My first impression was that he was well dressed, even though his jeans were quite frayed. He wore a skidlid, which is what my Dad used to call a beret, confidently cocked to one side in a deep camel color; a crewneck sweater of a similar color over a button-down collar shirt and leather loafers in rich caramel. His gaze stayed on me until he felt sure I’d lost interest. Within a few seconds of believing he was no longer being watched, he broke into karaoke laughter—I call it this because no sound emitted from his wide open mouth as he tossed his head back with an almost ecstatic expression on his face. His teeth were large, straight and white against his dark skin, and his lips remained a mime of amusement for a long while.
It wasn’t until the train approached 72nd Street that his face grew serious. His hands shot forward, gesturing as if making a point during an argument with some imagined someone. These emphatic movements, which included splaying fingers and pivoting wrists for emphasis, lasted until the train sped away from 79th Street. Then, as if the rocking motion thrilled him, he threw his head back once again, overcome with silent glee.
Taking advantage of the fact that I was nearing my stop at 86th Street, I lifted my backpack and pretended to adjust my glasses so I could sweep my gaze across him a few times to cement details in my mind. He had grown relaxed enough that he was lounging in the two seats adjacent to the conductor’s compartment, his long legs crossed at the ankle, shoulders wedged into the corner made by the train’s skin and the metal bar marking the entrance/exit. His hands, which rested in his lap most of the time would flutter to life every so often, teasing from him his outrage at the perpetrator locked inside his head.
Author Jerry Cleaver declares that the active ingredient in good fiction is emotion. In his book Immediate Fiction, he states: “Emotion is the trickiest part of life and the trickiest part of fiction. Emotion is the payoff, the ultimate connection, where identification occurs, where the reader becomes the character and feels what the character feels.” Though I couldn’t relate to this man’s life, per se, I did feel as if I “got” his range of emotions. I’ve had plenty of fights with others in my head and I’ve felt joy within myself in public; I just usually show these emotions in appropriate ways if I show them in front of others at all. Cleaver goes on to say, “The first thing to realize is that the world is emotionally determined. Passion, not reason, makes things happen. We love, help, hate, and destroy each other not because of logic, but because of passion.”
If you were to write a story in which this guy on the train was a character, how would you define his emotional determination? Who would you say he was arguing with and what would that person’s emotional determination be?
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6 comments:
I'm trying to understand this. Is cancer a passionate condition? When people die from it have they died from a surplus of emotion, or is cancer dispassionate and merely real? Is love a passionate or a human response? If you love someone, can you do so calmly, serenely or must you succumb to madness? Can life and death decisions be based on probability, statistics, intelligence, or must one be angry, vengeful, jealous? Why is it that tennis players, for example, or golfers must subdue their emotions in order to succeed?
A skidlid is a type of helmet. People who wear helmets throughout the day are frequently brain damaged, or simply damaged or unstable in such a way that they are susceptible to falls. Combine this with flamboyant displays of inappropriate behavior, though narrowly contained, and you have the makings of a medical condition, not an emotional one. If he's schizophrenic, unless you have a theory of schizophrenic perception, the reality you press upon him is likely to be false. The irrational resists rational analysis. It refuses first principles and makes up rules on the fly. The mentally ill are not simply rational people behaving emotionally, they perceive things differently. This man's propensity for camel and caramel might suggest nothing more than the availability of those colors to the person who dresses him, or the personality of the person providing the range of clothing from which he dresses himself. So the question might be, are you drawn to or repulsed by these colors, does his outfit remind you of someone or something, because otherwise there's a strong possibility that such details are meaningless.
Describing, inventing and eliciting emotions are not the same thing. Emotion is the tip of the iceberg, not its base or its starting point. Without the nine tenths supporting it, there would be no tip. We saw the movie Elektra the Monday after its opening with the wife of a friend whose mental condition was seriously on the skids. Near the end there's a complicated fight scene with lots of magical comings and goings. Someone (a woman, a girl, I can't remember) sneaks up behind Jennifer Garner. The moment before she strikes the wife screams out, "She's right behind you, you stupid bitch!"
Would it be fruitful to discuss her outfit that night, her history of employment, her family, or to attempt an analysis, even an emotional analysis of her emotions? The real story in your case, I think, not to be overly cute, is the lady riding the subway, not the man she's attempting to write about.
First off, I just realized that I used a colloquialism for beret: a skid lid is what we called berets when I was growing up in Tennessee. Secondly, I've obviously touched a nerve with you. Why don't you tell me the story of the lady riding the subway who's looking at people. I'd be interested to hear it, cute or not... seriously. That's the purpose of this blog: to encourage and inspire people to get imaginative and to write.
I appreciate that you've taken the time to post such an extensive comment. I truly mean no harm to anyone who struggles with a mental illness. I just believe that as a writer, it's important to learn how to really see the physical so that the muscle can be strengthened and result in richer descriptions in prose. I'm merely choosing to look at everyone, even those who most people do everything they can to avoid seeing.
This reminds me of when I see random people on the street having a heated conversation with themselves and then I realize that they have a bluetooth in their ear.
Not answering your questions, but thought I'd add that observation.
That's so funny. I tried one of those once and it made me feel silly!
I wasn't questioning your good intentions. Your intentions are obviously good, which is why I added my 2¢.
A beret is a different animal — I wondered how you could just slough off the helmet — and skidlid is a wonderful name for them. You should keep the word but add the explanation. Obviously, it's been co-opted by a clever manufacturer. As an aside, there's a strong contingent of bikers in Paso Robles, mostly middle aged to elderly, who rumble around on weekends in leather outfits wearing skidlids as an act of defiance against the helmet law. The irony is that currently manufactured skidlids are fully approved under the law these renegades are attempting to flout.
I still question reading thoughts into someone's mind whose behavior seems rather obviously schizophrenic. (Marisa has an excellent point, by the way, we have lots of fake schizophrenics walking around today.) Normal people connect the dots. Schizophrenics frequently jump from dot to dot in a random (and meaningless) frenzy. It's almost impossible to make their thoughts bear on the real world. The man's argument might have been with his brother when he was five or something he saw on television last night. It might also be an argument he cycles through twenty-five times a day. Unless your goal is to write about madness, which I doubt, then I think you should use such characters as background, allowing something about them to lead you on to something else more to the point, because the more you try to understand them, the less you are likely to know.
I in no way question observing people on the subway or writing about them. I have a feeling that the sensory apparatus of people living in big cities like New York has been severely compromised or subconsciously turned almost off. Forcing yourself to see the background as foreground, to focus on rather than ignoring your fellow passengers may turn out to be an enlightening experience. That lady on the subway observing, after all, is you, and her story is unfolding.
Thanks, Evan. Maybe the confusion stems from the fact that what I'm wanting to accomplish is unformed yet. I've been trying to decide whether that's a good thing or not. I see this beginning as a sort of improvisation--riffs not too dissimilar to what a jazz musician would play but about writing.
As a writer, I spend so much of my time alone that I've been craving community. Though I've built nice relationships online through the design writing I do, I've been hungry to deepen my work creatively so it's thrilling to me to have people posting and to see that others are willing to have a dialogue. I appreciate that you have been/are one of them.
As I go along, I plan to do some rewriting of posts based on comments and this will certainly be one of them. I appreciate your point of view very much.
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