I Do Love to Win Things....

On May 6, 2011, "Loves Her...," the opening excerpt from Pluck the Petals from a Daisy won second place in Steward House's weekly contest. However, once more, I feel as though the review completely misses my point. The piece is not about "relentless pursuit," but about desire and inaction. Of course, if you read my recent post about the novel the piece is excerpted from, then you have a fair bit more insight into it than did the editors at Steward House. Nevertheless, a placement is a placement.

By the by, while you're there, you should definitely read Keayva Mitchell's "The Remedy," the first place that week. The poem is absolutely amazing.

A Challenge (Elec's Excerpt #4, draft 3)

I'd like to fight with you to a finish, fall in time and climb back to a pause. I want to feel music curl in our mutual pulse, turning simplicity into intricacy, turning moments into eternities. There are parallels and ironies in our every little exchange, delicious and tantalizing, satisfying but never quite enough. Fighting is loving and the battle sets us as both opponents and allies. Banish the white flag to a distant melody that hardly matters anymore - there can be no surrender beyond mutual accord.

The Post-Modern Narrative (Elec's Excerpt #3, draft 3)

Since WWI, the traditional third-person omniscient narrative voice has fallen from popular use. Authors reason, "Life doesn't have an all-powerful voice revealing new and interesting facts to us - why should literature?"

Thus was born the occasionally confusing but indubitably realistic concept of narrative unreliability.

Just as people can lie, mislead, and get their facts wrong, so, too, can first-person narrators. Emily Bronte was massively ahead of her time with the idea when she filtered Heathcliff's story through Nelly. Faulkner pushed it to its limits when he recounted Addie's death in As I Lay Dying. Modern literature teaches its readers to distrust the ostensible story line.

Cut to the Post-modern era. Authors know their first-person narrators are inherently unreliable and, more importantly, readers know to question the stories such narrators convey. However, rarely do authors provide multiple perspectives for readers to compare with each other and thus deduce the true tale.

How, then, are readers to look beyond the filters of their narrators to the truth?

To start? Readers must remember that, as in life, the more frequently a speaker insists upon something as true, the more that something should be questioned.

Identification (Elec's Excerpt #2, draft 3)

People excel at labeling. And no, I don't mean boxes, although those, too, occasionally get tagged and classified.

More than anything else, people excel at labeling people.

Innocent. Liar. Drama Queen. Man-whore. Popular. Rich. Charming. Dangerous. Smart. Geek. Holy Roller. Bitch. Witch. Asshole. Dick.

The best thing about this labeling mania people have is that it's self-inflicted and self-enforced. Labeling is as integral to giving ourselves a place as it is to putting others in theirs.

Actually, those two functions are the same thing. Holistically, we call it "identity."

Loves Her... (Elec's Excerpt #1, draft 4)

She's the light at the end of her tunnel, head-lamp of an oncoming missile. She's headed straight for destruction, on down the tracks to pain. She crashes, burns, tries again, plucks the petals from a daisy. But every bloom claims "loves her not," and she's so silly - she believes them.

The ring of truth sprouted faeries, and that kicked her to the dust. The sensations are back again - they never really left. Her eyes regard the midnight sky, envious of stars. For once in an "upon a time," she held herself high, and there she was, if not a goddess, at least a human.

And now she wastes away, alive but dead upon the ground. Half-asleep and never noticing, she waits for the ending chime, but it never comes, it never sounds. (After all, if there is no start, there can be no finish.)

She knows those stars were once her friends, and she knows she might join them once again, but does she try? No, never once does she lift a finger except to grasp another stem. Left up to luck, her gamble's gone, and now she knows the answer. She crashes, burns, cries again, plucks the petals from a different daisy. And every bloom knows "loves her not," but that's the question that she gave them.