My children, listen well. Walking in the hills, I heard a wondrous sound proceeding from a cloud. There I saw a black servant playing a viola, and his recital was superior to all the King’s musicians. I tell you, that was the Devil himself.
The creation is perfect, harmonious, divine. When we sing in praise of God, we recreate the harmony of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth—life as before the Fall. But Satan inserts himself into the gap between one note and the next. Beware the tritone—it is the Devil’s music.
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
The Great Detective sported an infuriatingly smug expression. With a twirl of his mustachio he asked, ”What do you notice, Hastings?”
I hated him and everything about him—the affected accent, the smugness, the smell of his pomade.
“A car abandoned in the woods.”
“Mais non, mon cher Hastings. Use the little grey cells. Observe. Deduce.”
Tosser! Absolute tosser! I shrugged.
The GD enlightened me. “The engine. It is gone. But, surprisingly, not the wheels.”
Aha. The maestro had made a slip. “Actually, I think not, mon cher. The engine was in the back in this model.”
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
You’d think perhaps this is all the residue of a merry night—the empty bottles, the pyroclastic flow of wax. But no, it wasn’t an extended revelry. This was the work of seconds.
When he walked into the inn, the air carried a whiff of cordite, or maybe brimstone. Never having smelled brimstone, I can’t be sure.
“Wine,” he said. “Your best, if you please.”
When vision returned after the flash, he’d gone, along with all my customers. The imprint of his fingers remained, melted into the wineglass.
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Beloved is a masterwork. It takes its inspiration from a true story of an escaped slave who killed her baby rather than let it be taken back from the north of the US to the slave south, It is a novel about slavery, yes. But more, it’s about humanity and the enduring wounds injustice inflicts. Baby Suggs, for example, reflects on the danger of loving:
“The last of [Baby Suggs’] children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway. Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips with her own—fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognize anywhere. She didn’t know to this day what their permanent teeth looked like; or how they held their heads when they walked.”
And also it’s about memory. The past is not done and buried in Sethe’s world. It lives on, most particularly in the form of Beloved, who she believes is the baby she killed, and who first returns as the poltergeist that haunts her home, then as the creature that sucks her dry.
These are strong, deeply human characters. Not just Black characters but people who show us what it means to be a person. There is, of course, the many-headed hydra of racism and the lies racists tell themselves to justify their oppression:
“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right…. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them.”
But there is also the ambiguity that is at the heart of all of us:
“Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling. It amazed Sethe… because every mention of her past life hurt…. But, as she began telling about the earrings, she found herself wanting to, liking it”
Is there redemption in Sethe’s easing of her isolated pain? Or is it capture?
How does Morrison achieve these effects?
She does this in a variety of ways.
The existence of the past in the present is not just something Sethe asserts. It’s built into the structure of the novel with flashbacks and point of view changes that constantly braid past and present. The past, of course, is not a comforting time of fond memory, but one of humiliation and pain. Paul D’s tobacco tin of repressed memories exemplifies this:
“It was some time before he could put Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper, one by one, into the tobacco tin lodged in his chest. By the time he got to 124 nothing in this world could pry it open.”
Like Sethe, there is much about the past that is dangerous to him, Paul D’s tobacco tin is one of a number of recurring symbols. Another symbol is the whipping scar on Sethe’s back, which is described as being like a chokecherry tree. Does it symbolise the fraudulent beauty of “Sweet Home”, the place of Sethe and Paul D’s enslavement? Does it symbolise the ability of beauty to grow, even in horror? Or does it, perhaps, convey both meanings?
Biblical images and references are scattered through the story. The horsemen who come to take Sethe back to slavery are four in number. Baby Suggs’ sin of pride (if such it is) that restrains the community from warning Sethe of the coming of the four horsemen, is a huge feast that evokes the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.
And finally there is the symbol provided by Beloved herself. Dead baby, poltergeist, cunning and vengeful reincarnation. Sethe and her daughter Denver are seduced by Beloved, wanting her for themselves. Paul D is driven away by the apparition. What is she? Perhaps the burden of guilt, perhaps the desire for connection, perhaps … well you decide.
She loved the ring. Of course she did; who wouldn’t?—a cluster of garnets set in a silver mount. Bling! And its tech features charmed her—the monitoring of heart rate, movement and sleep patterns. With the GPS tracker, I know exactly where she is at every moment. That’s true love. We have a bond.
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
There is a dead dog on the floor. My dog. A moment ago, before the injection, she was wagging her tail trustingly. Now death has come, silent and graceful, to my home—a black furry absence. My dog is no longer in this body.
Before it happened, I’d begun washing the car, something I stopped half-way when the vets arrived. Now afterwards I’m not sure what to do. All that suggests itself is finishing the car wash. I’m glad she had that totter around the park on Monday.
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
“Way back in the old days, when I was a boy before the Chiasm, big tech corporations manipulated information for profit.”
“Wow! What’s a corporation?”
“Yeah Dad, and what’s a profit?”
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Culture shapes (and constrains) how we understand the world. For example, in a hierarchical society, the perception of groups of things tends to be ranked. Language both expresses and shapes culture, as well as, in turn, changing as culture changes.
A Portuguese friend once remarked, as we shared a bottle of rum on a beach, that the trouble with English speakers is that they only know one way of being. Portuguese, of course, has two verbs “to be” — one used for permanent states (like “I am Portuguese”) and the other for temporary states (like “I am ill”).
Grammar alters our understanding in quite profound ways. Many languages have gendered nouns. The word for bridge in Spanish, for example, is masculine, while its German equivalent is feminine. This does not happen in English. There are also languages that dispense with the need for gendered pronouns (“he” and “she”). Proto-Indo-European, the root language of whole families of present-day tongues, distinguished in pronouns only between living and non-living.
More profoundly, some languages (Hopi, for instance) lack a future tense, complicating conjectures and plans for the time to come. The same was true of Anglo-Saxon and of Proto-Indo-European—they had present and past tenses, but no future. Such a grammar probably reflects a society in which the future was likely to be pretty much like the present.
In turn, while many of us today conceive time as an arrow, a lack of a future tense may well favour a cyclic notion of time. This is, of course, more than a matter of the simple existence of tenses. Other factors are at play too. In European-speaking cultures, we tend to picture time as horizontal, with the future ahead of us and the past behind. Not so in Mandarin, where earlier events are “up” and later events “down”.
As an aside, not all features of our sense of time are coded in language. Research shows that different cultures, even within the same language group, may have different senses of how important the past is compared with the future. Compare the future orientation of US respondents to those from the UK in this diagram, which comes from the book Riding the Waves of Culture by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hamden-Turner.
What of some other basic features of grammar? There can be little in English more fundamental to an elementary education than learning to distinguish between subject and object. A subject is a noun describing the originator of an action. In the sentence “The man ate the dog”, the subject is “the man”. Likewise, an object is a noun upon which the action happens, in this case “the dog”. The separation of the universe into active subjects and acted-upon objects is a philosophical fundamental. From it, arguably, a whole worldview flows. We cannot say which came first, the grammar or the worldview, but they buttress each other to create an understanding of how the world works that appears to us unquestioned commonsense. In reality, of course, it is a cultural convention, albeit one with deep roots in the dominion over nature and over other people.
The grammar here entices us to see the world as divided into subjects who act and objects which are acted upon. This convention provides the soil from which spring knights errant and tales of derring do—in short, the heroic protagonist.
Alternatively, we might tell stories that do not depend on identification with a protagonist, but perhaps those that focus on the situation and on the society. Arguably, some Asian story forms are of this nature. Here, for example, is a summary of the Japanese story The Gratitude of the Crane.
Once upon a time, an old man finds an injured crane in the woods and nurses it back to health. One day, a beautiful girl comes to his doorstep, saying she is lost. The old man takes her in, and the girl tells him not to open the door at any noises. The old man opens the door anyway when he hears strange noises and finds a crane using its feathers to weave an extraordinary piece of cloth. Having been seen, the crane flies away.
Western stories are rational, and depend on clear ideas of cause and effect, and distinctions between what is objective and what is subjective. But this is not necessarily true of the literature of other cultures. Ming Dong Gu, in his Chinese Theories of Fiction, argues that Chinese fiction is fantastical rather than realistic. Things arise out of nothing; the Chinese story is full of interconnections and transformations between the world of humans and the world of nature.
2. The separation of actor (noun) and action (verb)
The consequences here are more subtle. They nudge us towards perceiving entities and events rather than underlying processes. We say, “the cat sat on the mat”. But from a different perspective, we might view the entities (cat and mat) as processes, extended in time and subject to change: catting and matting. We might also see the event (sat) as a process (sitting). If we adopted this perspective, what stories might arise? They might be stories with a stronger sense of transformation and of great time spans. Here, for example, is an experimental piece, The Quantum Cat, I wrote, exploring this possibility.
The catting satting on the matting, ideaings passing through their heading: ideaings of dinnering and of hunting. A womaning was arriving. They were holding out feeding to the catting.
The wave function collapsed. And the cat sat on the mat.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that language determines consciousness, but it does play a part in shaping how we imagine the world.
The catting satting on the matting, ideaings passing through their heading: ideaings of dinnering and of hunting. A womaning was arriving. They were holding out feeding to the catting.
The wave function collapsed. And the cat sat on the mat.
.
In our grammar, nouns are things and verbs are actions. But what if we didn’t make this distinction between nouns and verbs and saw, instead, processes? The quantum world is perhaps a bit like that.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Neil MacDonald Author 