36,917 so far for Magellan's Witch. I've made back the nearly 2000 words I deleted the other day. Had two pretty fab ideas which I've got now as rough chapters, and have a glimmer of where this thing is going. Could be awesome! I hope so. Tomorrow, I need to get my hero and heroine together. They've been apart too long, and that worries me. I have this idea though, and I'm just freaking going for it right now. If I crash and burn, so be it. One of my professors at Sonoma State, John Kunat, said he'd rather read a paper that crashed and burned than one that didn't take any risks. I loved his classes and I wrote some fun papers (to the extent any academic paper is fun). I once quoted Sponge Bob, and another time I started a paper with a scene set on a pirate ship. Someone's got murder on his mind. I got A's on both those papers.
Plankton: [To Patrick]: Look at him. He’s square and yellow.
He called you pink.
Mr. Krabs: [To SpongeBob] Go get him!
As everyone surely knows, SpongeBob Square Pants1 and Patrick the starfish live in the idyllic community of Bikini Bottom and are best friends. In the Fry Cook Games episode these best friends engage in a vicious battle for the glory of their respective sponsors, Mr. Krabs and Plankton. The problem is that SpongeBob and Patrick don’t want to fight each other. With all of Bikini Bottom watching will there be no games and no glory? Anxiety reaches a critical point and must be relieved. But how? SpongeBob and Patrick are best friends, after all. They aren’t going to engage in a brutal fight that can only end badly. Are they? Oh, yes they are. Their friendship springs a leak, and it isn’t pretty.2
What happened? It’s easy enough to spot, thanks to the dialogue provided herein3. Plankton and Mr. Krabs point out what neither sponge nor starfish noticed before; they’re different from each other. Those differences, invoked for the sake of Bikini Bottom (if only for about five minutes) focus the building anxiety of the situation and become the excuse by which they may act to relieve the community’s tension. It’s possible SpongeBob and Patrick might have lived their entire animated lives without ever noticing their differences. It’s also possible their differences might have come to light but simply never become a matter for anxiety. But, as we see, the differences did come into contention. Plankton made Patrick aware of SpongeBob’s “spongeness” just as Mr. Krabs make SpongeBob aware of Patrick’s “un-spongeness,” and thus, the community of their friendship dissolved into conflict and the Fry Cook Games go on.
Just as conflict arose in the community of Bikini Bottom, so conflict occurs in human communities.
Of Human Bondage - A Cosmology of Love
April 30, 1615. A salmon flops on the deck of an English Man of War, gasping at the feet of the sailor who baited the hook. That selfsame salmon just the previous day flicked a tail past the body of the sailor’s drowned shipmate. The sailor, who doesn’t yet know anyone’s missing, let alone the unfortunate soul’s rank, kills, cleans, cooks and serves the salmon to the First Lieutenant who, after a fine supper, writes a poem to his affianced in which he compares her eyes to the gentleness of a midsummer’s night sky, her skin to the softness of a rose and claims his love knows no bounds. While so engaged, he does not notice the rat peering hungrily from a darkened corner, a rat that just the day before saw the lieutenant’s superior officer fall overboard.
This is a scene with too many characters– salmon, seamen living and dead, rats, an officer eating his supper and writing poetry – and minimal setting; a Renaissance ship sailing the ocean blue. On the surface, nothing of any great interest is going on. Or is there? Might there be, perhaps, a hint of malevolence beneath the surface? What if we were to discover that the eyes of the lieutenant’s beloved are not as soft as midnight, he’s been sleeping with the captain’s wife and the sad truth is his fiancee is a nearsighted shrew with chapped lips and a rich father? What is knowable about this scene is quite different from what is felt. But, I digress. In setting ink to paper, the First Lieutenant does something at once unique and inherent to his species.
Labels: Magellan's Witch, writing
posted by Carolyn @ 2/22/2007 10:23:00 PM Permalink
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