Writing exercise
posted by saurabh in Writing |Strangely enough, boredom was never an issue, because he always had something to think about. In fact, his urge to ponder the question became terrifying at times, and he would emerge after a five-hour binge of scribbling in his notebooks sweating, his mind still buzzing with prospects, with outlandish visions for the future.
The bleakness of the landscape was inspiring. The cabin was a dot in the middle of an endless plane, uniform and unassumingly beige. The sky rarely betrayed the hint of a cloud, and looking up at it left his mind similarly blank, a tabula rasa on which he could sketch the fate of the world. At nights he would sit on the stoop beneath the aurora borealis, listening to the low static sound of its electric whorls, and let his sense of awe at that fantastic vision vie with the equally brilliant and torrid fabric of his thoughts.Then he would go inside and write. He would write anything and everything: histories of the next three centuries, lists of his favorite things, war stories, bedtime stories and pornography. He filled endless journals with fictions, microscopic observations of the daily minutiae of other men’s lives. It didn’t matter what he wrote: all of it revolved around the central question that burdened him. All of it, if he drew it out long enough, would eventually fall into that vortex.
There was little else to do. His only concrete activity was the preparation of meals and the human necessities: eating, sleeping, cleaning his space. Some days he would do nothing but focus on these niceties, frivolous though it was. Someone had once told him that solitude was where you learned who you really were. That seemed a solopsistic outlook, indeed, and his circumstance and problem often created in him a lust for human company so intense that he would spring up in his agitation and walk around the cabin, clenching his fists, running through lists of people who he could call, whose thoughts he might plumb, who could grant him perspective. But there was no phone, and no car, and Winnipeg was miles distant.
The one thread to the world he had left himself was Jarvis, his jailer, who came every three weeks to deliver food. Then he usually stayed for a few hours, his overgrown frame sprawled out in the armchair in the living room. Jarvis would answer patiently while he interrogated him hungrily, eager for any news of the outside world. Sometimes he would bring with him newspapers, or clippings from magazines of stories that he thought might be of interest. When Jarvis was gone he would read those over and over, until his fingers wore the paper thin and reduced the print to a faint gray smudge. But really those clippings told him nothing. Jarvis never brought him anything that mentioned him directly, and it was fruitless to try and discern in what he did receive the eddy patterns that his own situation might have created. The one time he did, hesitantly, ask Jarvis what people were saying about him, he had replied only, “Everyone is going nuts.”
For a period after that he tried to write out his decision explicitly. Even if he had no idea of its ultimate shape, it was useful, he reasoned, to try and understand what the form of such a decision could look like. These efforts always failed. They began as a single sentence, which seemed elegant and complete in its simplicity. But a few hours of meditation on this sentence inevitably meant that some corner of it began to look inadequate, and these flaws soon bled into supporting paragraphs which aimed to shore up the failures in structure, to preserve the original intent. Then he grew frustrated with the vagaries of language, with its inability to translate his unvarnished intuition, and pages and pages followed, detailing all of his worst fears and culminating in a condemnation of all the outrageous calumnies of his vile species.
About three months into his solitude, Jarvis asked him, “Do you have any idea what you’re going to do?”
He deflated. “No,” he confessed. “I haven’t come any closer than I was on the first day.” And the cabin, with thousands of pages of his writing scattered across its floor, suddenly seemed to weigh heavily on his back.
“Well, take your time,” Jarvis said. “No need to regret things.”
He began to find the cabin miserable. Manitoba was cold in early spring, and when it snowed he would be trapped in the cabin for days. He flipped through the atlas in his bedroom, dreaming of better locations for his prison. The desert seemed appealing - a playa in Utah or Nevada would surely be as bleak and isolated. Or else, high up a mountain in a tropical cloud forest, or a Caribbean island all of his own, with food and drink delivered by boat.
When he expressed these desires to Jarvis, he only shrugged and said, “If you want something else, you should have found a confidante with better resources. This is what I can give.” And he had admonished him against his fantasies of leaving, of perhaps wandering too far on one of his rambling walks across the prairie and stumbling across another human being.
But he was beginning to crave human interaction with an alcoholic thirst, regardless of what it was: the threats of violence, the weeping and pleading and selfishness of all sorts. Or the selfless, those who were magnanimous with their ideas, who knew exactly what he should do, and who seemed adamant in their certainty because they had the luxury of not being the ones to make the final decision in the end. All of these hounds from whom he had fled in the first place he now began to miss, and he longed to hear their stupidity. He even began to resent in Jarvis the primary qualities that made him such an excellent jailer: his taciturnity and his supreme uninterest in being involved in the decision. But he begged Jarvis for relief, for some scrap of contact. “It wouldn’t do much good if I drove myself mad, would it?” he asked. Jarvis gripped his jaw in contemplation, and three weeks later he returned with a dog.
The profundity of that introduction overwhelmed him. Even that simple presence, an animal intelligence, but another mind to share his space with, was such a comfort that he hugged the dog and wept with joy on the first day, and for the remainder of the week he brooded on the subject of love.
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