Monday, April 23, 2012

The Narrator

The Narrator tells the story and it is fixed in time and confined to a certain space, a location, the "setting".  Or it doesn't happen that way at all.  Maybe there are main characters and the story is about unraveling them, discovering what they are about, totally undressed until a motive is found.  Maybe there is no hero, an anti-hero could tell a story and it could be about nothing at all.  I have read storys that I didn't like but I liked the telling of them.  Words can become music and we turn the pages simply because we like the sound, the literation, the poetry, the language, the whole orchestra of what is being said.  The story becomes the description and what is actually happening isn't so important.  It is the journey after all.
   This will be a true story and it will be the end of the Earth.  That happens every day for some creatures.  We put "Round Up" on our gardens and neuro-toxins at the entrance to our homes in an effort to keep the spiders out.  We genetically modify what we eat and kill things we do not like.
Death is always "the end of the Earth" for those who die.  Just this week 857 Porpoises were washed upon the shores of Peru.  All dead.  All running from something.  I wonder about the ocean currents.  I wonder about what monsters lurk in the deep blue darkness in the ocean's depths?  What happens when you add a mixture to this soup?
   Can you write a story without a point of view?  Even diagrams are prejudice and statistics lie.  Numbers are easy to manipulate and what seems to be so certain and without judgement are really with persuasion simply by what is omitted.  I will omit nothing and tell you every single detail as I remember it.   That is the problem with any story telling, the remembrance of what happened.  It may not be so much that we see things differently, we put different significance into what we saw.  Sometimes we miss little details and didn't give them much weight at the time.  The Devil is in the details.
   Even in these difficult economic times the USA is a wealthy country.  People could make a living scrounging our land fills, finding useful stuff from what we throw away. We spend more money on our military than the rest of the world combined.  Apple Computer has more money than the United States Government.  It doesn't take much imagination to find a story there.  Until the tsunami hit Japan and destroyed their nuclear plants dumping radiation into the sea, Toyota was the largest auto manufacturer in the world.  We are talking about hundreds of Billions of dollars.  The bailout of the auto industry, a government program beginning with a Republican Administration and completed by the Democratic Administration, worked well, probably saved a million jobs and certainly saved a lifestyle, saved American Industry and put American Auto makers back in the number one position.  I wonder what Toyota would do to get it back?
   What could huge multi-national corporations do if they wanted to do something?  Our Supreme Court considers them "individuals" paving the route of the "super pacs" and contributions of millions of dollars for their political agendas.  We see very slick ads on television and don't even know who is paying for them.  Billions of dollars and they remain anonymous!  Our privacy is diminished every day.  Every keystroke is recorded.  There are things they want us to know.  They want to manipulate our emotions, control us in every conceivable way, who we vote for and what we buy.
   I suppose also, there are things they do not want us to know.

4 comments:

  1. I admit I am a bit lost, Jer. Are you starting anew from what I've already read? Or is this the protagonist thinking as he is at his former flame's home?

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  2. I got lost too Sherry so this is a total rewrite! These are the beginning thoughts that surface in the book. much like a journal of what happened and the thoughts along the way.

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  3. Do you mean "lifestyle" rather than "life stile?" I agree, there may be things they don't want us to know.

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    1. Thanks, cousin, corrected by a click of the mices!

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