The Wager
By Paul Cameron Brown
"We think by feeling. What else is there to know." Theodore Roethke
"I can live an adventuresome life vicariously through my characters. It's inexpensive and a dandy form of ready made self-expression. The perfect sort of sublimation exists after all. For years I wore myself out trying to amass enough experience to commence serious writing. You know the having to see all and do all syndrome. I realize the pursuit of that plateaus sheer idiocy as it remains ever distant as one grows older."
Wenceslaus at that point placed his pen down and turned to open a glossy picture print of a ship under full sail, a clipper mail packet on the China run over a century ago.
"Shakespeare never experienced the myriad situations he subjected his characters to - how could he - except perhaps subliminally. Jules Verne must have employed a similar type of wish fulfillment with his prophetic writings that splashed a hundred years into the present. What I propose doing is to animate my earliest atavistic yearnings in a like fashion. I hope to give scenarios embedded in the innermost recesses of my psyche time to materialize, to exude from the substance of dynamic characterization. In short, the cave wall pictures Plato mentioned, hitherto until now dim and elusive flickers, will become flesh and bone entities within their own right."
Wenceslaus reached back propping a foot against the table containing an old woodcut with some masking tape and a copy of Stendal's Rouge et le Noir. I thought of him subconsciously acting out the role of his many anti-heroes by parading their values through the pages of his many would-be books. Rather impatiently I moved to counter his studied expression.
"And what of actual events rooted in your own experience? How will you give your characters real presence, an allowance to take away from them unintentional archetypes or woodiness? What are your chances of breathing life into these shadow forms without some common backdrop with which to share a basic empathy?"
He continued to maintain his stare, not even breaking the gaze to light a cigarette or reach for his mug of coffee. He replied with a little annoyance.
"Words, nothing but smoke screens to conceal a bankruptcy of the thought process. How on earth do you propose I make love to every woman alive, explore every crevice of this earth? Surely, you aren't serious with this mumble about animating characters. I propose to let the characters speak of real ingredients through the force of actual events."
"Animation is for cartoons, not serious playwrights. I'm surprised at you," he went on. "What you are advocating is a bilateral pool of shared traits. I venture to say such a thing is not only patently absurd but unnecessary." He had let the coffee grow cold and turned to it with renewed annoyance.
The wind, it seemed, too, was expressing a little of the afternoon's short-tempered.
"Pity we live in this climate. All bluster and snow. Hardly the stuffing from which romantic heroes are made," he said stiffly.
"And what of Tolstoy, London, or Service?" I nearly whined back at him. "They used lack of glamour in their settings to their advantage. Primeval landscapes are not only physical but the force behind many a fanciful mind. That's the artificiality I was concerned with earlier. Next you will be playing the Gauguin adventurer convinced your lack of inspiration or ready talent is attributable to March weariness rather than to personal shortcomings. You will spend all your time searching for that thatched cottage in picturesque Arly country."
"Let me offer some more unwanted advice," I said, renewing the attack. "Remember the example of William Turner, the English landscape painter? He embodied in this next example what I attempted to clarify by argument. In crossing to Calais he had himself strapped to the mast at storm's height so that he might better witness the pummeling of his own ship. A breakthrough in the use of colour lead to the hey day of romanticism and preparation for neo-impressionism. This all came through one man's willingness to live events in the flesh not by haphazard random reading."
Wenceslaus was staring out the window apparently unmoved by what I, in my vanity, thought the near-definitive illustration.
"So you suggest that for me to write effectively about a given period I must breathe the very strains, the odours, verisimilitude of the age? By that account no one would be accredited teaching Macedonian history unless he first had witnessed the Hellenic revival in the first millennium before Christ. I would bloody well have to be impervious to all the dictates of common sense to follow through on your suggestions!"
"To prolong your garrulous argument, let me continue with this case in point: to understand the problems of the blacks or talk intelligently about the colour bar I would have to dye my skin and assume the identity of a Negro. Is this correct?"
"Well, hasn't that been done?" I replied carefully.
"Yes, but not for the reasons you advance."
"For sociological reasons, for the sake of novelty to do ...", he finished with a gesture.
"This argument is growing stale and circular, he began anew. Quite frankly, I grow tired of you and your pedantics. You remind me of the Medieval Schoolmen and their emphasis on clarification to the point of excluding Truth. Yes, even Truth if it could not be neatly packaged in their air-tight groupings."
I perceived Wenceslaus, in a moment of understatement, to be more than a little disaffected.
"And isn't it you who argues the finer shades between thisness and whatness, thickness and opaque intrusions at this juncture?" I was now needling him with his own wealth of details.
"Opaque intrusions," a bewildered smile now entering his face.
"Take out your razor, Ockham." [1]
Wenceslaus fingered the mug more openly. I didn't know who was baiting whom. I thought I had bested him but realized in doing so I was only personifying the shallowness I strove to dismantle through argument.
"Wenceslaus, Wenceslaus, let's cease this before emotion colours our better judgment. Let us stop for the time being and let a wager stand."
"A wager?"
"Yes, you know of Pascal and his wager on faith?"
"Vaguely, but I'm tired of this thumb-pressing."
"I know, but hear me out."
"What we wish to establish here," I began, "is the superiority of experience over imagination, actual events to intellect."
"Precisely," I maintained. "Let each of us do a bibliographical survey establishing the whereabouts of most authors' inspiration. The Muse as it were, that is the point whereby a given author is ready to grasp order from the chaos of eclecticism. Not exhaustively, of course, just a random selection of say ten and then report back to one another. Each must promise to abide by the general consensus of the search."
"Such a thing will deteriorate to mere sham, a freshman's guide to the use of periodical literature, he parodied holding a hand aloft like a scolding professor."
"It's one step in the direction toward delineating how others reacted to a similar problem."
"Fair then. We'll try it. But isn't it doomed to a split vote by the very choice of our authors, we having had some previous contact with their lives and thus knowing under which force the man propelled his search?"
"Partially, but we are after the division point, that hiatus in time whereby each no longer procured experience but began to write. That's our quest. The movement towards actual writing, why the mood descended on whom when it did at its precise locus in time."
"Locus?"
"Yes you know locus, in mathematics."
"What have we accomplished," he said turning to me wearily.
Tongue in cheek I replied by his very gestures he was experiencing a weariness with the thought process and embarking on the need to try the experience route.
"Sophistry," he cried aloud. "Pure bullshit. But we will let the wager stand and upon it our friendship, our acquaintanceship all I associate with the likes of you and yours. And, further, for argument's sake, argument itself."
"Aye, let all that stand and more. Let's get Faustian about this and raise the tempo, I nearly implored. One, by virtue of his defeat must swear off writing for a full three months. He must promise not to desecrate paper with tainted thought until the ink of this clamour gels as a sturdy lesson to his peevishness."
"Awkward, but interesting. Continue."
"Nothing more, just this little writing circle shall have the papal rite to banish anyone from its blessed entourage for violating the tenets of established truth. Let's rest our case for argument's sake, on this and all that has transpired today."
My companion was working on a pair of stubborn galoshes as I prepared my coat for a quick exit through the snow.
The workings of Truth, all debate seemed so pointless after all - just an elixir for resentment with the shifting sands of mood ever ready to wash away any permanency. Like snow, words reigned as queen of the elements for an appointed time, then they, too, passed away.
I had the feeling I had witnessed more than a huffy outburst within myself against winter's dreary confines or the frustration of a limited talent.
I had expressed the narrowing of tolerance and the box canyon of a roped spirit that clamours for freedom on the wind of a signal fury.
I paused and went forth into the storm.
[1] A Medieval Schoolman celebrated Or his sharpness.