i just finished reading "klara and the sun" by kazuo ishiguro. it's a wonderful and sad story. i have many thoughts about it, but essentially i think mainly about the things we take for granted... and the purity of a love so unconditional that it completely disregards the self... somewhat like sunlight.
yesterday i struggled to progress on "kappa noodle." but i realized that what i was writing was getting far too complex... characters with the same name, and what that was supposed to signify, etc... i was losing the point of the story. i really made a concerted effort to map out the plot, in my own messy way... i had this idea of having at least two plot lines, and make them each progress naturally, while resonating and echoing each other... somewhat akin to what haruki murakami tried to accomplish in "hard boiled wonderland." but i was having so much trouble... on the one hand, i wasn't sure what the point of either plotline was... and to make them resonate seemed to compromise the plotlines, make them contrived. so i gave up.
i now have another idea, a much simpler one. well, it's still complex, in the sense that there are still two plot lines. but i think if i incorporate my brother in the second plotline, then there would be a kind of collapse, a directness about things... after all, the story is largely about my ambiguous feelings towards my brother- so why not incorporate him directly, and have him speak for himself? maybe it would make him more sympathetic, rather than this effigy that i complain about and burn in my mind... the trick is this. on the one hand, i want to make his position understandable... but there is something that i want to hint at in this story, something unspeakable, that is the present source of all my rage towards him. it is unspeakable, and yet, i want to hint at it, perhaps through metaphor, perhaps through some apocalyptic event that occurred (or will occur?) in the kappa world... but i don't, frankly, have the subtlety for that. and i fear that incorporating this will simply muddy up the plot...
there's a point where you have to negotiate between truth and whether an artistic piece "works." life in itself, "truth" so to speak, is messy. art demands a kind of distance, an abstraction... a piecing out of what's essential... and therein lies the tension... we don't want to simplify an artistic work to the point where it "loses the baby" (bathwater-baby)... but we also don't want to supply the entire ocean, with all of its vagueness and depth, for our readers will simply drown in it, and not know what the point or purpose of it all was...
***
i am tired.
every day, i find, i am wrestling with trying to find a way to feel. a stance to take. a symbol to believe in. something to feel. i suppose it is in my nature to require something like that... and maybe this is what it means to be old. it is this struggle to continue life, when all of its fictions seem to no longer hold any more...
i continue to serve. i suppose that's life's one redeeming factor, is reinforcing other people, making other people feel more solid in their lives... but for myself?
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