Whose Fiction Is This Anyway?

[This is part of Leftout 10. I think it useful to have it as a separate post as well. ral]

Whose Fiction Is This Anyway?

Once Fex took command of the story—or tried to—subsequent events unfolded at such break-neck speed that it was hard for a disinterested observer, let alone the principal characters, let alone the two co-authors, to keep track. But there was one strange and curious fact: Owl Man and Heron Man had little to do with the outcomes. When Fex ran away with the story, he precipitated a cataclysmic series of disruptive consequences that seemed to blow the whole thing apart.

Forget Ling Bank. Forget Old Man Ling. Forget Shaman Song. Forget the heist. Forget, even, the Hasty Heisters, who had practiced so diligently under Heron Man’s—and, on two occasions even, Coo’s and Jasmine’s, tutelage—the practice designated by Owl Man as “feathers.” All this, while Owl Man was off in Yucatán listening to thousands of birds at midnight in a dripping rainforest with an old Mayan shaman.

The simple truth is that Fex’s interference with the carefully (or perhaps not-so-carefully) laid plans of Owl Man and Heron Man—we might as well say Fex’s bungling—had the effect of wrenching whatever control the two novelists were feverishly trying to maintain over the flow of events, completely out of their hands.

But lest we lose our heads in sympathy for the plight of Owl Man and Heron Man, let us not forget that, in some mysterious way, they were the ones responsible for the entire debacle in the first place! They were the ones who had initiated it all, especially Owl Man, and his supposedly innocent meandering down to Seattle that day, his presumably innocent cup of coffee, his ostensibly innocent penchant for pondering the centuries-old musings of Goethe—the old man of Weimar in his stockings and powdered wig, seeing a gentleman riding on horseback down the Sessenheim road, but in fact seeing himself as he would appear in exactly the same apparel, years in the future!

So, if there’s anyone to blame for the outcomes, as noted above, it should not be Fex, just because he tried to take command and it went all jabberwocky on him. After all, he’s just a fictional character! The blame goes to Owl Man and Heron Man. And while we’re at it, let’s toss Tully himself into the stew-pot, because Tully was so supportive of Owl Man and his quirks—a kind of mirror-effect, perhaps? Owl Man and Tully somehow mirroring one another? Entangled?

Or was there something else?

Perhaps we should consider, for example, the role of Jasmine and Helen in this rather rambunctious dénouement of the story. After all, Owl Man recognized and admitted the truth of Heron Man’s claim that “Helen is the woman of my dreams,” as he put it. And could we not say the same thing about Jasmine, in regard to Owl Man? Is she not the “woman of his dreams?” Who else could have accompanied him, as she did so steadfastly, throughout these adventures, even to the point of walking into the dragon’s lair of Ling’s office at the bank with Helen the Muse, aka Baroness Catherine Rothschild Van Renssalaer? So, what else could be Jasmine’s function for Owl Man but that of a muse? Not a succubus—not entirely, anyway—certainly a companion. But didn’t her companionship extend into Owl Man’s psychic and emotional depths, down to the regions where muses normally hold forth? Of course it did. With almost equal certainly, then, Jasmine was as much Owl Man’s muse as Helen was Heron Man’s.

Which leaves us with this fictional-yet-very-real quaternio of, shall we say, unresolved, “evolving” characters—Owl Man & Jasmine, Heron Man & Helen—in which it may be impossible to say who plays whose muse, or whence derives the inspiration—from the author? The character? Some other agent? Who inspires more? Author? Character? Muse? And which is which anyway? Can we say with final certainty what role it is we play, and for whom we act, if we take seriously the life of the imagination— we, the so-called “audience”? Doesn’t the act of reading also invoke energic intensities, which are drawn into the creative maelstrom?

In the end, perhaps the entire world is shot-through with evolutionary muse-potentials, and we can all serve as muses to one another, so long, that is, as we are willing and able to reach deeply enough into the realm of the muses, where stories and music and writing and poetry and dance are born. But for that, we must be willing to withstand the fires of creation. Then, and only then, we might be in a position legitimately to attend one of Tully’s monthly ceilidh parties.