»
Main Forums
»
Passions in Prose
»
True Story: Aaron
| Passions in Prose |
|
True Story: Aaron |
|
|
fractal007 Senior Member
since 2000-06-01
Posts 1958 |
In the Attrendian schools, the study of story gradually came to replace discourse on desoism. Even before the first striological (that is the Attrendian term for the study of story's relation to reality) texts aimed at the general public were published desoism had become largely a subject taken up by old conservatives and otherwise ignored by the progressive youth. To be sure, it was still being taught in the lower levels of schooling, but as one entered the specialization phase (that is the Attrendian equivilant of university) of one's schooling desoism dropped from one's list of required courses of study. As striology entered the world of specialization students could see that it was fulfilling two main objectives. The first was to fill the void left by desoism. Once the elder of the population died off, this purpose would be largely forgotten. The second was to purpetuate the Attrendian entertainment industry. Films, books, and radio-dramas whose storylines played upon clever devices were now more popular than ever and as I think about them now I can't help but wonder what Jonathan was escaping from. In my early twenties a friend of mine remarked of Tolkein, "that guy had to have had a disturbed childhood to have invented all those worlds and languages." Would that have to be the case? Would Jonathan have been trying to escape his step mother? When she decried his happy view that "anything is possible" as a man who gives advice to a long-lost child, saying "why can't you follow my advice?" By now you can tell this story really goes nowhere. I made it that way so you could feel Steve's sense of meaninglessness as he embraced atheism so he could be cool. He remembered Suzie, though, with her Bible and her CD's. She liked to listen to Christian boy bands going on about Jesus. It was cool how they could put the word Jesus so many times into a single sentence. "Oh look!" Suzie had said on one occasion to Frank, "they've gotten up to thirteen JPM. That's a new record for J'Kristio!" JPM, by the way, means Jesus' per minute. Apparently it was cool for Christian bands to get as many instances as possible of the word Jesus into a single minute of the lyrics. Steve was calming down now. He said, "Dad?" "Yes son?" "I'm going to talk to Suzie tomorrow." "OK, son. I'm proud of all you've become." Steve wasn't really sure what he'd become. All he knew was that he was just as much a failure as an atheist as he was as a Christian. Sometimes at night he'd lay there thinking about how the populace wanted more. Striology became something of a giant squid attacking academia and using it to its own purposes. Striology was single-handedly responsible for the birth of psychotopology, the study of the transformations that were possible between concepts and ideas. In order to study psychotopology, the student required a working knowledge of such fields as literary and onierological criticism and graph theory. Naturally, Onierological critism (dream analysis) had already existed as an important part of desoism, as did literary criticism. But the computational elements of psychotopology were what made the discipline so revolutionary. Something had arisen that was quickly replacing desoism with a view of man's relation to the world as though humans were computers attempting to conceptualize everything in terms of simple concepts. The Terran (Earthling) reader might suspect that what was arising was something of a sterilizing monster. But desoism in fact was another in a long line of factors that prevented Attrendian civilization from accepting the western Terran notion that there is some disconnect between reason and emotion, between creativity and process. For example, although psychotopology assimilated mathematical constructs in order to operate, it also relied heavily upon traditional forms of literary criticism. The psychotopologist was both a mathematician and an artist. She could devise elaborate structures with words of practical wisdom did he escape into the land of Compellia to watch the monks of Southern Namdar going about their day contemplating sex and the stars? When she fought with his real father in front of him did he picture the battles that were fought to re-define Attrendia after it had been occupied by Cape? But alas, I am bounding too far ahead now for my purposes. I closed the book and set it down on my desk, burying it with a few papers of a story I'd been working on. God didn't exist. He could almost hear the whispering at his window. It was the kind of whispering that Steve's girlfriend (Steve didn't have one) would use if she were trying to sneak in so they could be together again. "God is dead" Steve's daily affirmations would begin. Rustling and "nooooo---IIIiiiimmmm---NNNoooooottttt" could be heard at the window. "God is a figment of man's imagination." UUUuuuuuummmmmm thhhhaaaaattttt'ssss kiiiiinnnnnnndddaaaa boooouuuunnnnd toooo haaapeeennnnnn seeeennnnnccceeeee Aaaaaaayyyyeeeeee creeeeaaatteedd iiiiiitttttt He'd go on like this, talking with the wind outside or to the ceiling or to the rumbling fridge in the kitchen downstairs, for hours. The battle would rage on in his soul and he'd get nowhere. His heart ached as he couldn't see his lover's face anywhere. "Huh?" Suzie asked the next day. "Tell me about Jesus." I always felt a kind of joy whenever I set back to work on my creation. It was to be a masterpiece about a group of soldiers fighting an evil crocodile alien called Scrawlar. Scrawlar, the terrible beast of nightmares, would ultimately be defeated and, in accordance with my pre-pubescant fantasies, a woman's rescue from an untimely demise at his hands would factor into the hero's motivation to fight the final battle. And so I resumed again, relating the tail of the hero:
It was my mother. "Time for supper!" I went down to the kitchen to find my mother in the final stages of preparing dinner, relating plot elements together as though they were tables in a database, and then she could enter those elements and create like a goddess. Any idiot can see that the result is true. -- argumentum ad idiotum Me! |
||
| © Copyright 2006 fractal007 - All Rights Reserved | |||
|
jo_kritickisto Junior Member
since 2006-08-17
Posts 15 |
Fractal: I'm afraid this story is getting a tad boring. We can all see that you can put together pieces of stories like that. But why do you want to do it? It looks like you're just trying to impress us. Why not have your story live up to the ideas in your essay on the attrendian literatur and give it a central theme? Is there a point to all this? Also, some of your "transitions" could be cleaned up a little. |
||
|
Dusk Treader
Moderator
Senior Member
since 1999-06-18
Posts 1187St. Paul, MN |
Well, let's see. It's been some years since I've read something by you. You still have the touch for making me think. It was the title that helped push this piece along and make me think about what you meant and what you were trying to say or at least to attempt to interpret it. The contrast between earth where fiction and reality are separated and the Attrendian world where the boundaries are not so well described is quite interesting. The red and blue text seems to come across to me as an author and a fictional protagonist. The transitions are interesting. They are both hard to grasp, but they also flow remarkably well and leave you wondering to those last trailing thoughts. I still wonder what desoism is as it isn't really well described within the story. "I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness..." - H.P. Lovecraft |
||
|
|
⇧ top of page ⇧ |
|
| All times are ET (US). All dates are in Year-Month-Day format. | ||
