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this is an idea for a prelude to a novel about to be written, the plot / outline is basically a look at 20th C human condition, through having a reality tv producer - and a show he works on - against a close friend's untold and unrequited deep love for him, and a letter she writes declaring this to him in the event of her death, so he should know. he gets it while she yet lives and we get the letter as a narrative and the setting is his life as a reality tv producer as a parallel narrative.
i have a 'show' in mind and a some characters in mind (and in some draft notes) and i have written long chunks of the letter, but i wanted to open with a variant poetic style prelude to counterpoint the style of the main narrative (though the letter gets evocative) and that would also have, on retrospect, some themes that the novel brings out - so it is a draft and will change as i write, when i find characters creating their own issues. they're so pesky like that!
Stand The Heat
Prelude
… and a dollop of honey engulfs the hollow of the parfait spoon as it hovers below an ink-blue sky. Thus suspended, it rode beyond the feathery touch of bursting rye, swathing back and again in the zephyr that cooled an afternoon. Skin seems to slither through the slow stalks and thighs become thick with resin; feet pud in the soft earth, each step pillowed as if trod on liquid powder. A red beetle scurries to the tip of an autumnal blade, amid the soft crackle of insects nestling in the air like suspended solution. Swimming now moving slow drifting current of motion takes me; I surrender. How scintillating.
This yellow green carpet spreads out in front of me toward an horizon bruised with the effort of staying in sight. It strains against a darkness fed by [find grasses, eg - rye corn wheat…] and suckled by a sure rivulet, peopled by the glint of fish, trickling behind the radio drone of insects. I am standing in water. Flowing. It is one of many streams scything the grain fields into strips of parallel flow towards a point far far above, far far off like death.
Intrigue assails me and inertia takes me in hand. The light seems particular to memories I have not yet attained, like déjà vu. Smiles and tears, a welcome. Or a leaving; and I am still moving, only now at blinding speed. The soft caress of gentle grasses has vanished. Now only wind, and a rising from the pit of my stomach, holds me to the physical. Whoosh. Otherwise, I am entirely a neuronal complexity, a volley of firings in tiny sparks at infinitesimal masses, beyond the density of gravity that so patently pummels my body which launches across this vast curved scape of living things and trickling water.
The focus of thought lunges out sideways until I watch me rush past as a shinkansen ‘cross the slopes of Fuji san cho seen from tired eyes glancing up from paddy slog. The arc my body traces seems at first Idaho flat: topologically proved flatter than a pancake; even a crêpe! Then, as the point of view recedes and sweeps upwards, in an inverse parabolic description of the ratings of my first steps into reality television, I am revealed slipping up a landscape that spreads outwards for perhaps a few thousand miles, but onwards and beyond into a vast ring that fell at that moment into its syzygy with a radiant star and a bleak moon, seemingly hollowed from the centre of this bizarre world, an engraved galactic wedding band gilded within (the words carved out a truism: “I was right, but at the wrong time”) and bubbling black and red with magma and fumes casting into dim space. I am floating.
I am waking.
much obliged comments generally, and specifically i'd be keen for guesses on what you might think the themes will be - see if i have got them through in the passage (so is my message getting through, or have i missed the point!) cheers in advance.... : ) |
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