I heard a lot about it…and I finally watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I really liked it. It brought the difference between entertainment stimulating you and entertainment sedating you, into stark relief. I like being stimulated.
I thought about stories and memories and how stories are really an author’s memories…but the connections have been erased or changed.
Stories come from a strange shadow dimension. For all their interlocking patterns, the linchpins are free floating, random. If you back track, investigate the crystalline web strands that lead from the phrases, images, ideas of a story, you’ll find a collage of unconnected stimuli.
Imagine now and picture please, seeing through my eyes, driving on some road during some night. You’re driving, yes, but you’re also daydreaming. You like daydreaming at night – if for no other reason than an adorable pun.
Night daydreams drift with the speed and purpose of a falling leaf, settling on some corner of the afterlife. No…not the afterlife. Some afterlife – a pocket of limbo full of moonlight and rattling branches that whisper to one another, arboreal gossip overhead. There’s a road of chalk brick, a luminous, white road (the cousin of that path in Oz). It travels in a straight line and has no end and no beginning. You understand this is impossible, but you know it is true.
Two wraiths walk the chalk. Two wraiths walk and talk. Brandon Lee and Edgar Allan Poe walk shoulder to shoulder, down the white road. Poe is in a dark, charcoal suit – the same suit that he wears in everyone’s imagination. Lee wears the costume he died in, from the movie he gave a haunting mystique: black and mesh and black and white goth-clown makeup. Both glow in the immortality that dying young grants.
Perched on Brandon’s right shoulder is a black bird. Sitting on Poe’s left shoulder is another ebony bird. This is important.
Over the gnarled-tree whispers and dead land hum you hear an argument betwixt the shades. It goes something like:
“Crow.”
“Raven.”
“Crow.”
“Raven.”
“Crow!”
“Raven!”
The birds caw at one another, mimicking their masters. In a place where the calendar reads infinity, one might wonder how long such an argument can go. But you wait and you watch.
“Raven!”
“Crow!”
“RAVEN!!!”
“CROW!!!”
“…….”
“…….”
“Corvid?”
“Compromise.”
“Controversy?”
“Concluded.”
The birds go silent and the souls smile, walking down the forever road, ready for the adventures of their afterlife…
There is a story here.
Later, you go to jot this down and your eyes (my eyes) crawl over the walls (even a set of organs can procrastinate). Your eyes stop on two objects in your room. Your hands (my hands) stop typing. On the TV stand, there’s a little fountain – a sculpture of a movie scene. The scene is from The Crow. Eric Draven (played by Brandon Lee) steps from out a broken window, high above. A gargoyle dribbles water, from overhead, splashing the figure, simulating the rain from the scene.
Just above the fountain, adhered to the wall and still in its package is your (my) Edgar Allan Poe action figure (you’ve always gotten a kick out of the package saying “Action Figure” in large letters).
The two figures are roughly the same size. Each has a black bird on the shoulder (the birds are roughly the same size). Brandon Lee’s is on the right shoulder, while Poe’s rests on his left…situated so they could perhaps walk shoulder to shoulder…
It’s funny, the things you might notice if you but turn your head to the right of your writing desk (and how is a raven like a writing desk, Alice?). You mirthfully muse over the mental connections that form stories. They are random, you know this – they are not situated by any intelligence…and yet you can’t explain their connections otherwise.
There is a story here.
Joshua Alan Doetsch 