Explico algunas cosas, Dos

Coming from the comments made on part one of "Explico algunas cosas" - that is, none - and a discussion I had with a friend on Fictions, I have decided to forego writing the second installment as I had originally planned.

Now I've had some people tell me they think my book is shit, I've had people thumb through it and decline to buy it, I've had people just . On the other hand, I've also had people come up to me and say how much they plain out loved it and can't wait to get their hands on Volume II - there was one girl in particular that came up to me in Palm Court and praised both books, and sheep that I was, I couldn't get up the courage to make further contact, despite the searching eye contact for the rest of the night.

Okay, so far, I've had one discussion with someone who really "got" some of the more difficult stuff in Fictions and appreciated what I was doing. This is a very bright person, young professional, well read and living and working in Guyana. She is representative, I believe, of the ideal reader. The sad thing is that other "ideal readers" don't seem to get what I am writing as much as she does.

So, indeed, Neena, who am I really writing for particularly if only a fraction of the readership I expect the book to resonate most clearly with don't/can't get it? At the centre of literature is communication, messages from one person to another. If the medium, the literary work, fails to communicate those messages, then that work has necessarily failed in its purpose. And, as we all know, it is purpose that created us, purpose that connects us, purpose that pulls us, that guides us, that drives us, it us purpose that defines us, purpose that binds us...

Okay seriously. I love writing which offers rewards that are hidden and out in the open at the same time, which offer multiple layers of meaning which strengthen and implement each other. I can give you an example in Borges' short story "The Aleph" at which he talks about a publishing house called Procrustes & Co, a subtle reference to the tendency of publishers to butcher a writer's work to fit some preset mould or standard. Procrustes in Greek mythology was a giant who waylaid travellers, offering them a rest in his bed: if they were too long for the bed, he would lop off limbs or their head, and if they were too short, he would stretch them until they fit. One doesn't really lose anything if the allusion is not caught but there is a invaluable richness to be gained if it is.

Let me give you an example passage in Fictions which is the sort of thing I believe the discerning reader should enjoy, and which reinforces one of overall themes in the story, the sacred nature of of love, even within a failed relationship.

"We feasted lustily off each other for over two months, she drank of my body, I tasted her flesh, and sometimes, sated, and drifting off to sleep, my dark bulk cradling her elven paleness, I committed the sacrilege of imagining that those eyes staring at me in adoration, willing a resurrection, a second or third coming, before the four short hours she had paid for ran out, were those of the vapid woman who inhabited my apartment and whose love, even in those hours, my own heart yearned for."

Lit 101. Earlier in the story, the main narrator in the story speaks about a first kiss [with his wife] in the rain on the avenue on Main Street in front of the "the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart before it burned down and everything turned to so much ash."

The above passage is meant to do several things. First of all, as the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart is meant to symbolise the relationship of the married couple and its going up in flames, or ending up as ash, the affair referred to is meant as a phoenix resurrection, or an attempt at it, on one level.

The greater allusion in the paragraph is sacrilegious - the word "sacrilege" being deliberately included - with its carnal corruption of the Blessed Sacrament, ("she drank of my body, I tasted her flesh") as well as that of the Resurrection and the Parousia ("willing a resurrection, a second or third coming"). Even the word "adoration" is meant both in its literal as well as Christian connotations.

For me, the excerpted paragraph could be read in a purely literal sense and still be appreciated for the rhythm and balance I have (hopefully) imbued it with - but the true richness exists in the "what else" that is present. It would of course be tedious to litter a short story with metaphor and allusion just for the sake of putting as much in as you can. Any reading of Fictions, not to offer a Cliffs Notes on my own book, should be done the way you drink a particularly fine Merlot, rinsing it around in your brain a little before digesting it.

I am so fucking full of myself, it is scary.