One version of the narrative begins with the Narrator rereading old trance-scripts, feeling unhappy with his former self’s negative self-image. He arrives to a realization of how much of an obstacle he was to his flourishing. The Narrator wonders: should I “burn the diaries,” as Canadian poet Moyra Davey recommends? Should I edit, revise, re-sequence events? Is that how one creates an Alter-Destiny?
Tag: Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Some of us are wondering: Who is the Narrator? Who tells the story, and to whom?
Is the tale told at a remove by a skeptic? By a future occupant who, moved into the home at a distant date, discovers a former occupant’s trance-scripts, the latter having been stored either in a box in the attic or in a time capsule in the yard?
Does the home make similar events occur as these terma or “treasure-texts” reenter history?
Is the story a cautionary tale? A warning? A case study?
Is the Narrator a time detective? Has he been sent from the future to investigate a Text written by one of the home’s former occupants: a wizard who went missing from known timelines after claiming to have devised a working means of time travel?
Is the Narrator a postmodern schizophrenic? Twenty-first Century Schizoid Man? Is part of him a time traveler wanting to go back to live his past differently? What would he change?
The act of retrospection must be dramatized. Let us assume first, then, that the House on Shady Boulevard is a time loop. People who live in the home oscillate to its frequencies. They relive its ecstasies and traumas — though always with a difference. The tale, then, is one told by someone who, years after his time living in the home on Shady, attempts, through writing, to avoid the past’s recurrence.
Monday May 6, 2019
We live in a divided city. Anger, extinction rebellion: but we can heal ourselves. We can love. Or we can yell, fail to sympathize. Sit in separate rooms. Gather round fires, with spell-check clutching at our words. We face difficult existential choices: we stand at a crossroads of the personal and the political, the underworld and utopia. But which is which? Gold-wrapped chocolate rabbits, or a universe of books? Stern military Boys and Girls Club discipline, or Isle of Lost Boys? Gender submission or gender trouble? Fear or freedom? Attempts to determine answers remain clouded by the rules of attraction, each potential orbit possessing its distinct push and pull — and in the midst of these, the shaman. But I don’t want another novel of the ice age. I suppose I’m more green than red. Yet I remain torn between the two — the picnic and the bonfire. It’s all right there, laid out in the symbolism of a dining room. Picnic basket, flowers, hand towels — or Sister Nancy’s “Bam Bam.” The contrast leaves me feeling radical, but also radically indecisive. Which cross do we wish to bear? Life is, even at its best, no more than that question — or so it seems. We remain amid tests and halls of mirrors, sorting amid conflicting sense-data.
Trance-Scripts 