceptions, or is the problem with reality - or both? Can reality be divorced from perception?
Here's an interesting idea I was playing with: which is this. Let's talk about that old house you'd always walk past, when coming home from school, say twenty years back. Bright blue bricks - an oddity in suburbia. Wait a minute- the bricks were really red. You just somehow remembered them as blue, and in the story of your life, they'll always be blue. That is to say, you react, and are shaped by the memory of a house with blue bricks - and yet it never really existed. And what does that mean, years after the house is demolished? The house - the reality of the house - cannot be touched. It only exists as data. Sense data, which is experienced, and then stored in your mind. Does the reality of the house change when the data in your memory is corrupted? What do we draw from a world that is so inconsistent?
So in this fic - is it Arthur remembering? Can you take his word for it? And why, oh why, are there time spaces? What is time? Is he looking forward into the future, or is he looking forward from a position assumed by locating himself in a memory of the past?
Truth to be told, I have my own explanation, my own answers for the spaces. I won't say it. I say, each of you, fill it with what you think is the truth. This is the reality of the story we create, and accept ;)
-
Soundtrack for this:
1. Piano Man - Billy Joel
2. Every Little Thing - Dishwalla